El rincón idiomático – Honk that horn!

Does this intersection look safe to you?

Ok, I know I’ve done a kazillion posts regarding cars and driving in Buenos Aires but, as someone who fends for his life every day daring to walk and cross the streets of BA, I feel the need to do another. Having been here almost 4 months, I think I have a pretty good understanding of the ways of the road, at least from the peatón (pedestrian) perspective. First of all, the idea of the “pedestrian has the right to cross” is ridiculous here.  I thought it was bad in the US but the porteños take driving and virtually ignoring pedestrians to a whole new level. This goes for cars and buses alike. Seriously, if cars/buses want to go and someone is crossing, at a cross walk or not, they’ll drive practically within inches of you and stop, almost saying, “let’s go, dude, I’m in a hurry and even though I know you may have the legal have the right to cross I’m going to get as close to you as possible and let you know I’m not happy about it”. As I’ve made mention of before, there are virtually NO stop signs and most intersections (including this one in the picture) have this semi-controlled game of chicken where cars just go up to the farthest point of the intersection they can without actually hitting the car, slow quickly and look for the tiniest of openings to go.  This is, of course, with the pedestrian left as an afterthought and left to try to guess when to go inasmuch putting his/her life in his own hands hoping they’ll not actually hit you in the process. Technically, if a car is coming from the right hand direction, he has the right to go but this isn’t always followed. A shock, I know. This is not to say, of course, that nobody stops for pedestrians but the number of cars that DO are truly few and far between.  Just the other day, for example, I crossed with my daughter and someone began making a right turn into where I was crossing… he stopped politely, but then was followed by another car turning who, not willing to wait, sped around him braking a few feet at us.  Of course, I yelled at him for driving super dangerously and, of course, illegally, and he opened his window yelling back saying, essentially, roughly and PG translated “Can’t you see that I stopped, jerk? Why are you getting angry?” It’s truly an everyday battle/game with this.

Anyway, you may be asking why I am doing a language post on this.  Well, I wanted to open up my mini tirade about BA drivers by mentioning a couple of things.  First of all, here when you “honk your horn” they say tocar la bocina (NOT el claxon that they use in Spain).  Secondly, they do this A LOT here. Of course, it’s a big city and is likely to be expected but BA drivers are just not patient and even if they are in a hurry, if the cars in front of them are not in as much of a hurry as they are, they’re just going to honk until someone is able to or does move.  Buses do it as well.

Oh, and lastly, the public buses, los colectivos, ALSO have this sort of strange “whistle” they do.  I can’t exactly identify its sound (sounds sort of like something from a slapstick comedy routine almost) or why they use it but it’s common and, frankly, kind of annoying.  If anyone reading this post can enlighten me unto the purpose of this sound, I’d be very grateful.

Have a great weekend everyone and do me a favor: be a good driver and don’t honk the horn uselessly and just let someone cross in front of you… do it for me. 🙂 Thanks for listening to/reading my rant.

Prof Rabner