Germany

We witness bad drivers everyday. They exist in every city. However, when you travel, you realize that the days you wished to give someone a finger on your way to or from work were not that bad! You maybe thinking of places such as India, Russia, Peru, certain African Countries, Morocco, etc… are the worst places. According to WHO, the most dangerous countries tend to be of low and medium incomes. This would explain why you have to not only watch what you eat and only drink bottled water but also how you are crossing the road. However, if you ask the Germans, the French or even some Spaniards, who the most dangerous drivers are, they would tell you those that are driving with Orange license plates. In other words, the Dutch! According to Wikipedia, they have one of the lowest road fatalities by registered cars. However, let me explain to you why they are one of the most hated drivers in Western Europe.

Beautiful Drive in Bavaria

1) Speed of the Autobahn- Everyone knows that the German Autobahn has no speed limits, especially when you drive in the left lane. There, you are expected to go over 130km/h. However, the majority of Dutch drivers will drive around 100km/h in the fastest lane as opposed to sticking to the right hand side. This causes many accidents as drivers who are going 150km/h and cannot tell that you are going at 100km/h until it is too late. To add to this, there are a lot of seniors on the road with their motor homes, which could explain the slowness.

2) Skiing: While being on a bus tour in Europe, we had a Dutch driver who was telling a funny story about how people go on ski trips from his country. Unlike those from Germany, parts of France, Italy, Austria, Czech, etc… Netherlands does not have any Alps or other mountains to ski on a regular basis. Therefore, once a year, they take their cars through the Autobahn (to save money on expensive French roads) to ski either in the Pyrenees or somewhere else in the Alps. They are not used to mountains and winter tires, they are not required by law to have chains to put around their tires either. Because of this, they tend to get stuck and cause traffic jams.

Typical street in Naples

Finally, while you may argue that in Italy (especially in Naples), you have witnessed chaos that does not come close to the slow moving Dutch, they tend to annoy non Italians in other ways, such as getting honked at for moving slow, etc… Also, it should be noted that not all Dutch drivers are annoying Western Europeans, it may as well be the few people that I talked to that were personally annoyed by them!