Cars and Drivers II: size matters

Cars are small.  There is almost nothing like our typical American car size, which in Jacksonville feels like it is majority SUV or mini-van.

Functional equivalent of a mini-van?

Mini SUV?

Even those clearly meant to haul things are stubby.

An unusual sight.

Many are 2-doors.

I remember driving in Greece in 2001 and earlier.  The roads were pre-Olympics, and many roads have been overhauled since then, so I wondered how different it was now.  On our 15 hours of driving to Meteora and back last year, I had plenty of time to observe driving customs.  The most interesting to me is that the dominance/submission mentality seems still to be prevalent, which I now see makes driving much safer, as drivers pay much more attention to other cars than we do in the US.  Basically, on a two lane road, the traffic makes a third lane for passing (seemingly whether or not passing is technically allowed!).  Our bus spent most of the time in the breakdown lane so that cars going faster had more room when passing.  Drivers are actively engaging with each other and I even saw the driver wave someone around him because our driver had a better view of the road in front than the car behind us that wanted to pass.  When a car is passing us, the car in the opposite lane (going in the opposite direction) also moved to the breakdown lane to make more room in the middle lane.  I described it as dominance/submission because to me, an outsider, it felt like I wasn't aggressive enough as a driver and so had to cede the "good road" to the aggressive drivers and tuck my tail onto the breakdown lane.  But maybe my perception is overstating the aggressiveness, and it is just that good communication between drivers again.