We have local VD plates =) Yes, maybe it’s just our unusual driving. Hopefully, it’ll get better…
As for the difference I knew someone who moved from the German-speaking part to Romandie and was complaing about the different use of indicators over here, but it’s just this person’s experience of course.
As I said up there, French drivers use them very differently, so that might explain your friend’s observations. I’ve lived and driven extensively in (and of course around and between) Alsace, Basel, Obwalden and Valais for >20 years, in case you’re interested.
VD plates could perhaps be described as “so browbeaten by the number of stupid revenue-generating speed cameras that they’re too scared to do anything quickly”.
Maybe you should create a reference table for every canton’s license plate =)
I couldn’t agree with you more! In Switzerland, you only need to use the signal when exiting the roundabout. This is one aspect of driving in Switzerland that I really dislike. For us cyclists, this can pose a significant safety risk. In Scandinavia, you need to use the left turn signal while you’re inside the roundabout. As you’re about to exit, you switch to the right signal and drivers are much more considerate of cyclists. They always slow down when cyclists are navigating roundabouts.
A tip my son was given when learning to drive was to look at the car’s wheels as the indicate which direction the car is heading in.
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I suspect the authorities know the signalling rule is stupid. But they also know it slows down traffic … without having to figure out how to install cameras
I don’t know if anyone else feels the same, but I hate the way some smaller roundabouts have zebra crossings on the entrance/exit of roundabouts. So often when half turned on to the exit, a car has to stop to allow a pedestrian to cross. Something of a hazard for the person driving onto the roundabout behind who doesn’t expect the car in front to suddenly come to a stop.
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I can only add to this that on one instance we were leaving on foot our office building for a lunch with a few colleagues, and when reaching the roundabout zebra I was told something like “be careful, here there’ve been some accidents involving pedestrians as in Switzerland they’re taught to accelerate/not to drop speed on roundabouts” =)
Don’t you think that kind of thing is meant to be tongue-in-cheek rather than standard driving school practice?
My experience over the years has been that the driving styles here are a total hotch-potch, which I conclude comes from Switzerland being situated in the middle of Europe and full of drivers from the surrounding countries and further afield, all totally convinced their their own culture’s driving skills are definitively the correct ones.
The best way of dealing with it is, as Phil_MCR says above, to assume everyone else is an unpredictable idiot and just keep an eye on them till they are safely out of the way.
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Things are not thaaaat bad around here. Among the lowest road traffic deaths in Europe and this stat should be interpreted considering around half of road traffic deaths are pedestrians or cyclists. So, drivers are not accelerating on roundabouts to kill pedestrians in road traffic, it’s just keeping traffic fluid.
Anyway, roundabouts in streets with lots of pedestrians have 20-30 kmh speed limit. Is it really necessary to go slower?
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We had an argument on EF.
People wrote what you just did.
I pointed out that with the fantastic, well kept roads here, the abundance of newish cars with the latest safety technology and so on, the obvious explanation for why the road deaths and injuries aren’t much lower than they should be is because the driving standard here just isn’t as good as people like to believe.
People didn’t like that.
Switzerland’s fatalities in 2020 were 26 per million compared to the EU average of 45. It’s not all down to the quality of roads and vehicle safety features. You have to look at population density, average age of drivers, driving test criteria, etc. There must be dozens of criteria which will affect a country’s driving conditions.
Like I said earlier, Switzerland is a bit of a geographical roundabout for all the surrounding countries, which is also bound to affect driving conditions / quality.
As for driving standards, I can only compare it to the UK, but I’ve found the standards in the UK horrifically lax in recent years, both on motorways and urban driving.
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Switzerland has the twelfth highest population density in Europe, probably higher in the flat lands.
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Have you got a link to that? And one for non-fatal accidents.
One would think that the country with the best health care in Europe may not have so many deaths from accidents but that’s not indicative of the number of accidents in the first place.
Switzerland wasn’t on it because it’s not EU so I had to google it and found it as 26 per million.
I didn’t look up non-fatal accidents.
Not sure why you think the healthcare has anything to do with road accidents. They are just there to pick up the pieces when it happens. You can have the best healthcare in the world but all that is irrelevant if someone’s head is lying on the roadside, 10 metres from its body.
I thought your comparison of vehicle / highway safety made more sense, though.
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I thought I had explained that.
A life-saving operation after a car accident is not life-saving with inadequate healthcare facilities.
Many serious accidents can have one of two outcomes for the victim - the victim dies or the victim survives, possibly (quite possibly with life-changing injuries).
You only quoted deaths. Can you try and imagine that if the death is prevented (due to excellent healthcare), it doesn’t mean that the accident didn’t take place?
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I get that but I thought we were on a path of discussing the driving standards not the aftermath of an accident and the related trauma treatment.
I was kind of considering this:
Emergency trauma medicine is then moving away from the subject driving standards, vehicle safety and driver aptitude and, dare I say it, roundabouts.
It wasn’t me that brought up deaths, it was AXA.
My point was that death isn’t the only negative outcome of an accident and other very serious outcomes could include severe brain trauma, amputation or multiple fractures, internal bleeding and so on.
Stating number of deaths isn’t the same as number of accidents.
Well, numbers. For the EU, for CH, both reports from year 2021. Switzerland, 38 pedestrian deaths on 2020, around 8.5 million people, so ~4.5 deaths per million inhabitants.
Not sure if newer cars are safer. After all, SUVs are becoming more popular. Older sedans break your legs. Newer SUVs with taller hoods/bonnets break your torax, and they offer poorer visibility so higher chances to get hit 
Back to the stats, could it be improved? Of course, lower number of deaths is better.
Is it an indication of systemic failure? Calm down please. If you want to improve something that requires the cooperation of “society”, start by not putting everyone against you.
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