Driving in Türkiye
A summer of rental cars has ended, and I'm off the road -- for awhile, I hope. Here's a look at a few things I noticed during my drives around western Türkiye.
The biggest change in my lifestyle, moving from Tennessee (USA) to Türkiye was the automobile.
When I sold my car a week before the move, it felt like I had severed a limb. I had owned a car every year since the age of 16. Others felt bad, too. I would walk daily from my mom’s house to the home of my pre-divorce family, and twice friends pulled over and asked me why I was walking. I remember they looked distressed.
(They should have noticed my tummy. I was heavy. I needed exercise, and I turned down the rides they offiered.)
Within a month of living in Türkiye, I had begun to feel grateful for the loss of a car. I walked everywhere — to work, to the market, to the train station for trips into Izmir.
As a result, I was happier, healthier and wealthier (no gas, insurance or car payments).
Still, I have rented a car several times to go on day trips around Imzir. Car rentals are affordable here, $30 - $40 a day will get you a four-door Fiat five-speed. A lot of these have been for weekend day trips — visiting nearby places like Didyma and Ildir — but last summer, my dad visited, and I ended up with three weekly car rentals to visit the seven churches of Revelation.
Here’s a little of what I learned:
Turkish Roads are in very good condition
The motorways/ interstates, known here as “otobans” are equivalent to US interstate highways or German autobahns. They bypass quite far from towns, but they have six lanes from point to point, and speeds are equivalent to western motorways. Every Turkish otoban is a toll road, and tolls from Izmir to, say, Istanbul can reach $50 to $100, depending on the time of day you travel.
City streets are narrower, and there are few turning lanes. Four-lane highways mark the main routes through cities, although the right lane is often blocked (see below). There are few turning lanes, so u-turns are often necessary.
Within cities most streets are two-lane, and these are filled with public busses as well as dolmushes, private mini-busses that one can hail like a cab and pay 60 cents for a ride.
Stop lights are rarer than in the west. In some places around Izmir, the whole pole of the stop light will light up green or red. Lights will flash from red to yellow first, before turning green.
Village streets — they deserve a category all their own (see below)!
Double parking: the rule, not the exception.
As the meme above illustrates, it is quite common for a driver to stop in the middle of the right lane of traffic (or block the right lane). Sometimes it’s a delivery truck, other times an individual getting money out of an ATM or buying beer from a convenience store. In all cases there are a few honks, but drivers just move over to the other lane and pass.
I have even seen police cars come upon a double-parked car and just drive around it. Sometimes they will blare their sirens to get the driver moving, but more often than not even the traffic police just adjust and move on.
I wonder if this is an “Asian thing,” as 2/3rds of humanity lives on this continent and they are more likely than North Americans or Europeans to have to share space. This includes city streets and highways, where the center lane is the slow lane and the right lane (even on a six-lane highway) may be blocked for someone to buy something at a roadside stand.
Village Streets
Villages don’t have dead-end streets, per se. The roads just get narrower and narrower until you’re stuck. The worst example of this was when I was in Heraclea with my dad. We had tried to drive up to an ancient theater, only to be surrounded by village women trying to sell jars of honey and handcrafts. I tried to turn around, only to hear a horrible crunch as my sideboard scraped on a rock.
In Bergama (Pergamum) the old town on the side of the acropolis has the streets of a village. I was following Google Maps to our hotel and the street narrowed more and more. Finally, with about 3 inches clearance on either side, I stopped, backed my way out (about three blocks), and called the hotel for help. They showed me the one road wide enough to get to the top, which snaked around the historic district.
And even in the city, the streets can be village streets. Kusadasi is a city of 1.5 million, but our route to our hotel narrowed over the course of about eight blocks. I think the motto of Kusadasi should be “Size of a city, streets of a village.” I mean that.
Gas is the same price everywhere
This feels weird to me, and I’m sure there is a simple economic reason, which I presume to be the fact that the government purchases the gas and/or regulates the price. Service stations close to the airport (where gas is usually very expensive in the States) have the same price as those on the highway. Service stations next to one another have the same price still. If someone can explain, I’d welcome it.
Safety practices aren’t equivalent to the States
It’s common to see a car full of kids standing up in the backseat (or the front) and otherwise not wearing seatbelts. A fellow teacher has a car seat for his 3-year-old, and he has trouble finding vehicles that have a rear seatbelt to secureher seat — particularly busses.
Last night, as I was coming home from Teos, the bus driver whipped out his cell phone and checked his texts as he was slowing down to make a stop. This is, of course, banned in most U.S. states.
If you’re interested in more, I wrote about Parking in Turkey in March 2023
That’s what I have noticed in my few stints driving in Turkey. If you have anything to add, or if you have examples from the country where you live, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.