Guidelines or rules?

In Sweden people generally respect the rules.

Actually a lot of people think Swedes are so square you could use them as a mold if you ever need something really square.

Add to this a huge state machinery to fill us with propaganda about what to eat, how to sleep, how to talk etc and you get a people that drive very safely...

During 29 years in Sweden I think I saw people blatantly running red lights maybe 10 times. Most of my friends would never drive if they had a drink. Actually a lot of people won’t drive the day after a decent party.

Because people follow the rules.


Now in Barcelona things are a little bit different. Every day in traffic I feel compelled to paraphrase from the movie "Pirates of the Caribbean" where they say "its not rules, it’s more like guidelines".

I don’t know how many times I have seen people running red lights in my two months here. It is however often enough to make me instinctively look if the cars are actually going to stop before walking.

The strange thing is it still seems to work. I don’t see a lot of accidents.

There probably are more than in Sweden. But everyone is always keeping an eye out to see what all the other people might do next (because you really never know what they might do) - This results in drivers and pedestrians that seem much more aware of their actual surroundings than the ones in Sweden.


Now if they could only get people to drink a bit less before driving home during the weekends traffic here wouldn’t be worse than in Sweden.