The Unwritten Rules of Ankara Traffic

In April 2010, I wrote a short, irritated entry about Ankara traffic.

The subject was Eskişehir Road.

My complaint was aimed at drivers who, in my memory, would travel at around 90 km/h in the left lane and then behave as if they owned it.

If someone behind them wanted to pass, they would not move.

I was annoyed by the contradiction.

I wrote that the speed limit on that road was 70 at the time, so my younger logic was roughly this:

If you are going to respect the limit, then respect it.

If you are going to drive faster anyway, then at least do not block the lane.

And if someone behind you wants to pass, move over.

It was not sophisticated traffic analysis.

It was a rant.

A very Ankara rant.

The specific legal limits and road conditions belonged to that moment in 2010, and I would not treat an old entry as current driving guidance.

What interests me now is not the number.

It is the psychology.

Traffic has written rules.

Then it has the rules drivers believe everyone else should understand without being told.

Those two systems overlap.

They are not identical.

That is where anger begins.

Every city develops a driving culture.

People learn it informally.

How aggressively cars merge.

How seriously lanes are treated.

How early turn signals are used.

How much distance people leave.

What flashing headlights means.

How quickly the person behind expects you to move.

None of this is fully captured by signs.

You can know the formal rules and still feel lost in the behavioral language of a city.

That language is learned by exposure.

At first, traffic feels chaotic.

Then you begin predicting it.

Prediction creates competence.

It can also create bad habits.

You start saying things like:

Nobody lets you in unless you force your way.

Or:

If you wait politely, you will wait forever.

Or:

This is how everyone drives here.

“This is how everyone does it” is one of the strongest unofficial laws in urban life.

It explains behavior.

It also excuses it.

My old entry clearly lived inside one of those unofficial codes.

I was not calmly evaluating lane discipline.

I was saying:

If you are going to behave like an Ankara driver, at least be internally consistent.

That is funny now.

I was objecting less to rule-breaking than to inefficient rule-breaking.

You are already above the stated limit.

Fine.

Then why are you blocking me?

There is a particular young-driver logic in that sentence.

It values flow.

Momentum.

Predictability.

The road becomes a system whose greatest failure is unnecessary obstruction.

The older I get, the more obvious the missing variable becomes.

Safety.

Traffic is not only a throughput problem.

Cars are not packets.

People are not data.

The cost of failure is physical.

That changes everything.

Still, the instinct to seek predictability was not wrong.

Predictability is essential in traffic.

You need to know what others are likely to do.

A driver who is inconsistent can be stressful even at low speed.

That does not make speeding sensible.

It explains why unpredictability feels dangerous.

Traffic forces strangers to cooperate at speed without speaking.

That is remarkable.

Thousands of people who do not know one another share roads using lights, lanes, mirrors, indicators, assumptions, and tiny gestures.

A slight deceleration says:

Come in.

A signal says:

I intend to move.

Ideally before the movement.

Sometimes only as historical documentation afterward.

Drivers communicate constantly.

Mostly without words.

This is why driving cultures feel almost linguistic.

Someone from another city may understand the formal system but misread the local dialect.

Ankara had its own dialect.

At least it did in my mind.

Eskişehir Road had a particular rhythm because it was not only a road.

It was part of daily life.

People commuting.

People leaving the city.

People entering.

People rushing.

People repeating the same route until irritation itself became familiar.

After enough repetition, a road becomes personal.

You know where traffic slows.

Where people merge badly.

Which lane tends to move.

Where someone will almost certainly do something annoying.

This predictive familiarity is useful.

It is also how road rage becomes ritual.

You are not reacting only to the car in front of you.

You are reacting to every similar car from the previous five years.

One driver becomes the representative of a category.

There they are again.

The left-lane people.

The people who never signal.

The people who stop where they should not.

The people who accelerate when you try to pass.

Traffic turns strangers into stereotypes very quickly.

That is dangerous because once someone becomes “one of those drivers,” empathy disappears.

You stop seeing uncertainty.

Maybe they are lost.

Maybe inexperienced.

Maybe distracted.

Maybe simply making a mistake.

Or maybe they really are inconsiderate.

You cannot know.

But traffic gives little time for generous interpretation.

The brain chooses a story immediately.

Usually the story is:

Idiot.

This is efficient.

Not accurate.

The old entry was written entirely from inside that mode.

There was no curiosity about the driver.

Only prosecution.

You are going 90.

You are in the left lane.

You refuse to move.

What exactly is your philosophy?

I still understand the irritation.

But I trust the anger less.

Driving anger has a strange feature:

it feels morally clear while it is happening.

You are correct.

The other person is not merely inconvenient.

They are wrong.

Their mistake becomes evidence of character.

Selfish.

Stupid.

Arrogant.

Then five minutes later, you make a mistake yourself.

Miss a turn.

Change lanes late.

Hesitate.

Now your own behavior receives context.

I had to.

I did not see it.

The sign was confusing.

I am not usually like this.

We explain ourselves with circumstances.

We explain others with personality.

Traffic demonstrates this bias beautifully.

Everyone is the rational driver in their own car.

This is one reason roads are such good places to observe psychology.

A car creates a strange combination of privacy and public consequence.

You are enclosed.

You feel territorial.

Someone entering your lane can feel more personal than it should.

Someone slowing you down can feel like an obstacle placed specifically in your life.

They probably do not know you exist.

The body reacts anyway.

A vehicle amplifies agency.

You press.

It moves.

You steer.

The world shifts.

Anything that interferes with that control creates frustration.

Traffic is forced loss of control.

You want to go.

You cannot.

A red light decides.

A queue decides.

Construction decides.

The person in front decides.

This is why delays of forty seconds can produce ten minutes of anger.

Terrible economics.

The old entry also reveals how young drivers can turn preference into principle.

“I want to go faster” becomes:

This is about lane discipline.

Maybe it is.

Also, you want to go faster.

Both can be true.

Maturity often begins when we notice that our principles are sometimes conveniently aligned with what we already wanted.

This applies outside traffic too.

At work:

This is about efficiency.

Perhaps.

Also, I dislike the process.

In relationships:

This is about honesty.

Perhaps.

Also, I want an answer.

In traffic:

This is about proper lane use.

Perhaps.

Also, move.

Seeing both motives does not invalidate the principle.

It makes self-understanding more accurate.

The source entry contains a wonderful contradiction.

I invoked the speed limit while simultaneously complaining about someone who was already exceeding it but not exceeding it in the way I preferred.

That contradiction is the story.

Old writing is valuable because it records the flexibility we forget we had.

We remember ourselves as more coherent than we were.

Archives disagree.

Good.

They should.

When I read the entry now, I do not think:

What excellent traffic policy.

I think:

There is a young man annoyed because the road is not behaving according to his internal model.

That is more interesting.

We all build internal models.

Roads.

Workplaces.

Relationships.

Cities.

People.

Then reality fails to follow them.

Frustration often lives in the distance between expectation and behavior.

Driving makes the distance immediate.

Move now.

Signal now.

Accelerate now.

Decide now.

There is no room for negotiation.

Anger becomes a fast explanation.

Not a good one.

A fast one.

The dangerous part is when anger becomes action.

Tailgating.

Retaliation.

Blocking.

Trying to teach someone a lesson.

Traffic is a terrible classroom.

Nobody learns the lesson you think you are teaching.

If you drive aggressively behind someone because they are blocking a lane, they do not think:

I now understand considerate lane behavior.

They think something about you.

Now two irritated people are sharing physics.

Bad combination.

One lesson age teaches is the value of margin.

Distance.

Time.

Space.

Do not operate constantly at the edge.

Margin looks inefficient until something unexpected happens.

Then it is the reason the system survives.

This applies everywhere.

Schedules.

Budgets.

Software.

Relationships.

Roads.

The young version of me was more interested in flow.

The older version respects margin more.

That does not mean annoying drivers stop being annoying.

Annoyance survives philosophy.

The response can change.

That distinction matters.

You do not have to stop feeling irritated before behaving better.

A lot of maturity is simply separating emotion from action.

Feel it.

Do not automatically execute it.

Traffic gives daily practice.

The title of the old entry was “Ankara traffic’s own peculiar rules.”

That phrase is larger than the specific complaint.

Every city has written rules and emergent rules.

The emergent ones tell you what people really expect from one another.

If enough drivers expect aggression, aggression becomes normal.

If enough drivers expect courtesy, courtesy becomes easier.

Norms reinforce themselves.

One polite driver cannot redesign a city.

But culture is built from repeated small interactions.

Let someone merge.

Signal.

Do not block the intersection.

Do not escalate.

These behaviors feel tiny.

Collectively, they define the road.

This is true outside traffic too.

An organization is not only its policy manual.

It is what people repeatedly tolerate.

A classroom is not only its syllabus.

It is how people behave when something unexpected happens.

A family is not only its stated values.

It is its routines.

A city is not only traffic law.

It is what drivers expect from one another.

The unwritten system can overpower the written one.

That is why changing rules without changing norms often fails.

People continue operating according to the real incentives and expectations.

Again, this is far more analysis than my 2010 entry contained.

At the time, I wanted one thing.

The driver in front should move.

That was it.

But a short rant can be a good historical artifact because it preserves ordinary impatience.

Not every memory needs to be noble.

Not every post has to emerge from heartbreak, career turning points, or family milestones.

Some nights, the important thing was that somebody on Eskişehir Road refused to get out of the left lane.

That was enough to make me write.

Years later, the speed number matters less.

The irritation matters less.

What remains is the younger voice.

Certain.

Impatient.

Trying to reconcile law, custom, and personal convenience in one paragraph.

I would not take his driving advice today.

I would keep his sentence.

Because cities are remembered not only through buildings and people.

Sometimes they are remembered through the driver in front of you who simply would not move.