Driving in Poland, are there any rules at all?

Have been living in Lodz since in August and pretty much driving since day one. If there are rules about driving I have yet to see anyone following them :D

First few months shocked me (overtaking on bends or pedestrian crossings, tailgating being pretty much commonplace and as has been said if you are even the slightest bit slow in taking off at a greenlight prepare for some very angry feedback...)

All that said, eventually you just get used to it. Only frustration I have now is the number of speed cameras....

The only rules are there are no rules. Change lanes when you want without indicating; undertake; overtake on blind curves; drive aggressively at pedestrians on a crossing; if someone is trying to overtake on a dual carriageway and they are not going 300kph an hour drive one inch behind them flashing your lights; park where you want - block the whole pavement, double park, just stop in the middle of the road and put your hazards on and go do your shopping; chat on your phone and do your make up in 3 lanes of traffic; if the lane is merging ignore any warning signs and just drive to the end and move into the lane without looking; there are no box junctions so feel free to block trams and other cars; well maybe one rule - anything bigger than you be careful as they wil do all the above and can crush you e.g. buses. If you drive like that you should fit in well.

As I understand Polish road rules : there's no need, obstructing a junction is an offence.

I was involved in a road accident today with a bizarre tale. I was sitting at a crossroads waiting to travel north/south, on the opposite side of the road a car entered the junction at high speed traveling south/north. A woman with a mobile phone to her ear travelling east/west collided with the car which spun 90 degrees and hit the front end drivers side of my car, the arguing pursued and the woman admitted fault we are all started to exchange details and it was all civil, a small crowd of local people started to get involved and advised the chap he needed to call an ambulance as he looked a little shaky, after speaking to one of the crowd he phoned the police and also the ambulance. The police turned up and took statements examined the cars looked the junction and decided the chap travelling south/north was at fault as he entered the lane of the woman who had right of way, the woman was fined for using her mobile phone, the police gave me all of the guys personal & insurance details within two hours I have contacted his insurance company Link4, the insurance company have advised me that the chap has cancelled the insurance as he has sold the car today so there is change of ownership.I have contacted my insurance broker who is now dealing with link4 personally, as he explained to me there are many tricks people will try to pull if I had contacted Link4 tomorrow its more than 90% sure my claim would not go through.

hes probably changed it to his grandfather grandmothers name then the increase in premium wont be on his name

Merged: Are the road rules in Poland too lenient?

Hi Guys,

Everyday I am seeing cars going really fast in Warsaw. I'm sure they are doing nearly or more than 100 mph, I have seen the motorbikes performing wheelie in roads which could be really dangerous to the public But I've never seen anybody pulled over by a cop.

I've heard that the road rules in western countries are so strict, then why are these guys still racing in the public roads.
Are the Cops lenient in Poland or these people are wise enough to dodge the cops?

I think you're misjudging the speed, though I admit people (including me) drive with the flow rather than with both eyes on the limit. It's no excuse, but it's better to go with the flow than to make a bloody nuisance of yourself.... At the same time there are some idiots here, as elsewhere, as everywhere and perhaps the police focus is elsewhere. That's for the police and authorities to decide, based on their cost/benefit analysis of the resources available to them.

I wouldn't class Poland as a western country.

Most Poles have a blatant disregard for road safety. Poland has the highest roads deaths in the EU. It has one of the highest rates of drink-driving too.

It's not a safe country to drive in, so always pay attention when on the road...........especially now that summer has kicked off and the roads are full of moronic cyclists.

From my own experience I've never once been stopped by the Police here and I drive a lot, they don't seem to care about enforcing road rules and Poles sure as hell don't seem to care about following them.

I would say that mostly the latter. In Poland a device called CB radio is quite popular among drivers - not only the professional ones, but in private cars too. It is not dificult for drivers to warn each other about roadside inspections. And not only roadsite, cops do use more sophisticated method too, like following the driver in an unmarked car and registering its speed with a special video camera - but they are still not a problem for the crazy drivers who just MUST overpass everybody. They are still able to recognize even unmarked police cars.

I suppose all these might be because of quite low traffic fines in Poland. And just because it's Poland.

A friend recently complained that he'd brought his from France to Poland but nobody used them. Perhaps the frequency is different.


Someone did that to us a while ago, really aggressively overtaking on a difficult road. About half an hour later we saw his corpse lying next to the wreck of his car.

Hmm, but if everyone 'made a bloody nuisance of themselves' by driving under the speed limit, that would be 'the flow' and roads would be a lot safer.

Start with the man in the mirror, be the change that you want to see.


Here in Wrocław, some of those morons are on the pavements and come at you at high speed. We're not talking backstreets, but the main streets. They don't want to use the proper cycle lanes running alongside the tram route because, heaven forbid, they might have to wait at a red light to turn into Hallera or Wisniowa. Some of the cyclists here should be prosecuted without a shadow of a doubt.


You're probably a pretty good motorist then, simple as that, because the police stop plenty of drivers here. I see it all the time. I also saw my first ever j-walker (or whatever the word is) get a ticket the other day. Btw a friend got pulled over by the police in an unmarked 4x4 or similar not so long ago for allegedly driving erratically. I was in the car at the time, and it was a local B-road.


They stopped being used widely in the UK in the 1980s, although they enjoyed a lot of popularity when they were made legal. I was a breaker, as CB enthusiasts were known, and spent hours on air each weekend and some evenings. Some truckers probably still use them, but the number of breakers has seriously dropped from what I can hear when I try channels 14 or 19 in the UK on occasion. Sometimes just static, nary a voice.

+1


Same in Warsaw. The pavements are for walking not riding. Masa Krytyczna is annoying too when they try to stop you crossing the road at the pedestrian crossing.


In Poland they've never been popular.

Happens here all the time, and this city seems to be getting busier and busier with each passing month. Roads near me are much busier than they used to be, and guy I know who works in a hospital told me the population here is closer to 900K than the official sub 700K. And many of the newbies are aiming bikes in every direction or let loose behind the wheel of a car! At least I've had the decency to largely stay off the roads and stick to using the buses :)

Same here, pretty annoying. Once some clown came down a hill at speed and got tangled in my dog's leash. Poor dog when flying but the sucker flew even further and then got an earful from me, the look on his face when I laid into him in ENglish was priceless :D


I think CBs are quite popular here, you can see loads of cars on the road with the extra aerial for them.
Don't see the point in them myself, the Police can easily hear the conversations....people have codes for things like speed traps, one used to be 'tedy-bears with guns'.

But with the Yanosik app I don't see the point in them anymore.
It's a great app, displays all cameras and even patrols, both on iOS and Android
yanosik.pl/wybierz-wersje

Sorry about that Smurf - I will look where I'm going in future :)

But really - Poles have zero, zilch, respect for other road users - end of.

When I pointed out that the Highway code simply states:

1. Pedestrians
2. Cyclists/horses
3. Motorised vehicles...

The listener, a doctor on the 500 Polish medical council started shaking his head and arguing the fact. So what hope is there of a Pole thinking clearly on this topic?

I have just given up reasoning with the tossers, and carry a big stick.

With hairdryers :) Apart from teddy-bears, there are crocodiles too. Generally the drivers' slang is practically a different language. However the cops understand it without any problems for sure.

There are still some enthusiasts of radio connectivity here, but undoubtedly the drivers are the main CB user in Poland. Or rather of one channel - 19.

What is interesting - in Poland it is illegal to use a phone which (or whose receiver) needs to be hold in hand while talking - but using the CB radio, holding the microphone and driving at the same time is fully legal, since CB radio is not considered as a telephone.

As far as this radio brought from France is concerned - in Poland the AM modulation is used on CB, while in the western Europe - as far as I know - it is FM. Maybe it's the case.

I see all the makings of good road rage. Maybe even sidewalk rage. Does it exist?

If this is indeed true, then a lot of people are violating the law, including bus drivers! Here in Zywiec many of the bus drivers take and make calls while driving.

I remember when I first came to pl and a guy said to me "it takes an hour by car but a 'good' driver can do it in 40 minutes". He couldn't get his head round the fact that in the UK we'd be more likely to say it the other way round.

Polish drivers and their disregard for traffic laws. But I have driven all around Europe and I must say, French and Italian drivers are far worse.

I am not sure if the rules of the road are lenient or not. I found that the drivers in Warsaw to be aggressive. That was my first impression of them from my trip in Oct. 2010. Once you got out of Warsaw, the driving habits seemed to be more normal.

Personally I think driver habbits are changing since then in Poland and are becoming more rational.My guess as from 2000 very few licensed drivers were driving and were young and new on the streets with cars but things are changing very rapidly.I drive around 10k miles almost 16k km a year in since 2000 and find polish road drivers getting more sensible.lol then again i personally love overtaking a slow moving car and esp following a car with cb radio with a tall antenna:)

I think the higher fines and the cash being spent on traffic calming measures have had a great effect. When some of these idiots can lose a weeks wages i think the message is getting through.

Of course the police are still picking the most profitable spots, not the most dangerous. That will take a long time to change

Not really much use here, very little on the screen and the map lacks street name detail. I uninstalled it. Maybe it's one that will take off in the future, though. Is crowd-reporting of police patrols etc legal?


Reasonably similar here, on the outskirts and quitter areas, drivers more readily stop for pedestrians and behave. There are exceptions, however, and some drive far too fast down what to my eyes look like village streets near or in Wysoka.

haha, yea me two, I've got 2 hurleys in the boot now in case anyone tries something on me.
Got a dash camera too.


Yea, that;s true, but tbh I never look at street names anyway. I prob could name 5 streets in Kato, I learn the streets by what shops/pubs/etc are on them...I know it's weird but I've always done it that way :)

AFAIK it's totally legal.. I think it's because the app (business running the app I mean) doesn't actually give the locations but the users add them as they see them, and then the next driver along that stretch of road confirms it or wipes it off.

I know they are certainly illegal in France and all GPS devices come without traffic light locations, maybe there's a French version, but I dunno.

It is certainly up there, but not not the highest any longer - do your homework and look up latest stats before posting: now 3rd worst for 2012 (with a 15% decrease year to year)

https://polishforums.com/news/poland-dangerous-roads-europe-69248/

That's a dreadful statistic. Other EU states derecognising driving licenses issued in Poland and other countries high on the list until the situation improves might be drastic, however they've had plenty of time to improve things, yet the number of serious accidents is still tragically bad.

It really makes little difference it it's number 1 or number 2 or number 3.
People drive very dangerously here and have no respect for other drivers or the rules of the road....and drink driving is still a massive issue.

And a massive problem it remains, no one sane will deny that and I only wish there was more done to both make drivers/general public aware of the magnitude of this national tragedy and to eradicate idiot road behaviour. On a positive note, there has been a promising decrease in 2011-12, let's wait for the 2013 stats to come out - I'd expect that trend to continue over the coming years.

Hopefully so.

One thing you don't see here are tv ads about drink/dangerous driving.

youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6YEoYGArMas

youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vBsQc0a_8sE

I think they're quite good at getting people to face the problems. Also back home testing drivers for alcohol is far more prevalent which is obviously helpful.

It's weird I don't know why more isn't done about it.
Are other EU countries as lackadaisical as Poland in this regard?