July 13, 2018
In summer Slovenian highways become full of European tourists driving to the Croatian coast and back home (although some avoid the highways to avoid the vignette).
The cause of summertime congestion however is not always heavy traffic, but can sometimes be an accident instead, which might be difficult to figure out if caught at the far end of a long line of vehicles tail.
It is therefore important to know where to move to give way to emergency and other intervention vehicles on their way to save lives.
Slovenian highways mostly consist of three lanes, the lane on the far right is also called the emergency lane, where people pull over in case their car breaks down and AMZS – “the largest provider of roadside assistance in Slovenia” – needs to be called to tow it away.
This same emergency lane was also used by the intervention vehicles until 2017, when it was declared that drivers in the other two lanes should form an emergency corridor between the both lanes instead, since it often happened that the far-right emergency lane was blocked with something or someone.
To sum up, when there’s a traffic jam drivers in the far left lane are expected to move to the left side of their lane, while the drivers in the right lane are expected to move to the right side of their lane, and are even allowed to cross the solid line to give more space to the emergency vehicles arriving in between the two lanes.
