Death of an anachronism: Horse carts banned from Romanian roadways {Gadling}

Sep 24th 2009 6:28PM Hi from Romania to everybody :)
I know this is an old article and maybe nobody will even read this but i have to clear things out for y'all.
Horse driven carts are what Romanian drivers fear the most. More then 90% of our road network has only one lane each way. Imagine driving at 50 miles an hour, at night, and you spot a cart just 100 meters or less in front of you (almost none of them has any kind of signaling, no lights, nothing) and there is another car coming the other way. You don't have time to break, and in Romania there are trees on the side of the road on ANY road. You can't just steer right and go into a corn field. Your choices are : death by hitting the cart, death by hitting the car coming the other way or death by hitting a tree. I had a couple of these "near death" experiences both as a drivers and as a passenger and I can say you guys have absolutely no idea how dangerous these things are.
And a couple of horses cost just as much as a 1990's Toyota pick-up truck, but most cart driving folk will get a pick-up because you can't drive a car drunk. yeah, did i forget to mention that everyone driving a cart after say, 5 pm, is stone drunk. The thing is, the horses know their own way home ;)
And carts were not banned from all roads. Only from european and national roads. You can still drive a cart on a county road, and most villages are connected by these roads, not by those on which the carts are banned on.
2 years after this law was passed people still die every day on the roads because of horse driven carts. It's easy to judge when you are a world away