When I agreed to write this column, I vowed I would never touch the irksome subject of driving in Moscow. After all, it just raises one's blood pressure, and besides, what could I possibly add to the flood of already published tales of GAI harassment and encounters with New Russian road warriors?


Nothing, of course. I'm just like the rest of you. But after the last few weeks of navigating this city's roads, I can keep my vow no longer. I must add my voice to the many that have preceded me and rant and rave for a few moments about why I hate Moscow's streets.


This probably is because it took me two-and-a-half hours to get home the other day from an interview. In two-and-a-half hours I could have flown to Vienna or Berlin, or at least to sunny Sochi. Instead, I sat behind belching dump trucks on Shcholkovskoye Shosse, crawling at a snail's pace back home toward Kutuzovsky Prospect, cursing every driver on the road, and wondering why I hadn't just taken the metro.


Then there was the appointment to which I finally made it on foot, abandoning the car in some back-up that looked like it was going to last for days. When I saw cars lined up on the sidewalk, I knew it was time to get out.


Is it my imagination, or has the traffic gotten a lot worse? Aren't there more pileups, more bottlenecks, and more Mercedes than ever before? If you don't think so, drive over to a few of my favorite traffic jams: Smolenskaya Ploshchad (the square in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Byelorussky Station or the Triumphal Arch at rush hour.


There are more cars on the road -- from the 12-cylinder "Chariot of Fire" Mercedes to the lowly Zaporozhets, those little tin cans that huff and puff their way down the high speed lane. And with more cars comes more lawlessness, more driving on the sidewalks, more racing into the oncoming lane, more nauseating black fumes. Every time I am stuck in one of these impossible jams, I am reminded of the Thai traffic cop who, after years of service on Bangkok's notoriously backed-up streets, finally one day up and walked off the job, leaving his intersection to fend for itself. It's enough to give you claustrophobia.


Russia has more car accidents per capita than the United States, a country with many more cars. Is it any wonder why? Our own poor Toyota fell victim a couple of weeks ago to a KamAZ truck whose driver reeked of eau de spirit-of-last-night.


No wonder that more and more government bureaucrats demand that the roads be cleared for them -- another reason, by the way, for the growing number of traffic jams. When my husband was hit by the KamAZ, the GAI's first order of business was to clear them off the road, because Yeltsin was due to pass by at any minute.


Of course, accidents are not all you have to worry about. You could be caught in a real-live enactment of one of those shoot-'em-up car chases you see on movies like Lethal Weapon. In my neighborhood, these shootouts are apparently de rigueur. First, some gunmen in a Zhiguli gave spectacular chase to a Jeep Cherokee. Then someone tried to take out the deputy minister of nationalities as he headed out town.


His mistake, perhaps: He should have had the road cleared.You'd Walked