04.17.03 | Driving, Pt. Two

[The following entry about driving is a paraphrased excerpt from a much longer document I wrote detailing our trip to the area of Kent in southeastern England, which included visiting Canterbury, Dover, Hastings and Battle. I'm not including it here for reasons of length and the fact that I sent it out to many people back in April. If you'd like to see it, email me and I'll send you the Word doc. - BR]

For our trip to Kent, we left from Hammersmith, the location of the rental car branch, and picked up the western side of the M25 ring motorway to swing around to the eastern side of the city and then head out on the M26 and M2 towards Canterbury, our first destination.

I will say that with Claudine navigating and me driving, we did a pretty good job of getting around. I was fortunate enough to have already had some experience with right-hand drive cars while living in Los Angeles. All I had to do was remember to drive on the left side of the road.

This actually isn't that hard. As long as there are other cars around, all you have to do is follow them. But this does take a lot of extra concentration, and it can be draining. I found it hardest to maintain lane integrity. After so many years of driving LHD cars, your brain gets used to unconsciously positioning the car within the lane based on where you sit. But when you're driving RHD and looking out the windshield, your brain thinks you're way off and tries to reposition you to the left.

By the second day, I was feeling much more natural about driving. I only threatened our safety, err, once or twice.

How I managed to scare Claudine while driving:

Zebra crossings: The British pronounce it "zehb-ra." These are pedestrian crossings in which the pedestrian always has right-of-way. If she's stepping off the curb, it's your duty as the driver to stop immediately. This is opposite of America, where it seems as a pedestrian you put your life at risk anytime you attempt to cross a street.

Roundabouts: Ah yes, the roundabout. There's a great scene in National Lampoon's European Vacation in which Chevy Chase, driving his family sightseeing around London, gets stuck circling a roundabout for about 12 hours.

It's true that these things can be nasty, especially when you don't quite know where you're going. You can be heading on the A290, which is supposed to be taking your north, when you suddenly encounter a roundabout. Do you get to maintain a northern heading? No! The roundabout inexplicably shoots you off to the west for the A290. Miss the entry for the A290 and you're screwed.

There's also the issue of entering the roundabouts. Cars already in the circle have right-of-way. There aren't any stop signs, so one simply has to judge if there's room to fit in. I usually applied a President Bush method for entering roundabouts: go full-speed ahead, believe that you are morally right and don't pay attention to what anyone else is doing.

Class B and no-name roads: The British classification system for roads is pretty simple. Main highways are labeled "M." Major roads are "A" roads. Lesser roads are "B" roads. Even smaller country roads, at least on our road atlas, don't even have assigned names.

In America, roads almost always have at least two divided lanes. The British are much more frugal in the use of dividers. Frequently, the B roads or country roads lack lane markings and are about one and a half lanes wide, or just enough room for two cars to squeeze past each other. A head-on collision is often just a sneeze away.

Sometimes you don't even get one-and-a-half lanes. While driving through the small town of Petham, people had parked their cars along the road, turning it into one lane. If there was opposing traffic, we had to stop and wait for it to pass.

It all seems a bit silly, really. How hard is it to design and build proper roads? But I guess it could be worse. We could have gone to Italy where I hear driving experience is even scarier. << REWIND