Thoughts on UK Driving

[realjd]

So it was A40(M) for a stretch? Why would TfL downgrade it?

Yeah, getting from Marble Arch to the A4 was easy. Park Lane goes right there and it was well signed.

[BrynM65]

When TfL was created in 2000, there was a huge legal mess-up that gave TfL no authority to maintain motorways. Therefore all city controlled motorways were renumbered as A-roads.

The A40(M) became A40.
The M41 became A3220.
The A102(M) Northern Section became A12.
The A102(M) Southern Section became A102.

The roads themselves are exactly as they were before just with green signs instead of blue ones, and in the case of the A12, a new 40 mph speed limit where it used to be 50 mph.

[realjd]

I'm sure it doesn't make a difference to you all who live there, but as a tourist, I would be useful if it was still a blue line on the map. Although I suppose that's as much the map makers' fault as the government's.

I was pleasantly surprised by the A303. What was a slow looking green line on Google and the AA atlas ended up being a fast 70 mph road that seemed to be a motorway in all but name. But I'm used to the colors representing the road's physical characteristics (freeway, dual carriageway, single carriageway, etc.) and not an administrative classification.

[J N Winkler]

When TfL was created in 2000, there was a huge legal mess-up that gave TfL no authority to maintain motorways. Therefore all city controlled motorways were renumbered as A-roads.

I have my doubts about "mess-up," given that the London Assembly and its mayor were created by a Labour government which had won lots of London seats in the 1997 landslide and was doubtless happy to have the inner London motorway network (vestigial as it was) disappear completely.

[Michael in Philly]

How easy/difficult was it to get used to everything being, as Jeremy Clarkson would say (about the Continent or us), "the wrong way round"?

[realjd]

How easy/difficult was it to get used to everything being, as Jeremy Clarkson would say (about the Continent or us), "the wrong way round"?

It wasn't my first time driving on the "wrong" side of the road; I'd done it a few times previously in various Caribbean countries. It's more intuitive with a RHD vehicle like in England than with a LHD vehicle like they often use in the Caribbean. At least with the RHD car, you're still sitting toward the middle of the road, just on the other side of the line. With a LHD car, it takes more thought to turn into the correct lane IMO.

England was actually easier than other places due to the fact that traffic is often "channeled" into the correct lane. The ubiquitous roundabouts make it hard to turn into the wrong side of the road accidentally. The hardest part this time was looking up and left to check the rearview mirror.

I actually usually have more trouble coming home. When I was in the BVI with a LHD car driving on the left, it took mental focus to turn into the proper lane at first, but it became habit by the end of the trip. Coming home, I didn't concentrate as hard on keeping right as I did on keeping left there and found myself absentmindedly turning to the left side of the road in places with unmarked lanes like parking lots.

Coming back from the Bahamas, the Japanese RHD car I drove had the turn signal on the right side of the steering wheel. For whatever reason, when I got home, I kept trying to use the windshield wipers on the right side of my wheel as a turn signal, but only for right turns. I only had the car for about 5 hours there so it's funny how quickly your brain can rewire itself for stupid stuff like that.

Coming back from England, I had to mentally re-map the fast lane on the freeway back to the left lane. Since I live in Florida though, part of that may be the fact that there are a large number of slow drivers on the left so it's not uncommon for the right lane to become a de-facto passing lane. At least the German Mercedes I drove had the turn signal on the proper (left) side of the wheel so that wasn't an issue.

And yes, other than the turn signals, all of the controls are the same. The gas is still on the right, the brakes still on the left.

EDIT: I realized I never actually answered your question directly. To put it plainly, it's not hard at all, just be prepared for a few quirks.

[1995hoo]

I found driving in the UK to be a breath of fresh air compared to driving in the USA the times I've done it. I think the biggest difference has to do with the theory of how traffic is managed. The USA is obsessed with putting up signs and with the notion that (a) you're presumed not to know what the law is unless you're told every last thing and (b) we have to protect everyone from the POSSIBILITY of something going wrong. I think a lot of American stop signs are examples of the latter–you might have to stop and yield as some point, so we'll make you stop and yield every time even if there is no traffic on the other road. A lot of the time in the UK you'll find "Give Way" signs or pavement markings (their equivalent to "Yield") where you'd see a stop sign in the US or Canada. If there's no need to stop, you don't have to stop. Makes a lot of sense to me! Essentially, the European approach seems to be that the driver is presumed both to know the law and to follow the law, whereas the American approach is very often the opposite.

Driving a right-hand-drive car was no problem at all. It took a few miles to get used to the rearview mirror being to the left and to the bulk of the car being to the left, but once I adjusted to that, the only times I ever felt particularly uncomfortable was maneuvering in tight quarters, primarily indoor car parks. I did feel nervous around pillars simply because the bulk of the car was on the opposite side from what I'm used to. The controls were all pretty standard–the five-speed shift pattern in the VW Passat I drove in Scotland was the same as it is in my left-hand-drive RX-7 here, the pedals are in the same arrangement with the accelerator on the right, clutch on the left, brake in the middle, etc. The VW was a bit odd in that the handbrake was a button on the dashboard, but that's hardly a UK-specific thing.

The only thing that I really disliked was the insidious "average speed check." Essentially, when there is a big roadwork project, they'll position cameras a set distance apart and read your license plate when you pass each one. If the amount of time it took you to pass them was too short, it means you were speeding and you get a ticket. This system prevents what normally happens with a speed camera where everyone knows it's there, slows down to 5 or 10 mph under the limit, and then speeds back up. "Average speed check" makes it feel like you're CRAWLING when they use it on the motorway and couple it with a 50-mph speed limit. Ugh.

[J N Winkler]

The only thing that I really disliked was the insidious "average speed check." Essentially, when there is a big roadwork project, they'll position cameras a set distance apart and read your license plate when you pass each one. If the amount of time it took you to pass them was too short, it means you were speeding and you get a ticket. This system prevents what normally happens with a speed camera where everyone knows it's there, slows down to 5 or 10 mph under the limit, and then speeds back up. "Average speed check" makes it feel like you're CRAWLING when they use it on the motorway and couple it with a 50-mph speed limit. Ugh.

There are ways around the SPECS cameras--for example, they are not rigged to handle vehicles which change lanes, so in theory you can prevent the cameras from getting an end time to correspond with your start time over the monitored length if you change lane.  The more usual problem, however, is that British motorways tend to operate at a lower LOS (particularly in rural areas) than American freeways, so typically your speed is limited by the vehicles ahead of you anyway, much as happens in school zones in the US.

[oscar]

How easy/difficult was it to get used to everything being, as Jeremy Clarkson would say (about the Continent or us), "the wrong way round"?

I spent two days on the road in England (plus a day walking around downtown London) last month.  I quickly got the hang of driving on the wrong side of the road, or at least not veering into opposing traffic.  My problem was, driving a relatively big car (the only ones I could find in the rental fleets with automatic transmissions), was drifting too far left in my lane.  Since some of the A- routes in the countryside, like A36 south of Bath, have curbs instead of shoulders, that meant my tires were scraping curbs quite a bit.

The roundabouts were driving me nuts too, but no more so than their U.S. counterparts.  

That said, I'll cheerfully drive on the left in the U.K. (or Australia or New Zealand, both on my "bucket list" for future travel), only next time in a smaller and narrower car with a stickshift.  I can relearn siickshiefts, which I drove up to late 2008, easily enough now that I'm confident about driving on the left.

I'll second the comment upthread about the expressway-level A303, at least west to the Stonehenge area, where it turns into an ordinary A- class highway, with more curbs and roundabouts than I care for.  The motorways (all of M25, parts of M1, M3, M4, M11, and M48) were also pretty nice.  Their service areas, with multiple food and fuel places, were a welcome touch.

[Truvelo]

There are ways around the SPECS cameras--for example, they are not rigged to handle vehicles which change lanes

That used to be the case when they first appeared around ten years ago but it soon became obvious that drivers would deliberately change lanes at each camera to avoid detection, indeed I used to do it. They have since been upgraded to communicate between lanes so that trick no longer works. Instead I've seen cars swoop behind tall vehicles when approaching each camera then move back into the fast lane. This is so the camera's view of the front plate is blocked.

Another trick that was also possible is to count the number of cameras vs number of lanes. Typically where there's 3 lanes each way there would be just 2 cameras on each post. It was the case years ago that the two faster lanes would be covered leaving the left hand lane without coverage. As this was also exploited by drivers there is now usually as many cameras as lanes but there's still the odd set of roadworks where one lane isn't monitored.

[1995hoo]

BTW, I'm sure a lot of people would consider me crazy for taking a detour to Swindon specifically to visit the Magic Roundabout, but the folks on this forum can probably understand and appreciate that sort of thing. (I was heading from Heathrow to Bristol and I wanted to see both the Magic Roundabout and Stonehenge en route.)