UK Roads Thread

[webny99]

But as soon as I experienced it in real life (take this road, for example), I couldn't stop thinking about how weird it was to have to actually look for context (including incoming traffic!) to determine whether a road was one way or two way. It was easily the biggest "surprise" factor to driving in the UK... despite being completely obvious beforehand.

Looking at that road, I have to wonder if it was originally a three-lane road, where the center lane would be useable by vehicles in both directions to pass over vehicles in front of them. Obviously such "suicide lanes" were eventually deemed dangerous and I believe they've all long since been eliminated, though many were just simply restriped to being extra-wide two-lane roads like that one, IIRC.

Yep, you nailed it. The striping has been changed to two lanes but people still drive it like it's three. The lanes are so wide that faster traffic can pass on the inside without fully merging back to single file for oncoming traffic, so there was some pretty wild passing going on both times I drove it; stuff like this (but with regular traffic instead of a slow moving tractor) seemed to be the norm. The locals even mentioned that it was known to be a dangerous stretch.