"Ian Jackson" wrote in message
...
In message , NY writes


I never got the hang of 4-way-stop junctions in the US because I could
never remember what order we had arrived in

The best answer I got was "The first one there has priority to move off
first".

That's fine as long as everyone has the same perception of who was there
first. If not, two cars set off simultaneously, both back off and wait for
the other, and then they both retry at about the same time - rinse and
repeat!

and resented having to stop even if I was the only car.

The Americans seem to love having to stop unnecessarily - (which might
explain their attachment to traffic lights, and why roundabouts are still
a bit of a novelty.

I was staying with my sister who lived near Boston, and one day we went to
Cape Cod. I was driving (having got my confidence in around-town driving).
As you enter the "armpit" of the peninsular of Cape Cod, there is a big
roundabout with about six of eight roads joining - one of the very few
"rotaries" in the part of America (at least in the late 90s). I took it in
my stride, applying normal UK rules apart from doing everything as a
mirror-image, and when we stopped a bit further along the Cape, a guy came
up to me and said he'd been behind me and had been gobsmacked at the way I'd
managed to go round this "thing", changing lanes effortlessly without
missing my turning and having to go round again. He was even more gobsmacked
when he heard my English accent and realised I was driving on what, for me,
was the wrong side of the road. He made me feel slightly superhuman - I'm
not sure whether it was flattering or cringeworthy ;-)


I was interested by the differences between UK and US driving:

- All distances on signs on minor roads are measured in feet ("roadworks for
3000 feet", "restrooms - 1000 feet" etc); we're used to miles, fractions of
a mile and yards, but then Americans do like expressing things as a large
numbers of small units (eg people's weights in pounds rather than stones and
pounds)

- Painted stop/give way lines at junctions are often non-existent; if the
road you are joining is straight, it's easy enough to extrapolate the kerb
line across your road to work out where to stop, but it's bloody difficult
where there is a side road that joins on the outside of a bend

- Drivers in small towns are unbelievably benevolent to pedestrians: on
several occasions I was walking along a pavement (sorry, sidewalk) and
turned my head to look at a building on the other side of the road as I
carried on walking along the road - immediately cars would stop (not at a
pedestrian crossing) thinking I wanted to cross

- All road signs have words, though those "words" may not make sense: it
took me a long time to work out that a sign "PED XING" meant "pedestrian
crossing" (what we'd call a zebra crossing)

- Motorway/freeway/expressway junctions often have a lane-drop so if you are
in the extreme right-hand lane and you approach a junction, you need to move
to Lane 2 in advance otherwise you find yourself being taken off at the
junction; having left the through route on a slip road, there is sometimes a
VERY sharp bend (an elbow rather than a constant-radius curve) - plan to
slow down a LOT if you are coming off :-(

- A lot of speed limits end in 5: 15, 25, 35 mph

- School buses are a PITA because they drive too fast to be able to overtake
when there's oncoming traffic, but you are NOT ALLOWED to overtake them when
they are stationary and displaying their flashing red lights, because that's
when children are getting on or off: moral - if you get behind one, you are
there for the duration and must stop behind it whenever it stops

- Lane discipline on motorways etc is non-existent: they overtake equally
frequently either side: this scares the **** out of me - maybe I'm too used
to driving on British motorways where overtaking on the left is fairly rare
so you get intot he bad habit of not checking every time you move from Lane
3 to 2 or 2 to 1

- Road atlases (at least the one my sister bought of Massachusetts) are
bizar instead of having maps laid out in a regular grid in the order west
to east and then north to south, the pages are organised by "town", and each
town's map is at a different scale (WTF?) so it is very difficult to follow
your route as you go east to west or north to south because you are not
going from one page to the next one or the next+(some increment), but
instead are jumping around at random, and because of the difference in scale
and therefore level of detail, it is difficult to find any common ground
between one map and the next to work out where you are on the new map. How
many magic mushrooms do you need to eat/smoke/mainline before you come up
with the idea of a map with random page ordering (well, alphabetic by
"town") and non-uniform scale? This was before the days of satnav; nowadays
you've got satnav devices and phone apps which make paper maps almost
redundant (I still keep one in my car as a backup - but I've never needed to
use it in the last 10 years or so). ("Town" really means "small region"
rather than built-up area that ends when the housing ends - there can be
lots of small "village-type" communities which are all in the same town, so
you can't predict (and don't really care!) which "town" you are currently
in.)