In message , NY writes
"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.)

I can't disagree with any of what you say. Some of the USA is very
well-organised, but some doesn't quite seem to be 'joined up' (but I
suppose it IS a big place). I do like those speed limits that end in 5,
most of which are far more appropriate to the actual situation than our
'zeros', and are therefore more likely to be obeyed.
--
Ian