In message , Mrs Redboots
writes

I didn't think Germany did, but last holidays we were driving in both,
and my husband commented, when we got into Germany, that they followed a
similar system to us. So perhaps they've changed - or else, perhaps
they have red, followed by separate amber, followed by green? I was too
busy navigating to notice!

The most common traffic lights in Germany are indeed like UK ones:

http://home.att.net/~texhwyman/zeichen4.htm

--
Paul Terry

On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 13:45:00 +0100, "Martin Underwood"
wrote:

Going back to the earlier theme of "let's mock the Americans' way of doing
things", another thing that I found when I drove over there was that their
standard of signposting, once you got off the multi-lane highways, was
abysmal. Maybe I'm just used to a three-way sign at the junction of almost
every country lane in England. And the road name signs are very difficult to
read because they are in a very condensed font, in white letters on a pale
green background: signs are supposed to be legible! I can only comment on
Massachussetts roads: I don't know whether it's the same in all states. It
doesn't help that the road atlas that I had was organised by town (rather
than being a simple west-to-east, north-to-south arrangement) and the
various maps were at different scales and in different styles. And this was
a map book that boasted on its front cover "highly acclaimed" and "very easy
to use"!!!

Personally I find their street signs much better than we have here, in
that they appear at every road junction, with both streets and the
block numbers on them. Here it is unusual to find a street name at an
intermediate junction.
--
Terry Harper
Website Coordinator, The Omnibus Society
http://www.omnibussoc.org

"Clive" wrote in message
...
In message , Mrs Redboots
writes
What threw us totally was that these limits were *obeyed*.... presumably
why they can be higher than ours!
I'd noticed that and asked another driver why. Apparently breaking the
speed limit carries very draconian measures. A different issue but one I
found annoying was when driving an American auto box, slowly accelerating
was good but to attempt to overtake the response is to put your foot down,
each time I did I found I was without drive for about two seconds whilst
the box kicked down.

I'm not a fan of automatic gearboxes. They are generally too inclined to
change down in situations where in my car (admittedly with a diesel engine
which has oodles of low-speed torque) I'd stay in third but push down on the
accelerator. I've driven a number of automatic cars. My dad's Ford Sierra,
about 20 years ago, was OK. His Hondas were appalling: it was very difficult
to accelerate smoothly out of a roundabout without the box dropping into
first gear (well, that's what it felt like) as you applied the power - you
either got very little acceleration in third or kick-in-the-back
acceleration in first - no half-measures :-( But the worst was a Ford Focus
that I drove from Oxford to Ipswich on business a couple of years ago. There
must have been a fault with the transmission because it was very hard to
accelerate from a roundabout or to overtake anything on the motorway because
the more you pressed the accelerator, the further it would change down, so
you were in the ridiculuous situation that you want to accelerate from 50 to
70 but the only option is to keep going at 50 - any any of 4th, 3rd, 2nd or
1st gear depending on how hard you pressed the accelerator ;-) Next time
the company hired me a car, I said "manual only, please"!

I'd be interested to try one of these sequential Tiptronic gearboxes such as
the ones on the Citroen C3 and some VWs. These apparently are manual
gearboxes (with a proper clutch, none of this fluid flywheel that can creep
forward in traffic and which uses more fuel) but controlled automatically or
manually according to preference. A colleague who I used to work with said
his was fantastic. I'd also like try a Variomatic transmission (Daf, Volvo
etc).

"Paul Terry" wrote in message
...
In message , Mrs Redboots
writes

I didn't think Germany did, but last holidays we were driving in both,
and my husband commented, when we got into Germany, that they followed a
similar system to us. So perhaps they've changed - or else, perhaps
they have red, followed by separate amber, followed by green? I was too
busy navigating to notice!

The most common traffic lights in Germany are indeed like UK ones:

http://home.att.net/~texhwyman/zeichen4.htm

Very interesting. There are some interesting features that we could do with
adopting he I like the idea of the red light as well as the green light
at filter junctions having an arrow. At a junction where there are separate
lights for straight ahead and turn left (or right), it's difficult to know
as you are approaching whether both sets of lights are the same (normal
junction) or separate (filter junction). Many times I've instictively braked
because I've seen a red light, only to realise that it's for the other
stream of traffic and that I've got a green. If the filter red light was
red, you could tell at a glance whether or not it applied to you.

What's the German rule on roundabouts (if they have them in Germany)? Do you
give way to traffic on the roundabout coming from your left (ie mirror image
of the situation in Britain) or does traffic already on the roundabout have
to give way to traffic that wants to join, as I believe is the case in The
Netherlands?

"Terry Harper" wrote in message
news
On Sat, 25 Jun 2005 13:45:00 +0100, "Martin Underwood"
wrote:

Going back to the earlier theme of "let's mock the Americans' way of doing
things", another thing that I found when I drove over there was that their
standard of signposting, once you got off the multi-lane highways, was
abysmal. Maybe I'm just used to a three-way sign at the junction of almost
every country lane in England. And the road name signs are very difficult
to
read because they are in a very condensed font, in white letters on a pale
green background: signs are supposed to be legible! I can only comment on
Massachussetts roads: I don't know whether it's the same in all states. It
doesn't help that the road atlas that I had was organised by town (rather
than being a simple west-to-east, north-to-south arrangement) and the
various maps were at different scales and in different styles. And this
was
a map book that boasted on its front cover "highly acclaimed" and "very
easy
to use"!!!

Personally I find their street signs much better than we have here, in
that they appear at every road junction, with both streets and the
block numbers on them. Here it is unusual to find a street name at an
intermediate junction.


That's in built-up areas. I'm talking about out-of-town roads. Maybe it
varies from state to state, but I found that at junctions between what we'd
call a single-carriageway A or B road and an unclassified road, there were
almost never any direction signs (eg X miles to place Y). If you were lucky
there might be a road name sign, in white on pale green which (a) was
virtually invisible and (b) was bugger-all use unless you had a large-scale
map that showed road names. Signposting on highways and in cities is fine -
as long as you remember on highways that as soon as you pass an
advance-warning sign for a junction you need to move into Lane 2 to avoid
being shuttled off at the junction - in Massachusetts their entry and exit
slip roads are often part of the road (ie Lane 1) rather than being an
additional lane to the right of Lane 1 ;-) I only made that mistake once
and felt a REAL pillock!

Also, on main-road signs, they tend to signpost the compass direction that
the road ultimately goes in, rather than the direction at that point. If you
know from looking at the map that the road that you want to turn onto faces
roughly north, you'd tend to expect to take the "North" direction on the
sign. Occasionally I was caught out because the road has a couple of u-bends
in it and starts off going north but somewhere along its length (maybe many
miles away) turns south and ends up south of where you are now. If you want
somewhere north of where you are now, you'd expect always to take the road
signposted "North" but you actually want the one signposted "South" ;-)
There was a road on route between Newburyport (Mass) and Kennebunkport
(Maine) that did this - forget exactly where but I know we got hopelessly
lost and wasted a lot of time going in the opposite direction because of it.

On Mon, 27 Jun 2005 00:00:42 +0100, "Martin Underwood"
wrote:

"Terry Harper" wrote in message
news

Personally I find their street signs much better than we have here, in
that they appear at every road junction, with both streets and the
block numbers on them. Here it is unusual to find a street name at an
intermediate junction.


That's in built-up areas. I'm talking about out-of-town roads. Maybe it
varies from state to state, but I found that at junctions between what we'd
call a single-carriageway A or B road and an unclassified road, there were
almost never any direction signs (eg X miles to place Y). If you were lucky
there might be a road name sign, in white on pale green which (a) was
virtually invisible and (b) was bugger-all use unless you had a large-scale
map that showed road names. Signposting on highways and in cities is fine -
as long as you remember on highways that as soon as you pass an
advance-warning sign for a junction you need to move into Lane 2 to avoid
being shuttled off at the junction - in Massachusetts their entry and exit
slip roads are often part of the road (ie Lane 1) rather than being an
additional lane to the right of Lane 1 ;-) I only made that mistake once
and felt a REAL pillock!

Also, on main-road signs, they tend to signpost the compass direction that
the road ultimately goes in, rather than the direction at that point. If you
know from looking at the map that the road that you want to turn onto faces
roughly north, you'd tend to expect to take the "North" direction on the
sign. Occasionally I was caught out because the road has a couple of u-bends
in it and starts off going north but somewhere along its length (maybe many
miles away) turns south and ends up south of where you are now. If you want
somewhere north of where you are now, you'd expect always to take the road
signposted "North" but you actually want the one signposted "South" ;-)
There was a road on route between Newburyport (Mass) and Kennebunkport
(Maine) that did this - forget exactly where but I know we got hopelessly
lost and wasted a lot of time going in the opposite direction because of it.

The road signs are often found in rural areas, particularly where they
have roads half-a-mile apart named "10-mile road". If you have a
decent map, then you know which one to take.

At least their road signs continue when two roads share a common
carriageway, unlike our system, where the A34 (for example) stops and
starts at the DfT's whim. I find it easier to follow "US25 North"
through a city, than looking for signs that say "Toutes Directions" or
"Poids Lourdes", as they do in France, plus a miniscule sign for the
one junction that one has to take.
--
Terry Harper
Website Coordinator, The Omnibus Society
http://www.omnibussoc.org

Martin Underwood wrote to uk.transport.london on Sun, 26 Jun 2005:

I'd be interested to try one of these sequential Tiptronic gearboxes such as
the ones on the Citroen C3 and some VWs. These apparently are manual
gearboxes (with a proper clutch, none of this fluid flywheel that can creep
forward in traffic and which uses more fuel) but controlled automatically or
manually according to preference. A colleague who I used to work with said
his was fantastic. I'd also like try a Variomatic transmission (Daf, Volvo
etc).

Don't think our C3 has one of those.
--
"Mrs Redboots"
http://www.amsmyth.demon.co.uk/
Website updated 23 May 2005

Clive wrote to uk.transport.london on Sun, 26 Jun 2005:

In message 42beabf3$0$41915$ed2619ec@ptn-nntp-
reader03.plus.net, Martin Underwood writes
France certainly is; Germany is more like us.
Although I've not seen it anywhere else, I very much liked the pigs ears
on traffic lights (Little repeaters at eye height), that the French have on
all there lights.

I do, too - it means they don't need repeater lights on the other side
of the junction, as motorists can see what they are looking at even if
they are at the front of the clue. Only thing is, when we were walking
in France, I kept thinking they were pedestrian crossings....
--
"Mrs Redboots"
http://www.amsmyth.demon.co.uk/
Website updated 23 May 2005

Terry Harper wrote to uk.transport.london on Sun, 26 Jun 2005:

Personally I find their street signs much better than we have here, in
that they appear at every road junction, with both streets and the
block numbers on them. Here it is unusual to find a street name at an
intermediate junction.

What threw us, until we got used to it, was the way they put the name of
the side street across the street you were on; until we recognised the
convention, we kept on thinking we were going to have to turn! But it
*is* clearer than ours, certainly, although I'm told it does vary and in
some states is much less clear than others.

The clearest street markings I've come across in Europe were in Poland,
where each house seems obliged to tell you not only its number, but also
the street name.
--
"Mrs Redboots"
http://www.amsmyth.demon.co.uk/
Website updated 23 May 2005

Martin Underwood wrote:
Very interesting. There are some interesting features that we could do with
adopting he I like the idea of the red light as well as the green light
at filter junctions having an arrow.
[...]
If the filter red light was
red, you could tell at a glance whether or not it applied to you.

While in principle a red-filter might seem a good idea, it does
cause some cognitive dissonance (at least for me)[1].

Arrow == "go that way"
Red == "stop"

Stop... go... stop... go... stop... go... err...

By all means have a red filter, but ffs don't make
it an arrow. Perhaps a "--|" rather than "--".


[1] I've driven a little in Australia, where they have them.
The lights went from Green to Green+RedRightArrow and I had
about a second to (a) stop in the fast lane (of three)
or (b) cross three lanes of about-to-move oncoming traffic.
Now my concious brain knows what a red arrow means, but there
wasn't time to even think about checking for the curiousities
of local traffic rules...

#Paul