"Mrs Redboots" wrote in message
...
Martin Underwood wrote to uk.transport.london on Sat, 25 Jun 2005:

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"!!!

They don't seem to be very good at doing road maps - we used that same
one, I think, when we visited Mass. some years ago now.

Yes, it assumes that you instinctively know which township or which district
of a big city (eg Boston) you are currently in - because each has its own
separate index of street names (as opposed to a Massachussets-wide or even
Boston-wide index of streets). I got lost on my way back to Logan airport
somewhere in the Boston suburbs. With a decent map it would have been dead
easy to look up a street name and locate myself. But when you've got to work
out which suburb ("town") you're in to know which index to look in, it makes
life very difficult. The idea of having maps that didn't tile together on
consecutive pages in the book and which were all at different scales was the
final straw: it was so bad that it was hilarious. When I mentioned it to an
American he seemed mystified and impressed that I had the courage to venture
off the multi-lane highways!

The thing I noticed on our visit to Kansas was that distances were
measured in fractions of a mile, rather than yards - where we would say
there was an exit in (say) 200 yards, they'd put "3/8 mile".

Alternatively they measure smaller distances in feet rather than yards.
Seeing a temporary road works sign that says "Road works - 3000 feet ahead"
makes you think "Er, what? Oh, 1000 yards. Right, OK." Just a case of what
you're used to. But using non-decimal fractions of a mile is just plain
stupid, given that car mileometers are calibrated in tenths of a mile - much
better to say "0.4 mile" or "4/10 mile" rather than "3/8 mile". Mind you,
our signs sometimes give distances as 1/2 or 1/4 mile - but I imagine more
people know what these are as tenths of a mile than could work out 3/8 mile
in an instant.

The other thing that caught me out is that on minor roads there's sometimes
no stop or give-way line where a minor road meets a major road - very tricky
to work out where to stop, especially where the junction is on a bend.
However zebra crossings have dirty-great white lines across the road:
several times I instinctively slammed on the brakes to stop at a zebra
crossing, even when there was no-one crossing, thinking I was meeting a
major road - it's one thing knowing that you're wrong; it's another thing
remembering it in the heat of the moment. And it felt wrong not having a
red-and-amber "get ready to go, put the car in gear/drive, take the
handbrake off" phase to traffic lights, but I gather a lot of Europe is like
that.

I must admit, after driving in America and having to keep down to fairly low
speed limits on single-carriageway roads (35 where we'd probably have had 50
or 60), it was nice to get off the train from Gatwick into my own car and
drive on the right side of the road on country lanes where I was able to
drive at a reasonable speed, or on a dual-carriageway where I wouldn't have
to contend with someone overtaking me on my nearside or going dead-level
with me mile after mile, and in a car that didn't change down automatically
into second gear every time I dropped below 30 or negotiated a roundabout!
Before I went, I was apprehensive of how I'd adjust to driving on the other
side of the road, but I had no problems with that. And I think I coped with
roundabouts like the one going onto Cape Cod a damn-sight better than most
Americans who very rarely get to see one and were flummoxed to encounter one
all of a sudden. I wouldn't like to have to drive a RHD car on the right (or
an LHD car on the left) though: I like to be able to see in my door mirror
what's overtaking me or see what's coming towards me when I want to
overtake.