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

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.

France certainly is; Germany is more like us. Not sure about any other
European countries, we were only on the motorways in Belgium last
holidays, and I don't think I noticed what the situation was in
Switzerland.

I think Germany has no red-and-amber phase - I think I remember noticing.

The one thing that I remember reading about the Netherlands is that the rule
of priority on roundabouts is the reverse of ours: instead of traffic
waiting to join the roundabout having to give way to traffic already on the
roundabout that's coming from their left, its the other way round: traffic
on the roundabout has to give way to traffic waiting to join - which
frequently causes total gridlock! The EU apparently once tried to get the UK
to adopt this practice but were told where to go ;-)

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.

One doesn't, I understand. I don't yet drive, but I'm told by those who
do that this is invariably far less difficult than anticipated.

I think being on the opposite side of the car (the correct side for road)
helps a great deal. And at least in an automatic I didn't have the added
distraction of having to change gear frequently and remembering that the
layout of the gears is one of the things that's *not* a mirror image. Only
occasionally did I have to remember at junctions not to pull out
instinctively onto the wrong side of the road I was joining.

One thing I did notice driving and walking through small towns was how much
more willing American drivers were to give way to cars pulling out from side
roads or to pedestrians wanting to cross the road. When I was on foot,
several cars stopped simply because I'd turned to face the opposite side of
the road to admire a building! Even in the centre of Boston, cars were
willing to give way to pedestrians who weren't on "crosswalks" (also signed
as "PED XING" which had me puzzled till I worked out what it was an
abbreviation for!) or to drivers on side roads. However I also noticed that
pedestrians never seemed to assume that they had a divine right to cross a
side road that a car was waiting to turn into - maybe the rules of who has
priority over whom are more sensible over there.