The GCW Tour, A Few Bits of the UK and Ireland: Driving in England

So.

Driving in England.

How does one put this?

After approximately twenty hours behind the wheel the best I can come up with is, it makes my soul hurt.

I'll try to explain...

Although it doesn't say it on my business card, I am basically an efficiency expert. I take processes, find the wasteful steps, and remove them. I've been doing that for a couple of decades now, and it's become second nature. And I'm far from alone. There are scads of people whose job it is is to find and remove inefficiencies from manufacturing systems, health care systems, administrative systems, you name it. Industries, and armies of consultants, are devoted to it.

And I will bet most anything that not a single one of those people has ever been consulted by the powers that be in England responsible for the country's transportation infrastructure.

In short, this is a system that clearly was -- must've been -- intentionally designed not to work. The basic problem is that every time two or more vehicles come into the same approximate space it's a negotiation. This, I'm sure, was fabulous when Reginald and Tuppence were the only two people in the village who owned their own carriages, and so when they both happened on the bridge at the same time they could have a chat about all that had happened since they'd last seen each other, and, oh, by the way, who was going to cross first?, but t's not so great when the country is swelling, nearly everyone over the age of sixteen has a car, and they all want to go somewhere in their cars.

What do I mean by "negotiation"? Let me walk you through it. 

Let's take the example of your basic road running past a town which has a point of interest where people will occasionally want to stop and see. Where I come from, the road would basically look something like this...

You've got a nice, straight bit of black top with sight lines that don't quit. There's a shoulder (pink) on each side that's at least three-quarters the width of a vehicle, so in emergencies you can mostly get out of the way. Worst case, if they slowed down, two cars passing a third on the shoulder would be fine. But you don't want to have to do that all the time, so there's some off street parking to get stationary vehicles out of the way.

Most cities would post this as a 30 mph road, but in reality it's probably a 45 mph. Drivers doing 45 mph in either direction could be reasonably expected to deal with any surprises.

OK, now let's move our road to England. The first thing, obviously, is we need to switch to left-side driving.

It's a reasonable enough choice (though more on that later), and, truthfully, has no impact on the speed of our road. It's still a 45 mph road (and, oddly enough, England does use miles per hour, not kilometers per hour, as their preferred measure of speed). 

But we're not going to stop there. This is England. So the next thing we're going to do is get rid of the shoulders. I'm not sure why it is -- and the excuses like "the towns are old and the streets were built for horse carts" don't really hold water when you're essentially driving through a field in the middle of nowhere and there's still no shoulder to the road -- but the English do not believe in shoulders.

So let's drop 5 mph off our road speed, since now we have to be a lot more worried about coming across a car unexpectedly stopped (or a truck picking up cones), since there isn't room for them to get even partially out of the way and/or for three vehicles to span the road at the same time. So now our road is a 40 mph road.

Next up, curves. It would seem, based on what I've seen anyway, that to be a civil engineer in England you must first throw away any straightedge you might've been given at any point in your life. Roads here don't travel in staight lines. They gently sweep across the landscape in meandering curves which, admittedly, are quite picturesque, but trash the sight lines drivers depend on. 

So drop another 10 mph from you speed, because it's really hard to see around curves.

But the curves aren't the end of it. Next we need to plant gigantic hedgerows on both sides of the road to block even the remotest of sight lines.

Lose another 5 mph.

But we're still not done. Let's add a nice rock wall to the bottom of the hedgerow, just to up the anxiety level about the potential damage to the car should it become necessary to swerve to avoid anything. 

So there goes another 10 mph. So where are we? 40 minus 5 minus 10. England has taken our 45 mph road and turned it into a 25 mph road.

But wait. Don't order yet. Now comes the pièce de résistance (the English love it when you use French): We lose the car park. I do not lie. I've driven this road multiple times in just the few days I've been here. So, yes, we take our crappy 25 mph road, and now we park cars along the left hand lane like so...

So what happens to the speed of the road? Well, it sort of depends. I think we can drop another 5 mph off the top, well, just because. Then you've got the driver on the right, let's call her Tuppence. Happily for Tuppence, the parked cars aren't blocking her lane so she should be able to just cruise along at 20 mph, except she's got opposing cars randomly leapfrogging the parked cars and jackrabbiting through her lane. Also, she might occasionally have a sign telling her to give way to the opposing traffic, so I'm going to knock 10 mph off her lane speed. So the final natural speed limit for that side of the road is 10 mph.

And Reginald, the poor guy driving up the left hand lane? Reginald, quite frankly, is screwed. He's either stopped behind the parked cars searching up the road for an open gap he can use to leapfrog the parked cars, leapfrogging the parked cars, or reacting to confusing signals from Tuppence who's trying to indicate that he should go (since he can't see that she has a sign telling her to yield in this particular case) -- and THAT is what I mean by every vehicular interaction having to be a negotiation -- so we're going to call the natural speed of Reginald's side of the street zero, with the occasional flurry to five.

So our 45 mph road, after being transported to England, is now, roughly, a 3 mph road.

And it's horrible.

Now some of your reading this will say I've stacked the deck. That I've picked the worst possible examples to make my case.

Trust me. I haven't. The boys and I went to Stonehenge (more on that later), and there we were given a snazzy little map of other nearby English Heritage sites we might enjoy. And indeed, there were a couple of castles mentioned so we decided to make the detour. 

We had the little map. 

We had my GPS. 

So off we went. 

We eventually reach the point where Nephew the Elder, serving as navigator, says, "Turn left."

I stop the car. I look at him. "You're kidding."

"No, the GPS says to turn left. Turn left."

"There's no way."

"That's what it says."

"Have you looked at that 'road'? That's not a road. That's a cow path."

Assume the width of a standard car. Add, maybe, a foot. Again, mark each side with a rock wall. Add these towering plants growing out of the road from the foot of one wall all the way across to the foot of the other. Assume cars have been driving on it, so the plants are high on the sides, short in the middle, and there are wheel-width shiny strips running down the road where the asphalt still shows.

"That's the road to the English Heritage site?"

"Yup."

"What if we come across someone leaving the castle?"

"Don't know."

"You're sure that's the road?"

"Yup."

And he was right. It was the road to the castle.

So, no, I have not stacked the deck in my above conversation of England's completely lacking transportation infrastructure.

What was that you said? Roundabouts?

Oh, yeah, roundabouts. You'll hear a lot about how great roundabouts are because they keep the traffic moving in all directions as the cars sort themselves out in the roundabout (i.e., negotiate their way through). That might've been true fifty years ago when there were only two or three roads feeding the roundabout and only a dozen or so cars a minute passing through it. But on this trip we've driven through roundabouts with six and seven roads feeding them, and what must be hundreds of cars a minute passing through them, and trust me when I say they do not keep the traffic moving. More and more frequently, England's not even trying. Traffic signals have been plastered all around the roundabout controlling the flow of cars into it. So now it's just a big confusion blob in the way of my lighted intersection.

Can't say I'm impressed with roundabouts.

I'd actually be interested to see a study of the impact of transportation issues on the GDP of a country. It would be complicated -- how do you measure for the loss due to traffic jams versus the gains due to an operational subway system versus versus blah blah blah blah blah? -- but there must be someway to measure the impact of lost time and productivity due to transportation failures.

Just guessing, but I'm not sure England would score very well in such a report. Ah well. Too each their own.

Speaking of which, driving on the left. Again, I don't think it really matters much in England, as there are too many other issues at play, but there are three aspects to this I wonder about. Specifically...

There seemed to be a lot more concern in New Zealand about tourists and driving on the left. A big open country, with few drivers and wide open roads, there were lots of tales in New Zealand about cops having to scrape people off the road after a tourist plowed into oncoming traffic at speed. With just 4.4M citizens, and some 3.2M visitors a year, approximately two-thirds of which are used to driving on the opposite side, you'd think they'd want to play the odds and switch. I know I would (but I'm an efficiency guy).

Why do the car makers put up with it? Take my Roadster. It was manufactured in Britain, but for distribution in America, so it came with a left-hand drive. Which means Mini has to over-engineer the car so that it can accommodate putting the driver on either side. The company has to design, manufacture and maintain significantly more parts, since things like dashboards and what not can't just be inverted. You'd have to have a right-hand version and a left-hand version. And they've got to either maintain completely separate manufacturing facilities for each version, or they've got to periodically switch over their assembly lines to make the car's mirror image. This cannot be cheap. It would be interesting to see how the numbers line up in the argument to either build for the world (i.e., both left- and right-hand drive) or just pick one side of the world and let the other buy someone else's cars.

Finally, deaths of Harry Potter watching Tesla enthusiasts notwithstanding, autonomous vehicles are coming. I'm no AI programmer, but I would assume the software that goes into those vehicles has some basic guidelines -- guidelines based on shared driving principles -- programmed into it. How much more complicated do we make it by requiring left-hand driving autonomous vehicles and right-hand driving autonomous vehicles? I won't be around to see it, but it would be interesting to see how that all plays out.

Ok. I'm done. Back to pretty pictures...