My driving experience abroad has been accumulated over many years, a curation of memorable motoring incidents characterized in every instance by one or more of the following: willful ignorance, naïveté, pure necessity, and unchecked exuberance.
Driving on the wrong side of the road
I learned how to drive on the right by renting an affordable small car in Scotland – the gearshift on the left, the speed configuration reversed – loading the family – wife and two small children – into the car and, before starting out saying, basically – as I shifted into fifth – okay, let’s see how this goes. The first lesson began with a hair-raising effort to escape the narrow, cobble-stoned labyrinth that is the center of Edinburgh. And I found no relief outside the city, since the majority of rural roads we traveled on were scarcely wide enough for one car, which prompted numerous stressful stand-offs with oncoming motorists and highly-agitated steering onto a soft shoulder so narrow that it didn’t really exist, neither driver looking the other in the eye as we passed.
Driving on the right offers even more amusement when visiting a left-side country. For a time, while living in the UK, I made occasional trips to Belgium and was known to drive my right-side saloon (British for sedan) the right way around roundabouts (clockwise) but, being in left-side Brussels, the wrong way around. Fortunately, I managed to reach my exit before encountering an oncoming car.
If you’re not familiar with the experience, keep in mind that, while driving on the right-side, when you make a left turn, it will be hard to the left into the nearest lane (a mirror of the left-side drive hard right). You don’t want to make this mistake under left-side drive rules. In Brussels (again), I performed this trick on the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, which is really a boulevard, with three lanes of traffic on either side of an expansive grassy median. Again, before I had encountered any oncoming traffic, I managed to drive across the lanes, jump the curb, carve a deep S-shaped tread through the wet grass before steering into the first lane headed in the proper direction, luckily free of traffic, gunning the engine, with a humbled peek into the rear-view mirror to check for witnesses.
If you were able to keep the right-side left-side straight as you skimmed the paragraph above, you’ll probably be fine driving in right-side-drive countries. There is a certain pride in having the ability to adjust between the two within a few minutes. When I traveled frequently for work between the US and the UK, by the time I was through the rental car gate and out on the Heathrow perimeter road, I was fine. Although I still can’t go the right way through a roundabout there without recalling going the wrong way around in Belgium (yes, I did it more than once).
The Autobahn
There really is nothing more satisfying when driving in Europe than to be in a well-powered car motoring down the German Autobahn. It’s a complicated little packet of pleasure I get out of the experience. And it’s not just about the speed.
Okay, it’s the speed. If you have a car that’s built for it, hurtling down a well-engineered motorway at jaw-dropping velocity is pretty awe-inspiring. But there’s a lot more than that going on. First, the fact that you are driving on amazing road surfaces, sometimes – I’m thinking of the long stretch from the Czech border to Nuremburg – with very little traffic. Secondly, that those you do share the road with abide by the rules. This is important and why Autobahn-like driving isn’t remotely possible in the US. We don’t have the rules, and, if we did, the majority of us wouldn’t abide by them. It’s un-American.
Slower drivers (generally speaking) keep to the right, so German drivers are rarely tempted to pass on the right. Unless there is an overabundance of trucks (lorries, LKWs) bringing down the overall average speed, the left lane remains clear for passing. The convention of flashing your headlights as you approach a slower car in the left lane no longer exists, replaced by the flashing left turn indicator, but what’s important is that slower cars generally abide by it and get the hell out of your way (occasional fatheads and point-provers excepted). But it is having this small set of rules and conventions and adhering to them that makes the Autobahn possible. Because of this selfless, law-abiding high-speed gemütlichkeit, aggression on the road is infrequent; exceeding speeds of 200km/hour is not just possible, it’s sensual.
The unfortunate reality of the Autobahn is that less and less of it is actually the Autobahn as we think of it. Instead of endless kilometers of driving limit-free, it is, in fact, throughout more and more of Germany (the populous trafficky parts) only brief stretches of high-speed driving intermingled with long stretches of road with limits. One nasty little aspect of this reality is how often the speed limit occurs without warning, and the propensity of German drivers to slam on the breaks to instantly reduce their speed to the limit. Halving your speed on a dime is violently unpleasant, to say the least. It can do serious mischief to internal organs as well as your relationship with your significant other.
Nevertheless, the Autobahn is there for all of us, and (famously) free to use. It is a miraculous wonder that anything like it can exist when you consider the manifest dysfunctionality of the average human being. Where so many other countries are saddled with universal speedbumps in the form of toll booths or vignettes (the expensive little windshield sticker that allows you to drive on the motorways in places like Austria and Switzerland) or both (Austria charges for use of a few tunnels), not to mention speed limits themselves (in the interest of everyone’s safety), Germany has bequeathed this extensive high-speed extravaganza to all of us free-of-charge. Use it with courtesy and gratitude.
The oddity
I was once asked in a job interview what I found different about driving in Europe versus the US. The formal interview was actually over and we were having lunch. It seemed certain I would get the job and felt pretty relaxed. I answer immediately and truthfully that, without doubt, it was the priorité à droite – priority to the right – in France. Surprisingly, the German who had interviewed me claimed that this existed everywhere, not just in France. But this isn’t the case. In France, what this means is there are some intersections where cars joining traffic from the right have priority to you traveling on the main road. While in the US, for example, these cars would be required to yield until the opportunity became available to enter traffic, in France, you must yield to them. It’s changing now, with more signage to warn you of just such an intersection ahead, but back in the day – this job interview was twenty years ago – you had to know. Driving in France, whether through a major city or the smallest village, became an anxious métier of watchful avoidance.
I’ve seen cars appear from the right like a fired bullet and steer into traffic without the driver checking once, or even blinking. The inevitable globalization brought on by decades of EU-ness has diminished this behavior, but you still see it from time to time (I’m in France now as I write and observed this behavior in the wild on a few occasions).
You do get accustomed to it fairly quickly, especially now that it’s signposted, and now being less frequent perhaps than it was before, with fewer drivers relying on you to follow the rules. But the thing not to forget, which I relearned on this visit, is the havoc you can wreak by being the car expected to enter the roadway like that trusting bullet. I didn’t enter traffic as I should have in a small town one sleepy afternoon, forgetting I had the priority, and watched a French motorist pass at a sickeningly slow pace, not making eye contact but shaking his head, disappointed by the tragedy of my ignorant foreign presence.
Driving in Europe – my take
I read somewhere that Europeans tend to drive more aggressively than Americans (this was written by an American, who, I suspect, had never driven on I-95 outside Washington, D.C. during rush-hour, which is to say, at any time). It depends on how you define aggressive driving, but broadly-speaking I would argue that this is not the case.
Perhaps, if it were possible to grade all drivers, American and European, then compare the numbers, Europeans as a whole might be more aggressive. Lumping unfailingly safety-conscious and courteous Brits together with impatient Mediterranean types, shall we say, could affect the score. But my sense is that, because more Europeans than Americans follow the laws and conventions (Belgians, for example, are the biggest sticklers for keeping to the right on their motorways), they come across to me as less aggressive, safer drivers. These are generalizations, but I did read this outrageous accusation concerning aggressive European drivers somewhere; I didn’t start it.
The other aspect to keep in mind is the number of speed cameras on the roadways. Traveling anywhere in Austria, for example, is fraught with the peril of arriving home to yet another EUR 30 speeding ticket in the letter box – caught going 3 km over the limit with a 5 km tolerance. It’s brutal. But the limits themselves are usually reasonable, and it does reduce the number of absolute idiots on the road.
My preference is always for driving in Europe. I do try to avoid driving in the biggest cities, although I have managed it in some widely-acknowledged nail-biters – Paris, Bologna, Milan, and London (there’s a double roundabout near Heathrow I don’t ever want to see again in life) – and I’ve had some navigational challenges like nothing ever experienced in the US, but, all in all, I’d take a European journey by car any day over an American one – strictly for the driving now, so no flag-waving. Because, if nothing else, there’s always the Autobahn.