article from R & T
Side Glances - The American Driver.
By Peter Egan, Editor-at-Large
December 2005
When our motorcycle came over the rise and around the corner, I laughed out loud for a brief moment, then put my head down on the gas tank in the standard gesture of despair and defeat.
Ahead of us on this beautiful, curving, double-yellow roller coaster of a road along the rugged shores of Quebec were four slow-moving vehicles. They were, in this order: a large motorhome, a cop car and two big motorcycles. The motorcycles were pulling trailers.
I flipped up my face shield and turned to Barb, who was riding behind me. "Unbelievable!" I shouted over my shoulder. "Four of the most difficult-to-pass vehicles on Earth! And all in one group! It's like a bad cartoon!"
Barb patted me on the shoulder, by way of calming consolation. We could be stuck in this little train for many miles, unless we invented some excuse to stop and get off the bike. Maybe it was time to pull over at a scenic overlook. Get out a deck of cards, perhaps, or just finish medical school.
But wait! We didn't have to. This was Canada!
First, the police car turned off at the next little village. He was actually the only cop we'd seen in 2000 miles of riding through Ontario and Quebec.
Then the motorhome put on its turn signal and ran down the shoulder at a wide spot in the road, waving us past.
Without a cop and a motorhome, the motorcycles with trailers were easy to pass. They moved politely over to the right side of our lane and we glided by and waved. I noted that all four of these vehicles had Canadian plates.
These people were watching their mirrors! And they knew exactly what to do.
If this had happened in the U.S., we'd still be out there somewhere, following that same parade. Canadians, like most Europeans, not only have mirrors, but look at them once in a while. An art form almost entirely lost in the States.
Am I making a sweeping generalization here?
Perhaps, but recent personal experience tells me I'm not too far off the mark.
Barb and I just returned this Sunday to our home in Wisconsin, you see, from a 4000-mile motorcycle trip through eastern Canada to the Gaspé Peninsula on the Atlantic coast. We came home diagonally across New England and upstate New York. The last day, we took the Interstate home across Indiana and through Chicago to make time.
And we did make time, of course, until we hit the tollbooths around Chicago. These were backed up for miles in both directions. The last tollbooth in Illinois had southbound traffic stalled for at least five miles into Wisconsin.
Why the people of Illinois put up with this, I have no idea. Why would you pay your own highway department to bottleneck traffic, impede commerce, repel tourism, waste fuel, smog the air and make you late for vacation and work? Do the voting citizens consider this a valuable government service?
The whole highway system around Chicago is a national disgrace, but don't get me started. I might tell you what I really think.
Except for that short stretch of manufactured hell, however, it was a beautiful trip, with very few dull roads. And we rode all day long for 12 days, so we had plenty of time to contemplate the nature of the traffic around us. To compare and contrast, as my freshman History teacher used to say so chillingly in our semester exams.
So, herewith, a few observations:
In Canada, generally, the speed limits seem artificially low ? typically, 90 km/h (close to our 55 mph) out on the open road ? but everyone drives fast. Traffic on divided highways moves along at 80-90 mph, and hardly anyone with a fully functional vehicle is traveling at less than 70 mph on a two-lane road, unless it's very curvy or in a built-up area.
Yet these same "speeders" almost always slow down to a reasonable, safe speed in towns and villages. In other words, they drive at safe and prudent speeds for the conditions around them. When speed is harmless, they go fast; when it's risky, they slow down. They watch their mirrors, and on multiple-lane roads stay right except to pass. There's a maturity of judgment here ? a sense of swiftness and dispatch without aggression ? that seems totally at odds with the American driving experience. And yet there don't seem to be any cops ? anywhere ? to enforce this attitude. It's kind of like...Heaven.
Then you cross back into the U.S. and things change. The traffic gets slower, plodding drivers become more truculent (or maybe even recalcitrant), everyone drives in the left lane on the Interstate, and every other small town seems to have a cop running a radar trap. Suddenly, highway patrol cars appear in the flow of traffic.
To go from Canada (or England, France, Germany or Italy) into the U.S. is to feel exactly as if you've been demoted from adulthood and sent back to first grade, complete with hall monitors, teachers, lunch lines and slow-to-mature classmates who are still struggling with coat zippers and shoelace technology.
As an adult American driver, you feel you've been placed in a school desk adjusted too low for your knees.
Why is this?
There are, I believe, three basic forces at work here: Obliviousness, Sloth and Self-Righteousness. Yes, the Three Deadly Traffic Sins. The problem is, it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins.
For instance, you are following a motorhome on a winding road and the driver, who is averaging about 37 mph, has 43 cars backed up behind him, yet never uses a pull-out. Does this driver simply not see the other cars because he never checks the mirrors, or does he think 37 mph is plenty fast enough for anyone? Or is he simply worn out with the effort of pulling over every five miles on a 2000-mile journey around the U.S.? Maybe he's a kind of vampire in reverse, who sees only his own image in the mirror. Everything else is invisible.
Hard to tell, but in most parts of the civilized world (such as Canada) this guy can usually be counted on to pull over and make passing room at the first reasonable opportunity.
Not so in the U.S., where you might follow this driver in a long parade all the way from Colorado Springs to Cripple Creek, or until his refrigerator runs out of propane.
Interstates raise similar questions. When a car paces itself with a slow-moving semi (as we saw at least a dozen times on our recent vacation) and refuses to pass, does the driver not see all those cars in the mirror? Or do we have a self-appointed amateur cop on our hands, who thinks it's immoral to go faster than 64 mph?
My guess is the driver is simply too lazy to pass the truck, disengage cruise control or put on a turn signal and move over. This would require physical motion, as well as a small amount of judgment. It's just too much work. Besides, in the right lane you have to deal with merging traffic. Better to stay in the left lane all day, and let people sweep around on the right. If they can.
This sort of lethargy has led to an interesting condition on American I-roads: Our Interstates have now reversed themselves.
Yes, the right lane has become the fast lane, while traffic moves in a solid, slow train on the left. Barb and I breezed almost all the way across Indiana in the right lane of I-80/90, passing bumper-to-bumper traffic on our left. Occasionally we had to merge left and go around a slow car, only to observe a full mile or two of absolutely empty right lane. But no one would move over, probably for fear of having to make a passing decision sometime in the future. Or being cut off and losing a place to someone else. It's amazing. On a busy highway, nearly half the pavement goes unused.
I don't know what you do to change this. I suggested in a column a few years ago that we needed more emphasis on lane discipline in our high school driver's education courses. Students could be asked to repeat, at least three times a day, "Stay right except to pass," and that phrase could be emblazoned over the classroom door. I got several letters informing me that I was revealing my old age. "There are no driver's ed courses in most high schools any more," I was told. "It's a thing of the past."
That's too bad. How do you disseminate a cultural idea when there's no mechanism to do so?
Private driver's schools? Peer pressure? Tradition? I don't know. Maybe these are all questions of natural courtesy that can't be taught.
My old friend and former R&T colleague Rich Homan used to say there were two kinds of people in the world, those who notice things and those who don't. (I seem to remember he ascribed this original observation to Lord Buckley, but I'm not sure). People who notice things, Rich said, will look to see if someone else is following them through a door and hold it open. Those who don't will let it swing shut in your face.
Maybe we need a national windshield sticker, one that reads backward, like an ambulance sign, so it can be read in the rearview mirror.
It would simply say, "notice things." Just like that, in small letters. No caps.
Type size is immaterial, of course, as our target audience won't see it anyway.
cliffs:
1. canuck drivers >>> us drivers
2. other country drivers >>> us drivers
3. us drivers SUCK!!
Side Glances - The American Driver.
By Peter Egan, Editor-at-Large
December 2005
When our motorcycle came over the rise and around the corner, I laughed out loud for a brief moment, then put my head down on the gas tank in the standard gesture of despair and defeat.
Ahead of us on this beautiful, curving, double-yellow roller coaster of a road along the rugged shores of Quebec were four slow-moving vehicles. They were, in this order: a large motorhome, a cop car and two big motorcycles. The motorcycles were pulling trailers.
I flipped up my face shield and turned to Barb, who was riding behind me. "Unbelievable!" I shouted over my shoulder. "Four of the most difficult-to-pass vehicles on Earth! And all in one group! It's like a bad cartoon!"
Barb patted me on the shoulder, by way of calming consolation. We could be stuck in this little train for many miles, unless we invented some excuse to stop and get off the bike. Maybe it was time to pull over at a scenic overlook. Get out a deck of cards, perhaps, or just finish medical school.
But wait! We didn't have to. This was Canada!
First, the police car turned off at the next little village. He was actually the only cop we'd seen in 2000 miles of riding through Ontario and Quebec.
Then the motorhome put on its turn signal and ran down the shoulder at a wide spot in the road, waving us past.
Without a cop and a motorhome, the motorcycles with trailers were easy to pass. They moved politely over to the right side of our lane and we glided by and waved. I noted that all four of these vehicles had Canadian plates.
These people were watching their mirrors! And they knew exactly what to do.
If this had happened in the U.S., we'd still be out there somewhere, following that same parade. Canadians, like most Europeans, not only have mirrors, but look at them once in a while. An art form almost entirely lost in the States.
Am I making a sweeping generalization here?
Perhaps, but recent personal experience tells me I'm not too far off the mark.
Barb and I just returned this Sunday to our home in Wisconsin, you see, from a 4000-mile motorcycle trip through eastern Canada to the Gaspé Peninsula on the Atlantic coast. We came home diagonally across New England and upstate New York. The last day, we took the Interstate home across Indiana and through Chicago to make time.
And we did make time, of course, until we hit the tollbooths around Chicago. These were backed up for miles in both directions. The last tollbooth in Illinois had southbound traffic stalled for at least five miles into Wisconsin.
Why the people of Illinois put up with this, I have no idea. Why would you pay your own highway department to bottleneck traffic, impede commerce, repel tourism, waste fuel, smog the air and make you late for vacation and work? Do the voting citizens consider this a valuable government service?
The whole highway system around Chicago is a national disgrace, but don't get me started. I might tell you what I really think.
Except for that short stretch of manufactured hell, however, it was a beautiful trip, with very few dull roads. And we rode all day long for 12 days, so we had plenty of time to contemplate the nature of the traffic around us. To compare and contrast, as my freshman History teacher used to say so chillingly in our semester exams.
So, herewith, a few observations:
In Canada, generally, the speed limits seem artificially low ? typically, 90 km/h (close to our 55 mph) out on the open road ? but everyone drives fast. Traffic on divided highways moves along at 80-90 mph, and hardly anyone with a fully functional vehicle is traveling at less than 70 mph on a two-lane road, unless it's very curvy or in a built-up area.
Yet these same "speeders" almost always slow down to a reasonable, safe speed in towns and villages. In other words, they drive at safe and prudent speeds for the conditions around them. When speed is harmless, they go fast; when it's risky, they slow down. They watch their mirrors, and on multiple-lane roads stay right except to pass. There's a maturity of judgment here ? a sense of swiftness and dispatch without aggression ? that seems totally at odds with the American driving experience. And yet there don't seem to be any cops ? anywhere ? to enforce this attitude. It's kind of like...Heaven.
Then you cross back into the U.S. and things change. The traffic gets slower, plodding drivers become more truculent (or maybe even recalcitrant), everyone drives in the left lane on the Interstate, and every other small town seems to have a cop running a radar trap. Suddenly, highway patrol cars appear in the flow of traffic.
To go from Canada (or England, France, Germany or Italy) into the U.S. is to feel exactly as if you've been demoted from adulthood and sent back to first grade, complete with hall monitors, teachers, lunch lines and slow-to-mature classmates who are still struggling with coat zippers and shoelace technology.
As an adult American driver, you feel you've been placed in a school desk adjusted too low for your knees.
Why is this?
There are, I believe, three basic forces at work here: Obliviousness, Sloth and Self-Righteousness. Yes, the Three Deadly Traffic Sins. The problem is, it's hard to know where one ends and the other begins.
For instance, you are following a motorhome on a winding road and the driver, who is averaging about 37 mph, has 43 cars backed up behind him, yet never uses a pull-out. Does this driver simply not see the other cars because he never checks the mirrors, or does he think 37 mph is plenty fast enough for anyone? Or is he simply worn out with the effort of pulling over every five miles on a 2000-mile journey around the U.S.? Maybe he's a kind of vampire in reverse, who sees only his own image in the mirror. Everything else is invisible.
Hard to tell, but in most parts of the civilized world (such as Canada) this guy can usually be counted on to pull over and make passing room at the first reasonable opportunity.
Not so in the U.S., where you might follow this driver in a long parade all the way from Colorado Springs to Cripple Creek, or until his refrigerator runs out of propane.
Interstates raise similar questions. When a car paces itself with a slow-moving semi (as we saw at least a dozen times on our recent vacation) and refuses to pass, does the driver not see all those cars in the mirror? Or do we have a self-appointed amateur cop on our hands, who thinks it's immoral to go faster than 64 mph?
My guess is the driver is simply too lazy to pass the truck, disengage cruise control or put on a turn signal and move over. This would require physical motion, as well as a small amount of judgment. It's just too much work. Besides, in the right lane you have to deal with merging traffic. Better to stay in the left lane all day, and let people sweep around on the right. If they can.
This sort of lethargy has led to an interesting condition on American I-roads: Our Interstates have now reversed themselves.
Yes, the right lane has become the fast lane, while traffic moves in a solid, slow train on the left. Barb and I breezed almost all the way across Indiana in the right lane of I-80/90, passing bumper-to-bumper traffic on our left. Occasionally we had to merge left and go around a slow car, only to observe a full mile or two of absolutely empty right lane. But no one would move over, probably for fear of having to make a passing decision sometime in the future. Or being cut off and losing a place to someone else. It's amazing. On a busy highway, nearly half the pavement goes unused.
I don't know what you do to change this. I suggested in a column a few years ago that we needed more emphasis on lane discipline in our high school driver's education courses. Students could be asked to repeat, at least three times a day, "Stay right except to pass," and that phrase could be emblazoned over the classroom door. I got several letters informing me that I was revealing my old age. "There are no driver's ed courses in most high schools any more," I was told. "It's a thing of the past."
That's too bad. How do you disseminate a cultural idea when there's no mechanism to do so?
Private driver's schools? Peer pressure? Tradition? I don't know. Maybe these are all questions of natural courtesy that can't be taught.
My old friend and former R&T colleague Rich Homan used to say there were two kinds of people in the world, those who notice things and those who don't. (I seem to remember he ascribed this original observation to Lord Buckley, but I'm not sure). People who notice things, Rich said, will look to see if someone else is following them through a door and hold it open. Those who don't will let it swing shut in your face.
Maybe we need a national windshield sticker, one that reads backward, like an ambulance sign, so it can be read in the rearview mirror.
It would simply say, "notice things." Just like that, in small letters. No caps.
Type size is immaterial, of course, as our target audience won't see it anyway.
cliffs:
1. canuck drivers >>> us drivers
2. other country drivers >>> us drivers
3. us drivers SUCK!!
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