It was the B roads, not the left side of the road, that caused a problem.

When people think of driving in UK, undoubtedly the first thing they think about is driving on the left side of the road and right side of the car – and the second thing they think of is probably roundabouts. The B roads would probably rank somewhere around “total non issue” and “what’s a B-road?”.

Now that my 2-week sorta-road trip around England and Scotland is done, let’s record what turned out to be the most surprising parts of driving in the UK, from the most annoying (dangerous?) to the just-plain-odd.

B Roads

Imagine a 15-foot-wide asphalt road with no shoulder, exclusively blind curves and crests, no markings, and a hillside or stone wall immediately where the asphalt ends. In the US, I’d tell you it’s a rare one-lane road with a safe speed of probably 25 mph. In the UK, it’s a common B road with two-way traffic and a speed limit of 60. It’s hard to describe the experience as anything other than white-knuckle.

I did rub my car alongside shrubs trying to squeeze enough space for oncoming traffic at least once (no damage though!). The slightest amount of target fixation would’ve meant a serious head-on accident – the kind of head-on (“offset”) the IIHS says is most likely to cause “intrusion into the occupant compartment is more likely”. How pleasant!

I drove many of these in England and Scotland, and the ones in southermost England near Dover were by far the worst I experienced. The ones in north England were wider and an awesome experience, and with the smooth asphalt, mild climates, twisties, and high speed limits, this is clearly a great place to own a true sports car. Is it any wonder the greatest car show of all time originated in the UK?

Roundabouts

It’s not an exaggeration – roundabouts are as widely-used in the UK as what I think of as “normal” intersections are in the US. The main shapes and sizes are here:

1. Single-lane with a raised center. These were the most common, used at all kinds of junctions between minor or medium roads.
2. Single-lane with a painted center. These were used in cramped quarters along the main street in tiny towns.
3. Dual- or triple-lane. Major onramps and offramps used these, sometimes one on either side of the highway and other times in a figure-8 where you couldn’t go fully around either circle. It was helpful they added tons of signs beside and painted on the road about the final destination of each lane, so you knew where you’d end up.
4. Triple-lane light-controlled. Typically you yield to traffic in the circle, but at these busy multi-lane roundabouts the traffic with the green light has the right to enter the circle.

The roundabouts got easier when I realized some of the “tricks”:

• You yield to traffic already in the circle, no matter what lane they’re in. That’s so you don’t slam into them if they decide to exit at the stop immediately on your left just as you merge in!
• Just like an intersection, particular lanes in an intersection go particular places, and if you end up in the wrong lane entering the roundabout, you’ll naturally end up in the wrong place. Generally the leftmost entry lane is “I’m turning left”, middle is “I’m going straight”, and rightmost is “I’m taking the rightmost exit”. If you’re in that right lane, turning right, you’ll turn on your right blinker even as you enter the roundabout to the left!
• Unlike an intersection, you can change your mind while in the roundabout, and that’s where a lot of the danger comes from. Don’t do it!

But nothing could get me over the key problem with the painted-on roundabout. Let’s say I’m traveling on the two-way main road, and a smaller road on my left terminates at the main road forming a T intersection. There’s oncoming traffic attempting to turn right – across my lane of travel – onto that road.

If it’s a “normal intersection”, that traffic yields to me. If it’s a painted-on roundabout, I yield to them. The only difference about whether someone gets T-boned is a white circle painted on the road? No thanks! (These roundabouts are compressed into small streets not big enough for a real roundabout, so there weren’t any other cues I noticed.)

Overall, I’m more comfortable with roundabouts now, and I see why they’re more efficient – they clearly were in the UK. But it’s not something you just drop on hundreds of millions of drivers, or on an unsuspecting community. Yikes!

Driving on the ‘wrong’ side

As it turned out, this wasn’t so bad. Once you’re on the road, you’re rarely alone out there, and it’s easy to not turn into visible oncoming traffic. I never accidentally went onto the wrong side of the road on a “real road”.

I say “real road” because there were a handful of times, while exiting a rural parking lot onto a main road, I found myself on the right side of the road to turn right – when I should’ve been on the left side pointing right. But, really, I was blocking traffic trying to turn into the parking lot.

But there were zero issues otherwise.

Drivers were more collaborative and safer

The safety margins in UK roads were much, much lower than in the US. Almost universally they used more complex traffic controls – yields (“give way”) not stop signs, roundabouts not lighted intersections, no shoulders, no lane markings, one-way roads with passing pullouts, super-short merge lanes – and worse space-vs.-speed tradeoffs – two-way traffic on one-way-sized roads and higher speed limits (60mph on B roads, 30mph downtown).

As a result, drivers are more communicative, more collaborative, and safer.

For example, they don’t speed! Whereas the speed limit in the US is a minimum, it’s truly a maximum in the UK. On B roads posted at 60mph, typical speeds ranged from 25 to 50 or so. On motorways posted at 70mph I never saw persistent speeding, and most drivers were doing 65. My average speed in the US might’ve been 70 for a road trip, but in the UK I averaged – I think – 35 or 40 mph.

For another, they communicate with lights and hand signals. People take turns, and when it’s someone else’s turn, they flash their headlights. In the US, I don’t play dumbass games yielding right-of-way to the wrong car, but in the UK, with all their one-way roads (whether due to width or parked cars) the system would break without this, so I participated. In one case, I moved over to let someone merge on the highway and he said “thanks” by flashing his lights. Awesome!

On the freeways, too, they are incredibly rigid about passing only on the right, creating very clearly-differentiated slow lanes and fast lanes. In the US, both moving left and right are dangerous lane changes, but in the UK moving left is nearly always safe, because (A) you are moving left if and only if you completed a pass, and (B) there’s never another vehicle trying to pass you or the car you just passed on the left. It made half my lane changes 100% safe!

And they plan ahead. In the US, I often move out of the rightmost lane with an onramp coming up, and then move back over when it’s over – effectively I create a longer merge lane. Here, I’m one of the only ones who does that, but in the UK, it was commonplace.

Finally, there’s simply no room for distraction. The margin of safety is so obviously lower that you don’t even contemplate texting, picking up your phone, or – to be honest – even looking down at the map screen. I found drivers completely engaged.

My suspicion is the UK sees more collisions per mile driven than the US due to the overall less-safe road features – but since they drive less overall, and slower at that, probably fewer fatal accidents per capita and per mile driven. Some quick Google searching confirms the former, at least.

Little things

There were a handful of things I had to figure out, which weren’t necessarily dangerous or unexpected.

• The cars were smaller – There were Audi A1s, Audi Q2s, and BMW 1-series cars. Every manufacturer (Suzuki, Ford, Nissan, etc.) had a little city hatchback. None of those here! An A3 was practically a full-size car.
• The trucks were smaller. I saw probably fewer than 20 pickups the entire time, mostly light trucks (e.g., Tacomas, Frontiers, not Super Duties). The heavy trucks were shorter and narrower than American semis too, and I saw some with rear-wheel and dual-front-wheel steering to navigate the city streets better.
• Backup cameras aren’t mandatory on new cars. Honestly, this just feels like a bad decision.
• They are totally willing to block an entire lane of traffic in the inner city for parking, turning it into a one-way street.
• You pay for gas indoors after pumping it (so slow!) and there’s no auto-hold on the pump (admittedly I’ve had this cause a major gas spill myself, so I don’t blame them at all).
• There were virtually no cops patrolling the roads. Mostly they used speed cameras that measured average speed between two points, and set generous speed limits. (E.g., 70 mph on what I’d call an arterial with roundabouts every half-mile or so, not 45!) And as a result … no speeding.
• Parking lots were insanely tight. I’d very commonly do a three- or five-point turn getting into or out of a parking space.

Conclusion

Would I drive there again? Yes!

I’m glad I did – perhaps I can expand my road-tripping to the Alps, or France, or Austria, instead of just the US. I’m more for the countryside, so the city-hopping via train across Europe never really appealed to me. This was just the boost of confidence to take on some more international driving!

I’ll still steer well clear of India, though …

But if someone tells me next time that driving on the wrong side is just so intimidating, I’ll be sure to let them know it’s a non-issue. The real problem is the B-roads!