European driving

Since first arriving in Germany back at the beginning of September, I have driven at least 10,000 miles in Europe. Mostly around Germany, also to Luxembourg, Switzerland, France, Belgium, Netherlands and Denmark. And I have more places to go to.

I've mentioned a few things already about driving out here... but I'll carry on.

I reckon that driving in different countries makes travelling a lot more interesting and can be fun. You get to see more places than you would by public transport. You’re able to go whenever and wherever you want (provided there’s a road), but even so, you can just park up nearby and walk… or cycle in one case! There aren’t any delays with cars, unless you can’t start it. But it’s much more flexible than a train. And it works out cheaper, too.

However, driving in Europe isn’t the same as driving back home. For a start, we have to drive on the wrong side of the road out here… or for non-British people; it’s on the right side of the road. People drive left-hand drive cars, too… but I haven’t driven one of those yet.

But the layout and signposting is similar to those back home. After some Vienna Act a few years ago… 1968, I think… all European countries, or most, have adopted a signposting system, which can be easily recognised by every European driver. 

There are a couple of differences, and also signs that aren’t seen in Britain. You don’t see the ‘Araf/Slow’ road paint here, but you see signs that tell you that you just exited a tunnel. There are also signs in a shape of a diamond/rhombus, it’s yellow with a white border. This means that it’s your right of way… and drivers at junctions must wait. However, if there’s a black line through this sign, it means you haven’t got right of way any more. So you have to be extra careful in urban areas with these signs around, in case you’re travelling along at 50km/h (or 32mph), and suddenly you have to slam on the brakes because someone just pulled out of a parking space on the side of the road. How stupid.

Roundabouts are around here, but not as much as back home. But the system is the same… but opposite directions. You approach a roundabout, and give way to traffic from the right (or already on the roundabout). However, in France, this rule has recently changed, you had to give way to cars entering the roundabout… but no more. Apparently, this rule may stand in the more rural areas, but I’m yet to experience that.

And since there aren’t many roundabouts, there are a lot of cloverleaves. Back home, there are so few examples of these that some people don’t even know what they are. What they are? Stupid and dangerous.

Basically, picture the scene. You’re driving along at about 70-80 miles per hour on the Autobahn, and approaching a junction. You get onto the slip road and start to slow down. You approach the bend, maybe between 30-40mph, which people normally do back home when they exit the motorway. But, even at 30mph, it’s too fast to go around these bends. And they aren’t even bends, they’re nearly circles. Tight circles. On some of them, I had to slow down to about 20mph to get around them. Luckily some of them are wide enough in case you have trouble keeping ‘straight’. Otherwise, the crash barriers will come into use.

As the German population strives for perfection, or so I’ve heard, the Autobahn network must always be of a high standard. So a lot of maintenance work is being done all over Germany to keep the roads up to standard. This means a stupid amount of road works, widening the carriageways, maintaining bridges, filling in potholes, and so on. And the lanes through these road works become really narrow, which makes it difficult to overtake a lorry that keeps straddling lanes, especially as some lanes narrow down to a width of about 2 metres. This is not fun during a rainy night, as it’s really difficult even to see the lines when dry! And the lack of any cat’s eyes doesn’t help. I really don’t know why they aren’t introduced around here.

And in road works, the lanes change position, and they use these yellow stripes. And these things sometimes don’t stay on the roads and peel off, so you get small piles of yellow stuff on the side of the roads, or they’ve been warped and in weird shapes and not in straight lines, unless the guy who did them had a bit of a wild night down the local beforehand.

And people were complaining about the road works around Cardiff on the M4? They’d love this place. Especially the queues and congestion they cause. Wouldn’t you like to be at the back end of a 10km Stau?