Having decided to return to Poland by road with David we had quite an interesting experience of motorways across Europe – France, Germany, Czech and Poland. And of course now I have some experience of driving in Poland and the UK. Few observations came to me and I decided to record them here.
There seems to be two schools of how to use multiple lanes. One is: get in the fast lane and stay in the fast lane. People subscribing to this point of view will ‘downgrade’ lane only when nearly literally pushed by a car that is trying to go faster than them. This seems to be a domineering way of thinking – certainly Germany, UK and Poland subscribe to it. The alternative is you keep ‘higher’ lane empty and use it only for overtaking. That puts more strain on the driver (or brakes the boredom, depends on the way one looks at it) and, I think, makes for a more pleasant way of driving. I think we have met this outlook practiced only in France.
We have also tried to draw some relationship between the traffic/quality of driving and paying for the motorways. In the UK the motorways are free and often suffer from traffic jams (or worse – think M25). In Germany similar – free motorways and some traffic jams. In France you pay for the privilege of using the motorways and, in our experience, they were quite jam free. In Czech you pay a cover fee when you enter the country and our experience was similarly inconclusive.
Poland however does not seem to follow any of the above logic. In the south where I live there is a mixture of free and toll motorways. The free ones are (for the time being) in a much better state – for instance Katowice-Kraków A4 motorway (toll) is for large stretches single-lane. So traffic jams are frequent. Katowice-WrocÅ‚aw part of A4 (free) is mostly jam free and good to drive – however beware, there are no petrol stations by the motorway for about 100km. One needs to leave motorway and enter a city (and get lost of course).
But all the bad motorways experiences are compensated a bit by a polish habit of saying thank-you. Say, for instance, I let someone in front of me to join the traffic or change lanes, very often they will flash the hazard lights to say thank you. And even though it is nearly trivial, it can make your morning.
Of course, of the two styles of driving, one is in fact illegal. A minor technical point that – it saddens me to say – only the French seemed to have registered …
When I learned to drive, the driving school was doing a promotion where they offered a couple of extra “advanced” lessons as freebies if you passed your test. I was taught the style of driving you attribute to the French during these sessions.
I’d suggest that, even though it’s good practice, most people don’t drive like that is because (in the UK at least) most people are never taught to drive on motorways. You can’t drive on them before you pass your test and unless you have a special offer as I did most people stop learning what to do from that point on.
Flashing alternate indicators or hazard lights to say thankyou is becoming common in the UK. I first had it observed to me seven or eight years ago as a practice common amongst lorry drivers. Since then I have noticed it increasingly with lorries and also with regular road users.
While you don’t do motorway driving as part of a basic test you do get to do plenty of dual carriageway lessons. I certainly didn’t find my motorway lessons to be greatly different from dual carriageway lessons except that there were more lanes and I was taught about exiting/joining the roads and how to navigate by junction numbers. The actual rules about overtaking and lane-hogging were identical, except you could be overtaking two lanes of traffic instead of one.