95 Days In - Driving the CA Highways

I passed my driving test yesterday; with Greencard, Social Security Card and California Driving Licence, I am now a fully fledged Legal Alien. I think I’ll celebrate.

About ten days after we first arrived, Chris and I both took the theory driving test. This I was not worried about, it was multiple choice (when is it ok not to wear a seatbelt: when you are just taking a short trip; when you are in a limousine; never), and I had three goes to pass before I had to pay again. Chris barrelled on and took the practical test the next day, in his dad’s car. I did not trust myself in his dad’s car, and was not yet comfortable on the roads full of gigantic trucks. So I waited until I was confident.

There are a few tricky things to get used to: driving on the right, looking over your right shoulder when you reverse (I still have difficulty with this one), getting into the left side of the car, not needing to change gear (we have an automatic - oh the laziness). The latter of these may sound like it makes driving easy, but I have scrabbled at the driver’s door more than a few times when wanting to speed up, and Chris’ boy racer genes are so embedded that he literally got itchy hands to start with; I would catch him glancing at the gear stick, an evil twinkle in his eye. If you read his “Allsop Blog” you will already know that it was this weakness that led to him, whilst trying to find 2nd gear, throwing our automatic camper into reverse on a hill in New Zealand. Luckily there are fewer people in New Zealand than in Milton Keynes, and therefore no traffic - but replace that deserted hill with a Los Angeles freeway and it becomes a whole new scenario.

There are no roundabouts in CA (well one or two in mall car-parks of all places) so the “four way stop” is the trickiest thing to grasp; basically whoever gets there first gets to go - kind of like a roundabout, but you are driving straight through each others’ paths, so who knows what might happen. Oh and you are allowed to turn right on a red light. This does kind of make sense, but LA drivers are so blinkered that accidents are bound to happen.

The test consisted of about 10 minutes driving round the back roads, and then reversing straight down a deserted street. Reversing round a corner, or out of a parking space, I can do; parallel parking I am pretty damn good at and three point turns are a doddle. But when do you ever need to reverse straight? Like potting the easy shot in a game of pool, it is trickier than it looks.

Suffice it to say that the driving test does not prepare you for the American freeway. In rush hour - which is pretty much all-the-time - the feed onto the freeway is controlled by lights: two lanes, one car per-lane per-green. The slip-road itself is not very long, and the freeways here are all like the M25, either a mass of cars moving at 70miles an hour, or not moving at all. So when the light turns green you must overtake the other car (going behind them is not an option, apparently), get up to speed with the roaring traffic, and then find someone who is aware of their surrounding enough to let you in.

This is, of course, Chris’ favourite part of driving in the US. He described it as “like rally driving”. He has never been rally driving.

Once you make it safely onto the freeway, the rules are “don’t slow the flow of traffic in your lane”. You can get a speeding ticket for that. And they are not cheap.

So you can overtake on either side (there is supposed to be some kind of rule to overtaking, but the roads are so full that…). There are five or six lanes most of the time, and, just to make things that little bit more dangerous, American-design cars do not have orange indicator lights. No. They use their break lights.
On a six-lane-wide road, brimming with vehicles that are slowing and speeding constantly, it is easy to mistake breaking for indicating, and after ten-minutes or so of thinking people left and right of you are out to crush your car, you become something of a nervous wreck.

Add to this the lack of lay-bys plus the concrete wall that hems the road in, and well…Come On People.

Something that the LA freeways do have is very wide lanes, and because of the overtake-anywhere-you-want rule, lane hogging is almost obligatory. We bought a car with cruise control (clever us), so it oh-so-easy to become a blinkered LA driver.