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This topic comprises 4 pages: 1 2 3 4
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Topic: So how many hours do you spend in traffic each week?
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 06-21-2013 09:12 AM
About an hour in each direction, door to door, for the 26.2 mile-commute from York to Leeds. As I usually work from home on one day a week, that's about eight hours a week commuting. The morning trip I don't mind, because I do it before the rush hour, traffic is pretty light, I can listen to the Today programme and generally get my head straight. But the return trip is not pleasant: heavier traffic and at the end of a long day, when you just want to get home and wind down. Also, the main road linking the two cities, the A64, now carries a lot more traffic than it was designed to, with the result that one minor accident can extend the journey by hours. My record is 4 hours and 27 minutes for a single trip, on 1 December 2009. It suddenly started snowing like buggery around lunchtime (unpredicted: snow had not been forecast north of the Midlands), with the result that the entire workforce of Leeds got straight in their cars in an attempt to get home before it got bad. When I set off 3-4 hours later, all went well until a four-mile single carriageway section of the A64 just beyond the eastern outskirts of the city, when I ended up behind an accident (a lorry had skidded, overturned then been hit by multiple cars from both directions, completely blocking the road), and sat shivering in a stationary car for three hours until the police had cleared the wreckage. By that time there was a lot of snow on the road, and it was a second-gear crawl (passing dozens of broken down cars on the way) all the way home. Not fun.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 06-21-2013 01:38 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
It would take serious work for me to get used to driving in the UK. The streets appear more narrow and buildings are often positioned pretty close to the road. Not many of the super highways there are built wide with many lanes like you'll see in some American and Canadian cities. Traffic snarls are more likely to happen. Top that off with higher fuel costs, increasing the expense of being stuck in a traffic jam.
Maybe Southern California is not typical of the rest of the United States, but I've driven there quite a bit now, and would say that traffic congestion is a broadly similar problem there and in most English cities. Driving out of LA on the I-10 in the rush hour is a similar experience to driving out of London on the M1: slow and frustrating! You're right: inner-city and suburban roads usually only have one lane in each direction, apart from major trunk roads, but there tends to be more public transport use, and so you don't have the same number of cars trying to use them.
As for the fuel cost, in terms of pence or cents per mile driven, I don't think there's much difference. European cars tend to have smaller, higher compression engines and manual transmissions, and therefore are more fuel-efficient, and the fuel itself is higher octane (95 RON is standard in most of Europe, with 98 as 'super'). High efficiency Diesel engines are a lot more common in cars, too. So the cars drink less (a typical modern family saloon or hatchback would get 45-50 miles to the US gallon), but the fuel itself is taxed up the wazoo (roughly $8-9 per US gallon in the UK). In the US, cars tend to be less efficient and Diesel-powered cars are very unusual, but the fuel itself is cheaper. My 2001 Ford Fiesta here (1.25 litre, four-cylinder engine) consumes around £32-33 worth to do 300 miles or so, whereas my fiancee's 1999 Honda Civic (1.6 litre, four-cylinder engine) in California drinks about $40-43 worth to cover the same distance. OK, the cars aren't directly comparable (the Civic is probably about a third larger and heavier), but the price difference isn't that big.
quote: Bobby Henderson
Oh, and there's that whole driving on the left side of the road thing!
I've never had a problem changing the side of the road on which I drive, unless the steering wheel side of the car is 'wrong'. I once took my own car through the tunnel to France, and that was really stressful, because if you're driving on the right and the driver's side of the car is also on the right, you're nearest the kerb, with limited visibility and having to rely on your offside wing mirror a lot. I actually find it a lot more stressful as a pedestrian than as a driver in countries that drive on the right, because I'm instinctively looking in the wrong direction before starting to cross a road!
The things that took some getting used to about US driving for me were big intersections instead of roundabouts, stop sign etiquette, 'right on red' and automatic transmissions, which I still don't like.
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