Roundabout guide helps you tackle hellish traffic

by Frank Jones

You've just climbed into an unfamiliar car; the steering wheel is on the wrong side; traffic is whizzing by on the wrong side of the road, and lurking down the highway is a sort of hellish traffic vortex called a roundabout. And you've been up all night.

You'd have to be crazy. . . yet that's exactly the situation facing Canadian travellers arriving bleary-eyed in Britain every morning off trans-Atlantic flights and heading for the car rental agencies.

No wonder a reader, June Hunt, said in a letter she wrote me shortly before she and her husband left Aug. 29 for five weeks of visiting and air force reunions in Britain, "In our mid-60s (really 40s, isn't it!) we just do not have the courage to drive on the wrong side and face the roundabouts."

If June and her husband had seen a book I just received called, Driving In Britain: A North American's Guide to the Ins and Outs and Roundabouts of Driving Over There they might have felt differently.

Even as you read this, I should be tootling along country roads in Wales in our little red Renault at the start of a few weeks of vacation. But tootling, I hope, in a more informed and competent manner after reading this book by Rob Lockhart, an Ontario Ministry of Transportation editor and researcher.

The book came about as a result of a happy trans-Atlantic encounter. Rob, who has applied his computer knowledge to 24-hour car racing, but who claims not to be very good behind the wheel, met a Scottish schoolteacher, Moira Sneddon, at the Edinburgh military tattoo. They became friends, he invited her to Canada, and they crossed the country in a van.

Rob tells me that it was out of their discussions about the difference between driving here and in Britain that the idea of a book came up. Those differences, it turns out, are greater than you might think.

I can never get over the fact that British drivers, supposedly so polite, are tigers when it comes to giving pedestrians the right of way. Crossing a side street at an intersection, watch out for your feet and person as some bully in a Mini whizzes out. Often British drivers are downright bloody-minded when it comes to allowing you into the flow of traffic.

Rob, who has driven thousands of miles in Britain and on the continent with Moira (who he describes as a superb navigator and "the only driver I feel safe with falling asleep"), told me it's simply a difference of attitude and knowing the rules.

Strict lane discipline

And, of course, that meticulousness that we Canadians find so irritating pays off on the motorways (read expressways) -- where British drivers almost always maintain strict lane discipline -- and at roundabouts.

Ah yes, roundabouts. To the sleepy neophyte from North America, staggering into traffic outside Heathrow, these substitutes for traffic lights appear a blur of whirligig traffic. But, says Rob, if you know how they operate, they are simple and a wonderful aid to keeping traffic moving.

There are basic rules to entering a roundabout (mainly, yield to traffic on your right), but when it comes to swinging in and out of the centre lane, depending on where you're going, you'd have to read Rob's book to get the total picture.

My own tip is: just keep circling until you're quite certain where you want to turn off because the one thing you can be fairly certain of in Britain is, once you lose your way, there's no way back.

Roundabouts are really very reassuring, says Rob: "You quickly realize other drivers are watching you and reacting to what you do." In Canada, he says, we put too much faith in lights and signs, neglecting, for example, to check that the road is clear when the light changes to green.

So what would Rob tell my reader, June Hunt, and the thousands of older Canadians now headed to Britain for the quiet (and cheaper) fall period?

It's a matter of attitude, he says. If you want a challenge and are prepared to regard a roundabout as a giant computer game, go for it, being sure, if you are not used to driving a manual transmission car, to order a mid-sized automatic rental car (too small and it will be underpowered).

My advice would be, don't go until you've read Rob's witty and cleverly illustrated book, which is available, $12.95 mail order, from Rampant Lion Communications, P.O. Box 405, Don Mills, ON, Canada M3C 2T2.

...THE TORONTO STAR Thursday, September 19, 1991

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