Driving - Code of the Road

Recently, we took a trip to Europe. We rented a Van and drove around. As a teenager I grew up in Europe and learned to drive in Germany. It was good to return to the land of Driving.

Living in California is wonderful, except for the driving. No the traffic is not bad and the freeways are less crowded then in other big cities. Check out Paris for congestion. The problem in California, and much of America, is that Driving is taken for granted. People think they all do it well and the "other" guy is a bad driver.

There are rules of the road that we are required to know in order to get an Operators license to drive. These rules are similar in Germany and America. Yes, there are minor differences, but stay with me on this point. A license is a license, America, Canada, France etc. What is really different is the informal Code of the Road.

Here in Los Angeles even in the worst of congestion on a freeway you can turn on the right blinker and people will let you pull over. They will stop and let you cut in front of them. Many will wave and smile as they do it. Try that in New York or Boston. The horns would honk and people would swear at you. Clearly the rules for the Operators license are the same in both places but the Code is different. So what is this Code and how do we learn it?

The Code of the Road is the local style of driving developed by the drivers in any region over time. It is a result of the collective personality of the drivers. The police understand this and they accept most of it. In Germany on the Autobahn all drivers move over to the right lane to allow faster cars to pass on the left. Almost nobody drives in the far left lane, unless you are at 200 km per hour. Here in California the left lane [number one lane in Californian] is for Asian women to drive expensive German cars at 55 mph.

I have been stopped driving in excess of 100 mph. The police like to chase guys like me. But I have never seen anyone pulled over for driving too slow and obstructing the flow of traffic. I have seen miles of cars lined up behind a mini van driving in the far left lane. I have seen cars pull over into the right lane and pass as many as 15 cars in a row then pull back into the left lane. On Saturday I drove to San Francisco up the I-5. Cars riding in the left lane doing 67 miles per hour passing trucks doing 65 miles per hour. Holy shit. In some cases it took cars over 15 minutes to pass a truck. This would never happen in Germany. The Code is different there.
Read the sign "Stay to the Right except to Pass".