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A month or so ago, I signed up with a car-sharing scheme called Zipcar - I don't have an American licence, but they accepted my British one on the logic that nobody who learned in the UK could possibly be worse than anyone who drives around in Boston. Even though it gave me the possibility of driving again I'd been rather scared of actually doing it, just because of the large time gap since I'd driven before and the unfamiliarity of being on Boston roads - but this weekend, Whitney persuaded me to hire a Honda Civic, the nearest available car in our area, for an hour and just chav around a bit to get some practice in for when I might actually need one. Conditions were not ideal - as soon as I booked it yet another giant thunderstorm started, so my first driving experience in Boston was carried out with severe handicaps such as not being able to see through the waterfall pouring down the windscreen or have any traction on the canal system that had replaced the roads.
As I discovered when trying it in California a couple of years ago, suddenly having to drive on the opposite side of the road is actually less difficult than you might think. It's more the way that you're on the opposite side of the car that you have to get used to - I had to spend twice as long checking my mirrors because I had to take the time to stare into the parking permit on the windscreen and over my shoulder at the back seat before then looking at where the mirrors actually were. But this is more than made up for because of having so little to worry about in actually controlling the car - like most in America, the one we hired was an automatic. And compared to the manual transmission cars that I've driven in Britain, the difference is incredible - there is no biting point to worry about, no having to remember the gearstick position - just two pedals with STOP and START on them. It makes the feeling of driving so completely different that I'm having difficulty even comparing the experience in the two different countries.
The roads and commonly accepted rules for driving on them are different as well. Some of Britain's roads have literally been around for a considerable portion of a millennium, and with little planning involved, a lot of towns look like somebody threw a bowl of spaghetti at a wall and then said "Build it like that". In America, while the roads aren't always perfectly grid-based like the common image of its cities, they seem to be built in such a way that you just sort of keep going forward, following the lane markings or just hoping nobody will hit you if there aren't any, until you decide to turn. That's not to say that it doesn't require a lot of concentration - the way that I haven't driven in close to a year and the unfamiliarity of it all means that 20 mph feels like Warp Five, and keeping up to a reasonable speed was what I probably had the most difficulty with throughout. Happily, I didn't go at unreasonably low speeds if you consider that I was actually driving on water for most of the journey.
We spent a moment going slowly round the car park, then on to some side roads, past our flat, then along the local main road for a couple of passes before navigating our way back to the pickup point. The experience didn't exactly make me any less scared about driving in Boston, but as we returned the car in the same shape as it was when we got it, I consider the journey a success.
As I discovered when trying it in California a couple of years ago, suddenly having to drive on the opposite side of the road is actually less difficult than you might think. It's more the way that you're on the opposite side of the car that you have to get used to - I had to spend twice as long checking my mirrors because I had to take the time to stare into the parking permit on the windscreen and over my shoulder at the back seat before then looking at where the mirrors actually were. But this is more than made up for because of having so little to worry about in actually controlling the car - like most in America, the one we hired was an automatic. And compared to the manual transmission cars that I've driven in Britain, the difference is incredible - there is no biting point to worry about, no having to remember the gearstick position - just two pedals with STOP and START on them. It makes the feeling of driving so completely different that I'm having difficulty even comparing the experience in the two different countries.
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Contributing to the fuel crisis at 25mph |
The roads and commonly accepted rules for driving on them are different as well. Some of Britain's roads have literally been around for a considerable portion of a millennium, and with little planning involved, a lot of towns look like somebody threw a bowl of spaghetti at a wall and then said "Build it like that". In America, while the roads aren't always perfectly grid-based like the common image of its cities, they seem to be built in such a way that you just sort of keep going forward, following the lane markings or just hoping nobody will hit you if there aren't any, until you decide to turn. That's not to say that it doesn't require a lot of concentration - the way that I haven't driven in close to a year and the unfamiliarity of it all means that 20 mph feels like Warp Five, and keeping up to a reasonable speed was what I probably had the most difficulty with throughout. Happily, I didn't go at unreasonably low speeds if you consider that I was actually driving on water for most of the journey.
We spent a moment going slowly round the car park, then on to some side roads, past our flat, then along the local main road for a couple of passes before navigating our way back to the pickup point. The experience didn't exactly make me any less scared about driving in Boston, but as we returned the car in the same shape as it was when we got it, I consider the journey a success.
