Canadian drivers could use lessons from our counterparts in Britain

I landed in Canada from Britain in 1967, in the Centennial Year, and at that time I had not yet driven a car.

I remember the skepticism I met with when I went to apply for my first learner’s license and was warned that it was a criminal offence to supply false information about previous confiscated or suspended licenses. The truth was that the official in question had never encountered a twenty-odd-year-old man who had never had a driver’s license, and, looking back now, I can’t blame him.

It is a fact, though, that 50 years ago in Britain, very few ordinary citizens owned cars. Private cars were practically useless there, a waste of time and money. There was only one effective modern road, the M1 motorway, and it was short — London to Leeds — and had taken 18 years to build. There were about 60 million Brits then, jammed into a tiny country that you could lose easily, fifteen times, in the unpopulated wilds of Northern Saskatchewan. But no matter where we wanted to go in Britain, there was first-class public transport available to get us there quickly.

Not as quickly as we would today, admittedly, but 50 years ago no one was in that big of a rush all the time.

But travel time was important. Everyone who traveled anywhere took careful note of the anticipated time needed to get from Point A to Point B, because on any longish road journey, an average progress of 25 to 30 miles an hour was amazing, even on major trunk roads like the A1, because all the main roads were two-lane thoroughfares and they followed the contours of the landscape — no flyovers, no causeways, and bottlenecks in most towns.

One of the most famous stretches of road in England was the old Watling Street route in Norfolk, remarkable for having no bends for an 11-mile stretch, and it had been built by the Roman legions, two thousand years earlier. It’s still in use today.

Since then, of course, I’ve gone back there and I’ve driven on their now astonishing network of inter-urban motorways, and the thing I find most amazing and admirable about the drivers there — as in other parts of Europe—is their consistently high regard for lane discipline and traffic courtesy.

You simply can’t drive like an average Canadian if you want to survive on a European motorway, solely because the rules are so strict. Ordinary drivers keep to the inside lane, on the left, and to pass a slower vehicle ahead you have to signal in advance, watch your rear view mirror and then pull out, overtake and pull back in, quickly.

If you dawdle, you’ll have someone flashing their lights in your rear-view mirror in no time at all, demanding that you pull over and let them pass.

And if you persist in driving the way you do in Canada, hogging the lane you’re in, you’ll quickly become exhausted, hyperventilating and white-knuckling your steering wheel because you can’t relax and everyone seems out to get you.

They’re not. They’re trying to get past you because you’re blocking traffic and being a nuisance, holding them up and creating real danger for other, faster moving vehicles.

The middle lane, as it should be, is the norm. Most vehicles there are pushing the speed limit and moving under cruise control, and when they have to pass, they pull out into the fast, outside lane and get it done. But then they go back into the middle lane. The strange thing is that, except under high-stress circumstances, the fast lanes on motorways are often close to empty. But woe betide the dawdler who tries to amble aimlessly along in the wrong lane. That’s not the case here in Canada. We recently passed a law to penalize dawdlers hogging the fast lane, but I’ve never seen anything being done about it since. Here, for example, every time I come down from East Kelowna to the junction of KLO and Benvoulin Roads, I turn right and simply accelerate in the slow, right-hand lane, because most of the slower cars ahead of me have automatically pulled out into the fast lane, and so I can usually pass all of them without even surpassing the 70 kph limit on that stretch. Truth is, most of them shouldn’t be there. They simply don’t think. They feel entitled to be there and so they accelerate over into the fast lane and then usually slow down. That’s bad driving, plain and simple.

It’s not quite so bad on the main, out-of-town highways—particularly stupid driving patterns seem to be reserved for high-density, urban traffic situations where there’s far higher risk of causing damage. But, lordy, we seem to have more than our share of careless, uneducated and uncaring drivers nowadays.

Jack Whyte is a Kelowna author of 15 bestselling novels. Email jack@jackwhyte.com or read more at jackwhyte.com.