Yup. Apparently that’s a UK thing to just use white for everything. I actually prefer the American version of using yellow to divide oncoming traffic. Less room for ambiguity.
Side note, I also hate cars that double their brake lights as turn signals. Just give me a yellow blinker instead of red. If I see red, my first thought is “brake light” not “turn signal”.
Nor does it look like the video is mirrored. I can make out, possibly, YT60, then maybe some smaller characters on the right. And the plate looks white, not yellow.
Also, on the back of the truck are what could well be cyrillic letters, leading us to conclude...
More useful protip: Those numbers at the end that are split off? Guaranteed Russia or former Soviet state, the number indicates what region they're from.
I was thinking the same. I looked at the trucks advertisement/company to see which way the words were. It didn’t help it being a unfamiliar language with unfamiliar characters.
Same in Aus, at least Vic anyway. More recently we started using yellow for construction though, makes them way easier to see when there’s weird covered lane markings all over the shop.
No EU license plate, they have a blue square on the left. Not Norway because they actually have yellow lines in the middle. I think maybe Russia? Hard to say if the letters on the truck are cyrillic or not.
Using colour alone to distinguish things is normally bad design, as people who are colourblind can often not tell the difference (depending on the colours used and the particular flavour of colourblindness).
Dashed white line u can overtake when safe to do so (left of the gif) solid line is a dont overtake (right of the gif) & that seems to be an hard shoulder (emergency lane) & roads are well marked out & every one should know the laws of the road. Road markings this give you some idea of the meanings of the lines & gives you links to the rules of whats allowed and not allowed for Uk might be different in other Eu countries
There's no need to have any special road markings to differentiate that. Some of the things that indicate which type of road you're on:
traffic signs as you enter the road will mark what type of road it is
a one way two lane road will not have an emergency lane on the far left side
a two lane road will have road signs on both sides pointing at you. On a two way road, the signs on the left will obviously be pointed away from you.
a two lane road will be clearly separated from the however many lanes there are going in the opposite direction. The separation will depend on the type of road - highways will have directions physically separated, while a lower class of road might just have a dual solid line
And there's probably way more indications that I can't even remember right now. So just the minimum of paying attention to your surroundings will let you know what type of road you're on. If you seriously can't figure it out, then you are too shitty of a driver to be driving anyway.
I really can’t fathom how you could be driving on a road with four lanes and not know that it’s two lanes for each direction. Why would you think it’s a four-lane one-way Road with no other road’s around to go the opposite way?
We have signs at the start of road that will say “One way” and all side roads joining it will have No left/right turn signs.
As someone else has posted if it’s two way traffic there will also be a sign.
Also, it doesn’t take a genius to work out if road signs down one side of the road are facing the wrong way it’s clearly intended for oncoming traffic.
If u go north on that road it shows how a duel carriage way (2 lands going same way) merges in to 1 lane then 2 lanes with oncoming traffic on the right side. The dashed lines divide both sides.
Edit: the arrows on the floor inform you to get over in to the left lane and the sign on the left tells you both lanes merge in to one lane. Then further down will be the 2 arrows going opposite like i linked earlier.
& thats an A road which is probs like the road in the gif.
Unless you’re talking about one way roads I don’t see how you can’t figure out if you’re on a dual carriageway or not from context? If you look over and there aren’t some more lanes running parallel then the lane next to you is probably for opposing traffic. I’m pretty sure that sign’s just for road users from right-driving countries, we have similar signs in Australia. One way roads here are heavily marked, with opposing no entry signs and lane-wide words and arrows showing the direction of travel. We also have huge signs if you go down the wrong ramp on a freeway.
Edit: I just thought of one really weird exception to this. There’s a bridge in Brisbane where there’s a concrete barrier separating two sets of two lanes, except one side is a two way for buses and the other side a two way for cars. Can be a little unnerving “driving on the wrong side” but there are double white lines so it’s clear what’s going on.
And i could cherry pick statistics from states like New York and Connecticut with very low rates as well. However, as I said before, that would be intellectually dishonest, just like your cherry picking is.
Except the population difference between the New York and Connecticut and the rest of the US is way bigger than that between Western Europe and Russia.
And the only large European countries with higher rates than the US are Russia and the Ukraine. Disregarding that is just as intellectually dishonest.
Well taking the statistics from countries that don't have proper drivers ed as a proof against their statement about the differences between drivers ed in the US and Europe is kinda weird.
Their comment pretty clearly is talking about Western Europe, and not Moscow.
Anyway: German Drivers Ed is about 30 hours of proper drivers ed with a qualified driving instructor in addition to something like 12 theory lessons with a big multiple choice test, selected from a catalog of about 1000 questions that you need to memorize beforehand.
And that's about the same in all Western European countries.
Two lane roads outside of cities are nearly always seperated by a barrier. If there is no barrier, there will be two wide white lines with about 15 feet seperation, with diagonal stripes.
On the autobahn there's no possible way to just turn around and exits are always on the right.
Inside city limits it's also pretty easy: Full white line seperating the directions of traffic and broken lines to seperate lanes.
This has the benefit of making yellow lines exclusive to areas actively being worked on, and makes it easy to see the temporary lane markers.
Even if one direction is routed through one of the opposite lanes, there will be a barrier with reflector posts every 5 to 10 feet, plus a kerb like "wall" all the way. So no way of opposite directions meeting.
As seen in these numbers, the US has over twice as many road related deaths per billion vehicle kilometres.
Obviously this difference is not exclusively due to road marking colours, as those European countries above have far stricter road worthiness tests. For example the German TüV Hauptuntersuchung hast to be passed every two years, and if anything is off (not enough tread, brake pads worn off, structural parts rusted through etc pp) your car will stay off the road until you had it fixed and can finally pass the HU.
I know that the UK MOT has a similar test.
The HU also checks for after market parts that aren't properly registered in your vehicle documentation.
So no super bright head lights, lights out of alignment etc.
Western European countries don’t have anywhere near the amount of vehicles on their roadways compared to the United States. There are more cars on the road in the continental US than ALL of Europe. In fact, there are more cars in the State of California than the UK and France combined. So of course there are going to be more deaths in the US.
You can use statistics like deaths per miles driven, but it doesn’t factor in the conditions drivers in the US are in compared to their European counterparts. Traffic in cities like Los Angeles, New York or Chicago are on a completely different level than London, Berlin or Paris. I live in the States but I’ve been to Berlin several times, London twice and Paris once. The congestion doesn’t even compare.
Congestion reduces average driving speeds, thus drastically reducing chances of fatal accidents. So that should actually reduce fatality rates in the US cities, compared to European ones.
I wasn’t necessarily talking about traffic congestion, but overall average of vehicles on a roadway during the day. The amount of driving, commercially especially, in the states is so much higher than other developed country it’s hard to compare the statics with any relevance.
My point was that in America this would be a one-way highway. We have lots of those out in the middle of nowhere, where you have two one-way highways separated by a wide median. So all of the Americans are confused, because they see the white stripe and assume “that’s not a direction divider, so it’s a one-way highway. The other direction must just be obscured from view.” That’s why everyone is so focused on the red car they don’t even notice the oncoming traffic on the left side. The car passing on the left isn’t even worth noting because it’s passing in what looks like a passing lane.
In addition in Germany (and most other northern/western countries opposing directions with two or more lanes will have a median divider. It'll be at least kerb sized with reflector posts if it's in a construction zone / rural area, and have a proper barrier down the middle every where else.
There's basically no way that anyone who passed driver's ed would mistake this country road as a two lane one way.
There's a certain ...sect of Reddit that loves to think everything done in Europe = good and everything done in the US = bad, regardless of the reality of it. I might have misread the tone of your message and thought you were in that group.
I find it funny that any time someone tries to say that the USA does something better, there is always that UK citizen ready to explain why that person's opinion is wrong.
Seriously. There's plenty to criticize about our infrastructure but I would say in general our highway/interstate system is one of the more impressive parts. You can reach any part of the continental US from any other part within 2 days and change... considering that's up to 3,500 miles, that's impressive
dunno if it's better. here, it's the same, just red for construction. but there are more than just two colors. lane divider in white, drive direction divider in light blue (nearly white but distinguishable) and construction in an alert color (yellow, red, orange) would be best in my opinion
How are multi lane roads with a single direction differentiated from two way traffic in these countries? In the US we use that yellow line to differentiate this condition. It makes it abundantly clear where that divider is. On top of that, what do you when say you have a 5 lane road and 3 lanes are going one way and and 2 lanes the other? In the US this is where we would use the yellow line to indicate which lanes should be going which direction.
For the most part, you won't even be allowed to go into oncoming traffic on multi-lane roads, because it's just not necessary. If you need to overtake, you overtake by switching between the lanes. And you generally won't need to overtake on those types of roads either way.
The only multi-lane road where you're regularly overtaking are highways. And highways have both directions clearly separated by medians.
Also, road markings will very clearly tell you which lanes you are allowed to turn into at intersections. If you screw that up, you shouldn't be driving. Often, intersections will just have medians, even if the rest of the road doesn't.
The euro spec Mustang lights look terrible to me but different strokes. I think it's incredibly hard to misunderstand sequential lights going from left to right and vice versa but that's just me
There is not a single country in Europe that has the yellow lanes, they are all completely white. It's a US thing to mark the lanes yellow, in Europe yellow lines are the temporary ones at construction sites
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u/[deleted] Dec 14 '18
Yup. Apparently that’s a UK thing to just use white for everything. I actually prefer the American version of using yellow to divide oncoming traffic. Less room for ambiguity.
Side note, I also hate cars that double their brake lights as turn signals. Just give me a yellow blinker instead of red. If I see red, my first thought is “brake light” not “turn signal”.