simont | Maybe it's because I'm not a Londoner

I drove down to London yesterday to visit my sister, who lives in the general vicinity of Wandsworth. Normally I'd use a more sensible mode of transport, but on this occasion the point of the trip was to bring some bulky stuff back to Cambridge for Mum to look after while Sophie's away in New Zealand.

I hate driving in London. Every time I do it, I vow never again, and someone always manages to talk me into it regardless. Still, I might as well keep trying. Never again!

When I first started driving, I had an absolute terror of London, because I'd heard so many awful things about London drivers. Driving around the M25 was fine, but I had a lifetime ambition never to take my car inside the region it enclosed if I could possibly help it.

I think I first broke that ambition by accident, by missing my turning off the M11. That was OK; I just turned round at the first opportunity and hastily went back, and it was still just ordinary motorway and roundabouts. Then I visited somebody only just inside the M25 on the north side (Enfield or thereabouts, if I remember rightly), and that didn't seem obviously scarier than outside.

With my confidence thus boosted, I made a couple of trips to places on or around the North Circular, and then one to the Isle of Dogs. That was where it started to get irritating, not because of the feared London drivers but because the road layout policy in London is alien to all my non-London experience and I can never predict what the lane system is going to do next. The last time I went, I had drswirly in the passenger seat being a full-time navigator and we still managed to take several wrong turnings and end up both thoroughly infuriated with the wretched city's road designers. ‘Let's never come here again,’ said Gareth. If only. Still, it seemed like an improvement to avoid London out of annoyance with the road layout than from terror of the danger to life and limb from the sinister phantom of the London Driver.

So yesterday I ventured into Wandsworth by way of the M4 and the South Circular. On the way in, again, I had a full-time navigator in the passenger seat, and apart from an easily corrected wrong turn in a one-way system five minutes from our destination, we got the whole journey done with only a constant background level of annoyance at the lane system: the road kept dividing into two lanes and back again for no very clear reason.

On the way out again, my navigator was missing: Mum didn't need to be back in Cambridge as early as I did, so she'd decided to stay a bit longer and take the train home, leaving me to drive all the bulky luggage home on my own. I wasn't too worried by this: getting out of big cities is always easier than getting in, because there are always lots of signs pointing to the motorways.

It went fine until I was nearly back to the M4, at which point I took a wrong turn at a roundabout because the right turning had no confirming sign. In retrospect, actually, it did: it had a sign after the turning, pointing back the way I'd come saying ‘this is where you should have gone just now’. The spiralling lanes didn't permit me to go all the way round and try again, so I ended up heading off in the wrong direction, and then decided to take my life in my hands by trying to find my way back to that roundabout without stopping to look at a map.

It worked, but only just. I turned off the random A-road I was on, and attempted to head back in the right general direction by counting my turns and hoping to hell all the turns were good enough approximations to right angles. Just as I'd lost count, I found myself at a crossroads in the middle of Chiswick which apparently hadn't heard of the idea that signposting the major motorways is helpful. Fortunately, I noticed a little brown sign pointing to ‘Brentford Fountain Leisure Centre’, and in a feat of memory which I'm still feeling smug about the next day I recognised that as the name printed on a building we'd driven quickly past on the way in to London five hours earlier. So I headed in that direction, and was right to do so; within minutes I saw the roundabout ahead, took the right exit this time, and was on my way home with no further mishap.

So I was pretty pleased with myself for managing to get myself out of that, but pretty irritated with London for requiring me to have that good a memory!

Also, this time, the real London drivers finally did make an appearance. I think they must have observed the same indecisive lane markings as me and drawn the conclusion that they were probably only advisory; so they kept treating ordinary one-lane-each-way roads as if they had two lanes, and overtaking me on the inside at moments that had me shaking my head and wondering how anyone who did that on a regular basis was still alive. Fortunately my driving experience to date had left me with good instincts for spotting someone about to undertake me and a good reflex response to start behaving especially predictably as soon as I notice anyone else doing something weird, and those kept me out of serious danger. I still felt like a herbivore among apex predators, though, and was very glad to get out of there.

Let's try this one more time. Never again!

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From my experience, the best way to tackle driving in London is in an unmarked white van. That way, everybody expects you to be randomly changing lanes, ignoring road signs etc, and they give you a wide berth.

I'm with you on the one lane - oh hold on, it's two lanes - argh, no, one lane again - oh wait, two lanes - no, one.... thing. I have NO idea what on earth possesses anyone to design a road like that.

<aol/>

Surely, ideally, IMNSHO, the number of lanes should only ever change at a junction. Lanes should peel off to or join on from other roads. There's a conspicuous example of this not happening on East Road, and it annoys me every time I use the road in that direction, because traffic has to merge for no good reason. A relatively simple fix might be to mark the right lane right-turn-only from the previous junction up to that point and put a traffic island about where my marker is.

It's true, that thing on East Road is annoying. I think it's the gratuitous merging that's the problem, though; I generally have no problem with additional lanes being split off other than at junctions if it's sensible. (Typically some distance before a junction, to prevent a queue of traffic trying to go one way from holding up the people going the other.)

If you think East Road is annoying, though, the point about London is that it's orders of magnitude worse. East Road does that once; the South Circular between the M4 and Wandsworth did it about ten times!

*nods* re driving within the M25. I've driven to the Isle of Dogs - M11, North Circular, A12, forget the rest apart from lanes randomly becoming filter only lanes, I'm impressed that I got there without getting lost, but it was at 10am on a Saturday morning when there was comparatively little traffic about. My London driving policy is 'stick to the middle lane' as it is the least likely to randomly change direction and it allows me time to move either left or right if I need to turn off.

I have a couple of routes that I know [M11 - to the Pembury in Hackney is go right at the end of the motorway, take the first exit off the North Circular, turn left at the roundabout, follow the road to the end - takes about ten minutes, turn left at the roundabout, stay in the left hand lane and take the second road on the right, then turn right again into a square where there's free parking on Sundays] and I try not to deviate off those routes.

But yeah, am not a fan of driving in central London!

Except the one person who cut up

daneel_olivaw on the North Circular when he was moving house in a hired van and at 40mph pulled across literally 2 inches from the front bumper. The problem with cars that aren't yours is that you can't find the buttons fast enough, notably the horn.

If you ever have to do it again, take me with you, because I'm rather good at London navigation except where the angles are more than 30 degrees different from those marked on the A-Z and I can always figure out a recovery plan in those cases. Furthermore, I was looking for places to be that weren't my house yesterday.

Before I was a Londoner, I drove into London quite frequently on clubbing expeditions, and then a few years after that I rode a motorbike through London quite regularly to visit my then girlfriend.

My experience on both occasions was that London drivers are mostly fine (except pizza mopeds), and in fact are much nicer about letting you out of side turnings than people in smaller towns/cities tend to be. What I found really difficult, especially when I first started driving into London, was navigating in an area with such a density of junctions.

Particularly having learned to drive in Milton Keynes, I'm used to 'the third left' meaning 'about 2km from here', not 'about 20 metres from here'. Combine that with the one-way horrors you can get entangled with if you do miss your turning (whereas in MK there's (almost) always an entirely predictable route back onto the correct course), and you have pretty much the entire reason I hated driving into London.

Satnav helps a great deal :)

Because some of the bits of road aren't wide enough to have more than one lane each way, but the traffic density in London is increasingly too great for its road system to bear, and hence wherever possible they've added extra lanes for the extra cars to use (read: all but park on for hours on end) during rush hour.

London has cow paths. Lots of them. And the GLC's plans in the 60s didn't get built. (http://www.btinternet.com/~roads/lon_mway/glcplans/Ringway1.jpg)

I am learning to drive around Wanstead (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=wanstead,+london&sll=-40.137939,176.537146&sspn=0.361156,0.601501&ie=UTF8&ll=51.57803,0.027058&spn=0.009174,0.018797&z=16). The roads getting there from Plaistow (http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=plaistow,+london&ie=UTF8&z=14&iwloc=addr) are relatively sane, but squishy in many places.

This is a trial by fire, I think.

If I'd known you were looking so hard you'd be willing to put up with a random person's family, I'd have considered it!

There is only one way to treat driving in London. Dodgems!

I hate the turn-right-here syndrome. You know - the map says turn right. You can't (roadworks|alterations|map wrong). Take the next right. No Right Turn... repeat for 3 miles...

One thing better than never driving in That London is not going there at all :)

i don't think i'll be able to drive in England ever again after 3 months on the empty lazy roads here

Yeah, now you mention it I'm not too fond of going to London by any other means either, but driving is definitely the worst way to do it by some distance...

(Not, I hasten to reassure any Londoners reading this who I like, that there aren't things and people that make a trip to London worthwhile. It'd just be even better from my point of view if I could experience those things and see those people without having to go to London to do it :-)

You leave them space to undertake?

BTW, did you get my email about Saturday? I'm sorry to ask, when I was asking if you would be able to do me a favour, but I thought I ought to check it hadn't vanished into the chiark ether.

Well checked: no, I haven't seen any email from you in a while. Whatever it was, it probably has vanished.

Thank you! I just discovered the problem, I sent it to the wrong address. I just now resent to pobox.com, did you get that? I said "I heard you were planning on driving down to S&M's party on Saturday. Are you returning that night, and are you full up of eager passengers? If you are returning, and would have room to be able to give a lift, might you do so for Rachel and I? (Thank you/sorry if not.)"

(Also, I copied the email address from an email from Emperor to several people including you, saying he thought you were going to his housewarming, but not sure if you had wanted crash-space. So if you didn't get that, you should probably reply to him also.)

Maybe it's because I'm not a Londoner

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