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randomnessI drive faster now that I've been driving in a place where 85 mph or so is about normal for the middle lane. This will last until I get my first speeding ticket here, I think. :)
Wow, I can fill the tank for less than $25! It was costing about €50 (about $60) to fill the same sized tank in Germany. It got to the point that when I drove through Luxembourg, which has the lowest fuel taxes of any of the countries in the neighborhood, €1.09 a liter felt cheap.
Lanes sure are wide in the States. Even in Boston, the lanes are pretty wide for Europe. Of course, in Europe, they tend to be a bit more consistent than in Boston, where they vary a lot, when they're painted on the roads at all. In Germany, they are very consistent, but narrower, and nearly always well-marked.
Someone needs to fix the street surfaces around here. I've been told that road repair crews in Germany have competitions to see who can build the smoothest surface. They do a great job of fixing potholes; the holes don't last long--the repairs do. At 200 km/h, you feel every ripple in the asphalt.
Wow, I can fill the tank for less than $25! It was costing about €50 (about $60) to fill the same sized tank in Germany. It got to the point that when I drove through Luxembourg, which has the lowest fuel taxes of any of the countries in the neighborhood, €1.09 a liter felt cheap.
Lanes sure are wide in the States. Even in Boston, the lanes are pretty wide for Europe. Of course, in Europe, they tend to be a bit more consistent than in Boston, where they vary a lot, when they're painted on the roads at all. In Germany, they are very consistent, but narrower, and nearly always well-marked.
Someone needs to fix the street surfaces around here. I've been told that road repair crews in Germany have competitions to see who can build the smoothest surface. They do a great job of fixing potholes; the holes don't last long--the repairs do. At 200 km/h, you feel every ripple in the asphalt.
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Date: 2006-03-14 04:13 am (UTC)In part, it is the money, because money can pay for things which are lower priority if there's a lot of it to go around. However, the priorities and culture don't help here.
The road surfaces in much of the pacific northwest are smooth,
Not by comparison with German or French roads, actually. I'm not sure I'd really want to drive down I-5 in Washington or Oregon at 120 mph, and there were bits of I-84 going west along the Columbia River into Portland which were memorably bumpy. I don't remember I-90 into Seattle being anything really great, either.
They're certainly better than ones around here, though.
the signage in the mid-atlantic is quite good
No argument, though still not as good as UK signage. You can get across England without looking down at a map. German signage failed us once on our way back from Bavaria; they failed to give us a sign for a turn in the middle of Heilbronn. One failure isn't bad.
The French and the Belgians, on the other hand...well, there's the importance of priorities and culture for you. Apparently Belgian TV showed a pair of signs which, translated, said: "<- All Directions" and "Other Directions->".
NYC's public transit is the only major system on the planet that doesn't stop at night.
It may be that it doesn't count as a major system, but parts of Chicago's system also run all night. And that's if you only count rail transit. There are countless cities with overnight buses. Not Boston, though. Grumble.
Any transit system which doesn't give you *some* overnight option has a crippling problem, in my opinion. Paris, London, and Berlin will get you home *somehow*, even that somehow is on a bus.
But yeah, priorities.