The Driving Force

When we came to Canada, Los Angeles had already fully developed the drive-as-fast-as-you-can through any stop light that was even marginally yellow during your time in the intersection. How puzzling to come to B.C., where not only did the cars stop when the light started to turn yellow, but the local authorities frequently gave you a slightly earlier signal that told you when the light was going to turn yellow so you could be adequately prepared. It required an entire readjustment of our driving styles. Almost two decades have passed, and the L.A. mode is only now beginning to make itself seriously felt up here, but I can no longer say with confidence when a car zips through a yellow as it changes to red, ‘there goes an American in B.C.’

I think of L.A. as a place of serious drivers. You drive the freeways there and you know how to drive because otherwise you’ll be dead. You will enter the freeway at a minimum of 45 mph. You will keep up with the car in front of you, regardless of how fast he is driving. You will tailgate, honk, and then pass any car driving below the speed limit. You will get there first, wherever there is. Having learned these lessons well in the U.S. required another significant adjustment for me in Canada.

The foremost of these Canadian lessons is you will drive no faster than the speed limit and if it suits you, you will drive slower than the speed limit. Since our house is in a place with a (mostly) two-lane highway, this can be an inconvenience, not least when there is a very large truck in front of you, a truck loaded with very long and very big cut and limbed trees. You will not be passing this truck very soon and this truck will not be driving unduly fast and neither will you. While you are poking along, you can imagine L.A.’s I-5 with 20 or 30 lumber trucks moving along deliberately. It’s a great picture.

Another significant area of learning in Canada has to do with merging. You do a lot of it here. I don’t know whether it is something about Canadian traffic or road construction theories or another manifestation of multiculturalism, but merging from five lanes to one in about 50 feet (e.g., at the entrance to the Lion’s Gate Bridge coming from West Van) is a specialty of B.C. roads. In the U.S., you couldn’t do this because, within the first week, everyone who drove there (except for the one winner, of course) would have been killed or maimed in the traffic accidents that such merging would create. But in Canada, everyone merges with exquisite fairness. It never ceases to amaze me. It is a mark of a people so polite that I wonder that someone has not tried to conquer them. The battle would be about to start, and the Canadians would be checking to see whose turn it is. And then the battle would be over (at least if it were the Americans on the other side of the battle. The Canadians would take the first turn, and then the Americans would take all the rest of the turns: Game Over!).

But where the Canadian drivers let it all hang out is in parking lots. In recent years, cars have gotten longer, wider, and more opaque, and parking lot slots have gotten narrower and, if not shorter, at least no longer, but the parking lot designers (who may not be the same people as the traffic/road designers) are certainly trying to pack the maximum numbers of cars in parking lots up here. Either despite this or because of it, the typical Canadian driver seems to consider the parking lot just a somewhat more constricted and congested road where 50 kph (30 mph) is a reasonable speed limit. They drive fast down the lanes and they back out without looking to see whether anyone is on his/her way down the lane (largely because you can’t see until you are all the way out in the parking lot lane). I would not be surprised if the single largest category of traffic accidents in British Columbia turns out to be in parking lots. To their credit, they themselves practice defensive parking in the lots by backing into the parking places so they’ve got some chance of seeing the speeder coming down the lane right before he hits them.

Maybe it would help if the parking lots were designed with a lot more merge lanes?