23 August 2004
Signs of a far different culture
I took a last chance to holiday in America this month, before it becomes not worth the effort to break through the bureaucracy barrier at the border. And my trip to New England held a few surprises. Not just the kind you get when you walk on the pavement (hit by truck) or say you are staying for a fortnight (total incomprehension). Nor the even more mysterious linguistic conundrums that leave you wondering what on earth, for instance, “native ice cubes” might be.
No, the big surprise was the trees. Of course even I had heard that autumn in New England is spectacularly bright because of the gloriously technicoloured leaves heading for a fall, but I was unprepared for quite how many trees there are. Even the 4000-foot mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont are completely covered by them, so that the only view a climber can hope to get is at the top.
Don’t get me wrong – I love trees, and I loved New England, but there were times when I yearned for the majestic bleakness of a Scottish Munro.
The other big surprise came on the stunning shoreline of Maine and Massachusetts, where I made a few fruitless forays down side roads before I realised that the vast majority of it was privately owned. In the land of the free, beauty has a price. We should be grateful that much of our own compelling coast is open to anyone.
But because I spent so much time travelling, what really made an impact on me was the road signs, some of which I would like to see introduced into Norfolk. “Watch for moose in roadway”, for instance.
Then there was the brutal frankness of “Wrong way”, which sounds a lot more helpful than it is. Perhaps Norfolk County Council could use it to replace the much less useful “Byroad”.
More in the Norfolk style was the mid-highway “Bump”, which made you wonder why they didn’t spend the sign money on smoothing the road.
I enjoyed “Thickly settled”, which I took to be like Brundall, and the pretty well essential “Bridge freezes before road” – for some reason quite common in Vermont, where people freeze before bridges.
I can think of a number of prominent Norfolk citizens who would appreciate “Give way to Rotary traffic”, though they might be bemused by the healthy “Reduced salt area”.
But perhaps my favourite was the reassuring “No tolls ahead”. I don’t know why this should be especially noteworthy. There were no elephants either. Moose, of course, are another matter.
Ways to keep traffic flowing
What a joy to drive hundreds of miles through Ontario, Quebec, New York State and New England without seeing a single speed camera or road hump.
Ontario, of course, abandoned its cameras after finding they did not reduce road deaths, as indeed they haven’t in this country. And for some reason putting obstacles in the middle of the road has never caught on across the Atlantic.
Two things common in most areas, though, are worth introducing here. One is the ability to overtake on both sides, which might help avert the frustration caused by slow drivers religiously avoiding the inside lane.
It will do nothing, unfortunately, to avoid the real plague of driving in the United Kingdom, which is selfish lorry drivers overtaking other lorries painfully slowly on dual carriageways – clots causing clots, as it were.
The other innovation across the Atlantic is the simple proviso that, after stopping, you can turn right on a red light if the road is clear. Don’t panic; that would be left in this country, and it would also be a safe, cheap and easy way to keep traffic flowing.
So no chance of that happening.
Making exploration much easier
I am delighted to be able to report another breakthrough by intrepid Norfolk explorer Richard “Volcano” Meek, who has discovered why most people have trouble finding the source of rivers.
He writes: “Most explorers seem, somewhat perversely in my view, to spend a lot of time and trouble looking for the thin end of rivers – the bits where they are little more than a damp spot in a field of mangolds. “It should be obvious to all that the easiest bit to find is the thick end, which is bigger, wetter and usually marked on a map. I set out about two weeks ago and followed a well-marked trail along the banks of the River Nar from Gressenhall to King’s Lynn.
“Lo and behold, there was the mouth of the river – stuck on the side of the Ouse, just as the helpful notes supplied by the Setchey and Upper Wormegay Tourist Board said that it would be!
“May I commend this method to other would-be explorers as a far more productive and reliable way to actually find something after all that hard work?”
We are all grateful to Mr Meek for his ground-breaking excavations in so many areas; so it was sad to hear that he was confined to hospital for a few days after his latest adventure. He attributes his recovery to “the Angels of Necton Ward”, an organisation so obscure that I have not managed to uncover anything about it, except that it is probably underpaid.
Impediments up for abolition
While I was away, I see that a reader suggested to the editor that when speed cameras are abolished I might turn my attention to the removal of “other irritating impediments to the motorist”, like traffic lights, keep-left signs and zebra crossings.
These are interesting ideas. Keep-left signs would often be unnecessary if the obstruction put up to support the sign was removed, and zebra crossings would be redundant if motorists had the respect for pedestrians that they should have: some countries make do with simpler indications of pedestrian priority. Unfortunately many Britons seem to collect a rather pathetic aura of superiority every time they get in a car, much as they do when they drink a can of beer, so I could not support abolition of zebras.
Traffic lights are a moot point. They often keep you waiting unnecessarily and thus cause frustration. I seem to remember that a former Transport Secretary said that traffic lights caused most of the delays in London (that was before Ken Livingstone, of course).
He may have been joking. I personally would love to see the idiotic lights on the Trowse bypass replaced by a roundabout, but it is probably too late for that, as it is for so many things.