Traffic

As a pedestrian, when I move to a new city it takes me a few weeks to figure out the flow of traffic and traffic lights. Which red lights stay red longer, which intersection gets a green arrow first, which small streets are safer to jay walk, etc. That adjustment has taken a little longer here because I have to stop and think about what side of the street the car will be coming from. And there are one way streets and traffic rotary's and strange intersections that even the drivers don't seem to know how to maneuver. I basically look like an owl when I'm preparing to cross the road. I swivel my head in all directions just to make sure the coast is clear. (And when I have the right of way I always like to make contact with the driver. Even though I understand that cars travel on the opposite side of the road, and drivers drive on the right side of the car, I have ingrained instincts to look at the left of the car for the driver. And the driver's not there!)

I first learned to drive in Boston, having to deal with rush hour traffic going through Harvard Square. This intersection below reminds me of that chaos just on a smaller scale. The first picture is as I'm walking to class at FCH and then the second picture is coming back from FCH. This is where I saw an accident last week. I know it doesn't seem difficult in this pics, but there are six different traffic patterns that happens here. It's kind of like when you put together those little race tracks that have those multi-line connectors so you can make figure 8 tracks.



One of the first things I noticed when I moved here was how noisy the traffic is. You expect traffic noise a big city. Everyone talks about how much American's drive and Europeans walk everywhere and Cheltenham is a small condensed town so you don't really think there will be much driving. But there is. And it's really noisy. Maybe it's that the little toy cars here are noisier than American cars? or maybe it's on big streets where there is consistent traffic there is a dull hum and you don't notice a car zipping around the corner?

These are photo's of the small little cars here. Even "big" cars like Audi and Mercedes and other luxury cars are very small. I wish I could have gotten a photo of me standing next to the Jeep in the photo on the left. It's like a little toy jeep. And you can see that most parking is done on lots in front of houses. The pic on the right is a row of small cars.



As for traffic on the sidewalk and the grocery store? I still haven't figured it out. Stairs and escalators follow the same driving pattern of walking/driving on the left, instead of the right, but the grocery store seems to be a free-for-all.