Driving in London

Don't do it. Avoid this at all costs. I would rather stick bamboo shoots under my fingernails than have to drive through London again. Seriously.

The city-planners need to be dragged naked through their twisting and turning streets, tarred and feathered, given paper-cuts one the webbing between their fingers, flogged with a garden hose, pelted with tomatoes, AND THEN shot! To get from point A to point B, you have to go via points Q, X, H, and Z.

It took us almost two hours to drive 36 miles from the Hyde Park area of London to Gatwick airport. And when we tried to go from the National Film Theatre to the hotel near Hyde Park (despite mapquest's directions saying it would take 6 minutes), it took us nearly an hour! This was not only because of the continuous switchbacks, jug-handles, one-way streets, roundabouts, and forced left or right turns, but also because of the grossly inadequate signage. What street is this? Is this the A23 or the A21? No, it's the A505. I don't see that on the map. So on and so on. You really need three heads (one to look where you're going, another to see where you've been, and a third to look at the map) and two sets of arms to successfully navigate (or perhaps a GPS would do it).

And then there's the traffic. London is worse than LA (at least LA's roads are laid out fairly sensibly). Laughably, they have dubbed most of central London a "Congestion Zone". This means that everyone who drives through there during business hours, has to pay 5 lbs. per day. This didn't seem to work. In fact, not only is it still congested in there, it's even more congested OUTSIDE this zone!

OK, to be fair, I can't compare a European city to a US city. Pretty much every city, town and village in Europe was built long before cars and paved roads where even close to being realized. They didn't think to lay out the cities in a grid pattern. But, surely, a city like London... they could have designed the traffic flow a little better. I can't propose a solution for that mess (other than perhaps building some freeways from the M25 into the city which would require kicking a lot of people out of their homes), but that doesn't quell my complete disgust for the parties responsible. For crying out loud, PUT SOME DAMN STREET SIGNS UP! LABEL THEM SO PEOPLE IN CARS CAN SEE THEM! There's this story that during WWII, they took down all the street signs so if the Germans invaded, they wouldn't be able to find there way around. Well, I don't think they ever got around to putting the signs back up. IT'S 2004, IT'S TIME TO STOP PROCRASTINATING!

-RP-