Australian Road Warrior

[canyonwalker]

Australia Travelog #19
Leura, NSW - Wed, 27 Dec 2023, 10pm

Today was a full day of driving in Australia. We put 404 km on our rented car. That's 251 miles in US units... not really a lot of distance by US standards, at least not western US standards, but this was in an unfamiliar road-scape. Driving in Australia is on the left side of the road, opposite of the US, and the cars are right-hand drive, also opposite of the US. That made driving 251 miles a much heavier cognitive load.

Where did we go?

I've already written about a lot of what we did today, so I'll summarize here with links to recent blog posts:

• We Ubered to the airport to pick up our rental car, a Renault SUV
• We hiked Fitzroy Falls and visited Kangaroo(less) Valley for lunch
• We drove to, and hiked, Belmore Falls and Carrington Falls
• We checked out what Costco is like in Australia

And now we're at our destination for the night, the Fairmont hotel in Leura, NSW. It's in the Blue Mountains, where we'll be driving around for various sightseeing and hiking over the next few days.

Five Things about Driving in Australia

I started the day concerned about how hard it would be to drive in a foreign country. 400+ km later here's what I found, in the form of Five Things:

1. I thought driving on the left would be hard but it wasn't, in context. It was actually easy to "remember" to stay on the opposite side of the road when there's traffic. The other vehicles provide contextual cues about where to be.


2. Sitting on the right side challenged my senses of position. It's not just the lane directions that are the opposite of the US, it's sitting on the opposite (right-hand) side of the car. This threw off my sense of position on things. Not only did I have to reorient myself each time as I approached the parked car to enter the correct door, but I fumbled a bit with having to shift gears and use the hand brake with my left hand. Plus it's harder to sense where the opposite corner of the car is when making tight turns. Frankly all this is a harder acclimation than staying left on the road.


3. Driving in Australia is orderly. One thing I've observed in visiting various foreign countries and thinking, "Would I want to drive here?" is that, in some, driving is a chaos. In some Asian countries, for example, the roads are kind of free-for-alls. Lanes, signs, traffic lights, the correct direction; these are all merely suggestions. Australia is very much not like that. Drivers obey signs, rules, and even courtesies like merging neatly when a lane ends, instead of 1/3 of the people rushing around the queue trying to get ahead of everyone else. In that regard it's better than the US.


4. Speed limits are low. In city traffic the speed limits are reasonable. 40 km/h is comparable to 25 mph in the US, and it's what's safe to drive at on urban streets. But on the open highway the speed limits are slow to increase. I did see limits as high as 110 km/h but only in very remote areas. Multi-lane highways near the city were still signed as low as 80 km/h (about 50mph) and even when the regular speed was higher, any spot of construction would slow things down to 80 or even 60.


5. Drivers obey speed limits! This was honestly the freakiest thing I experienced in a day of driving in Australia. Whatever the posted speed limit is, drivers obey it. There's no cultural ethos of speeding like in the US, where many drivers consider it normal to go at least 10mph faster than the posted limit. In Australia if the sign says 110 (that's 66mph) by and large everybody is driving at most 110. I could set cruise control to the signed limit and stay with traffic. And when the limit dropped to 80, say because of construction, everybody actually slowed down. Like, you'd see everyone's brake lights come on because they're actively slowing to 80 as they pass the 80 sign. Wild!