About public transport in the UK (6) [Despre transportul în comun în UK]

The promise made in the first image (taken somewhere in the NW outskirts of Edinburgh) – Beat the traffic, take the bus – is generally kept thoughout the few UK cities I’ve been to.

There’s no doubt that one is better off travelling by bus than by personal car, both from a financial perspective, and form a practical point of view – you can reach your destination faster, in a relatively comfortable manner, and you’re spared of the fuss concerning the need to find parking space for your car.

How come the Brits can keep this promise? Well, I don’t think this has something to do exclusively with law enforcement, but with the fact that – as far as I could tell (again, I may be wrong in my assumptions and observations) – British motorists are law-abbiding citizens. Whether education keeps the traffic in good order or Big Brother’s watchful electronic eyes – I couldn’t tell…

But there’s no way I could have missed noticing that drivers in this country generally respect the ‘sanctity’ of the bus lanes in a way most Romanian motorists don’t.

As a matter of fact, yielding to buses seems to be so much an ‘acquired behaviour’ in the UK, that a Romanian working in London (and one in a relatively high position, which I choose not to disclose; he was by no means an illegal immigrant) was complaining to me of how ‘silly’ the British motorists could be, for ‘queueing’ always on the busiest lanes, and not on the ‘free one’…

It’s only natural that the free one should be kept so for buses – but this is something Romanians are very slow to understand, aren’t they?

[For all the episodes of this series, and all the posts on this blog go to/Pentru toate episoadele din această serie şi toate postările de pe acest blog mergi la: Contents/Cuprins]