Drivers Ed, which is a real thing through our high school.
And I'm not kidding when I'm telling you
that I learned how to drive from my Spanish teacher.
Hey guys, welcome back to the Girl Guy London Channel.
If you're new here, my name is Kalyn.
I'm an American who's lived in the UK for almost ten years.
And today I'm doing a video
on the differences between driving in the UK and US.
So I'm not going to look at you because I am a safe driver.
I'm currently driving in the middle of absolutely nowhere in the US.
Genuinely, this road is not paved and there's nothing else around.
If you're familiar, we've just finished up at Joshua Tree National Park.
So anyway, if you want more content on life in the UK versus the US,
definitely hit subscribe because that is what I talk about on this channel.
And for now, let's get into the video.
Okay, so the first difference, obviously this is an obvious one.
In the US we drive on the right hand side
of the road and in the UK we drive on the left hand side of the road.
Again, it's so obvious, but it is a big difference,
particularly for visitors who are coming to either country.
I always tell visitors from the US
to the UK that actually the UK is so well laid out with public transport to not
really bother with driving because not only would they have to learn the other UK
rules of the road, but just driving on the left versus
driving on the right can be a pretty big switch.
I learned how to drive in the US.
I do have a UK driver's license and I do drive in the UK.
And it was hard for me to learn to switch to the other side of the road.
And when I'm in the US, I do have to make sure that I'm
remembering to be on the right hand side of the road.
Okay. Difference.
Oh my God, there's a person.
Oh my God, that's like a coyote dog coming.
Oh, my gosh, there's a car coming. Okay.
This is seriously like a UK road here
though, because I'm not good at passing cars because I'm American.
So I like to leave 100 miles in between us.
So this is going to be interesting.
You just pull up the bank, there's only enough room for two cars.
Just pull up. Just pull up.
Yeah, go up. Tip the guitar up here a little bit.
Like that not that high.
Do you think they have enough room?
Yeah.
Okay.
I don't really know.
They're like, this person is not even from here.
Talk about how Americans does a thing. Okay.
Number two,
Americans in general, since we've been driving here in the US
this time, you know what, my husband wants me to mention this.
I'm going to mention this and I'm going to say it's California specific.
So my experience of Florida is I feel like more people do say thank you when you let
them in or they're just being polite on the road.
I'm not saying Florida drivers are good,
but I was taught to say thank you with a little wave.
People in California, they don't ascribe to that belief.
They don't do that.
Whereas in the UK, I think pretty much everybody
says thank you.
But another difference, and I think I'm on difference two now
saying thank you or is this difference three?
I think difference two.
In Florida, I was never,
ever taught to turn on your hazard lights to say thank you.
But in the UK, they definitely use their lights to say thank you.
So here, my husband keeps doing it. Okay, hang on.
Is this a train track?
No, it's a paved road. Everyone.
We found it.
Where was I?
Hazard lights.
So I feel like in the US,
we don't actually use our hazard lights to say thank you like they do in the UK.
My husband has it meant. Okay.
My husband has just informed me, as you say, hazard morning.
Okay. Therefore, yeah, but everyone in the you
always turn them on when you say thank you in America, turn them on.
I am warning you that I am a hazard because I'm on my phone.
So do they teach you in the UK to turn your lights on to say thank you, though?
People just do it.
It's just become like accustomed
or whatever. Put your hand up.
Okay.
So technically, you're not supposed to be polite to use your house.
People in the UK are very polite. Okay.
Difference number three, automatic versus manual driving.
So a manual, otherwise known to most Americans as stick shift,
is another big difference because in the US, we mostly like 95% of us,
learn to drive an automatic and will never drive a stick shift.
Manual transmission.
I just made up the 95%,
but the overwhelming, overwhelming majority,
it is considered a special skill here to drive a stick shiftmanual.
In the UK, they mostly drive as standard a manual transmission.
You can get automatic cars in the UK, and people do drive them.
And I find that increasingly more and more people do drive them in the UK.
But the default in the UK is going to be a manual transmission.
So if you're an American renting a car
in the UK, you're going to want to make sure that you're getting an automatic.
Because I know for myself, I never learned how to drive a stick shift.
And when I learned to drive in the UK, I have an automatic only license.
That was a personal decision for me
because I felt like it would be a pretty big undertaking at the time I was
doing my master's degree and I had to get my British license.
And so I decided to stick to automatic only.
Okay. So my camera got cut off.
We pulled over in the middle of the desert.
All is good. I was talking about stick shift versus
automatic transmissions, UK stick shift, US automatic.
And that is the story about that.
Okay, the next difference has to do with straight roads.
Let's start with the direction of roads to find a straight road like this in the UK.
I've never been on one.
I'm sure there's some long straight road somewhere, but I haven't found it.
Uk roads are curvy.
And also, by the way, the UK is a lot smaller than the US.
So just naturally you're going to have more turns and more curvy parts.
The US is massive.
This is a straight road that we are going to be on for a long time.
I have not had to go around to bend.
I have not had to turn a corner.
I'm literally just pressing the pedal and driving straight.
This is not necessarily the case with all of the US.
Of course, you're going to have places, particularly where we were in California
before doing, like the Pacific Coast Highway,
that has a lot more curves than you might be used to.
But these long, straight roads are kind of really associated with America,
particularly American road trips, and you just wouldn't find them in the UK.
Okay, the next difference, let's talk about the size of the road.
So again, I'm going to be generalizing
here because you can find some narrow roads in the US.
We have found them during our trip
in California, particularly when we're driving in Santa Barbara and Los Angeles.
There were times when I was like,
this is an English size road with American sized cars, which is a lot more difficult
than just using British sized cars on British sized roads.
But in general, the size of an American road, the size of American parking spaces
are going to be a lot larger, a lot wider than in the UK.
That brings me to my next difference,
which is about the size of the cars that's so big.
American cars are giant.
Now, I don't view all American cars as
giant because they're just normal cars to me.
But UK cars are much smaller than US cars and things like homers,
giant pickup trucks, you just don't find those in the UK.
They're not even going to fit on the road.
They're not going to fit in someone's driveway.
And that's not the culture in the UK, bigger is not better in the UK.
In the US, bigger is better.
Giant monster trucks.
People love those.
And in general, just like a normal sized
a normal sized car in America, it's going to be much bigger than a UK sized car.
Now, the next difference to talk about has to do with people driving those cars.
So let's talk about driving tests in the UK versus the US.
And I'm going to out myself here.
I am not necessarily the world's most confident driver in the UK.
I have taken a UK test and I have passed.
However, my initial driving instruction and driving test in the US in Florida was
essentially driving down like a back road and having to park going straight in.
We don't do parallel parking on Florida driving tests.
Maybe they do them nowadays.
We didn't back then and they definitely
weren't going to take you above like 25 miles an hour.
Now you can ask yourself,
but how do they know that you are actually licensed to drive?
Well, they don't, I guess.
So we're all left on the roads mostly to our own devices.
The UK driving test is about an hour long.
It's very intricate.
You have to do all sorts of different maneuvers.
Parallel parking is one of those things that you might be asked.
Parallel parking is very popular in the UK.
In general, there are theory tests in both
countries, so I did have to do that in the US and in the UK.
But in general, the driving portion of the UK driving test
is so much longer and more intricate than we have in a lot of States.
In the US, again, this can differ from state to state,
so each state will have their own driving test.
I can only speak to Florida, but we definitely did not make it hard to pass.
Another difference with driving lessons
and learning to drive has to do with who teaches you to drive.
So in the UK, you traditionally would
do driving lessons like proper actual.
You sign up with a driving school and you
do driving lessons with a driving instructor.
In the US, we have passed one driving instructor car during our trip here.
This is not my experience.
None of my friends did driving lessons through anything other than drivers Ed,
which is a real thing throughout high school.
And I'm not kidding when I'm telling you
that I learned how to drive from my Spanish teacher.
So if that tells you anything about
the quality of American driving, we typically learn from our parents.
So like my dad and mom would take me out
to drive, we wouldn't really have official lessons.
So take that for what you will
about the difference between American and British drivers.
I was taught in my school parking lot
by my Spanish teacher and here someone would take like multiple hours of actual
instructed lessons with a qualified driving instructor.
Okay, another difference and I hope you're enjoying the view behind me because I
definitely am is going to be roundabouts versus intersections.
So in the UK, roundabouts are the most popular way to cross over what they call
junk.
It's called the junction that a roundabout helps you get through.
And so that means a lot of times people don't even really have to stop.
If it's clear coming from your right hand
side, you can just keep going through the roundabout.
In the US, roundabouts are not very common.
We've experienced a couple of different I
think we found one official roundabout the others apparently are something called
the traffic circle because they have stop signs.
So it isn't like a true roundabout.
Americans don't understand how to use roundabouts.
I'm just going to put that out there.
We mostly just get confused, try and drive straight through them.
What are these signs up here?
Not very popular.
So we would have just an intersection
with traffic lights and they do have traffic lights in the UK,
but we have them at a four way intersection or however many ways you're
going intersection in the US, roundabouts are not common.
Another difference that I've noticed when
driving in America versus driving in the UK has to do with stop lights.
Stop lights, traffic lights.
I've only seen traffic lights in the UK that are kind of stood up on a pole.
Here in the US, we mostly have them hanging over the road.
So I think we might have some hanging over
the road in the UK, but it's very common to have them kind of just standing up.
Another difference
which I had and then I just forgot. Stop sign.
Yeah.
Another difference has to do with stop signs.
Stop signs are everywhere in the US.
You're always stopping.
Sometimes you'll have a four way stop so everybody has to stop.
And the way to know who goes next is usually who got there.
Like the order in which you get
to the stop sign is the order in which you get to go.
So if you got to the stop sign second and someone else got to their stop sign
coming from the other way, first you stop, they stop, then they go, then you go.
You have to look to see who else has stopped signs.
They can just be kind of like randomly in places.
We were driving like 60 miles an hour
and then all of a sudden there was a stop sign.
Stop signs aren't as common in the UK.
A lot of times you don't need them because
of a roundabout, but also it's just like a yield.
So the kind of quintessential American looking stop signs again,
are really a big part of driving here that you have to get used to.
If you're used to UK driving,
you are also supposed to treat an intersection with traffic light traffic
lights like it has stopped signs if the traffic lights are out.
So fun fact during the Hurricanes when they come to Florida or if there's some
other natural disaster, if you're driving and the lights are not
working, you treat it like it is a four way stop and you just go based on who has
gone to the traffic to the stop sign first.
If there is a debate over like you're not entirely sure, a lot of times people will
just waive you on, so you'll just waive someone else on.
But you have to look and kind of negotiate
with the other drivers on the road as to who should get to go.
Okay?
So I'm going to go and enjoy this beautiful drive.
Those are some of the major differences
I've noticed between driving in the UK and US.
I'd love to do a part too.
So leave any of your observations below if you've driven in both countries.
Thank you guys for watching and I'll see you next time.