Driving in Germany

What's up?

Ok, so today my host family and I went for a drive from Allershausen to Lanterna, Croatia, for the tennis camp, and I was blown away by the highways there, compared to the highways in Canada. So for today, I figured I would just write down interesting stuff I noticed on the highway, and tell you guys about it. It should actually be more interesting than it sounds.

First, the lack of speed limits on the Autobahn is kinda a myth. While the speed limits here are much higher than in Canada (most of the time we're going 140 km/h) there are usually posted speed limits. To keep the autobahn tradition alive there are some areas where there are speed limits, but these are few and far between, depending on weather conditions. This brings me to my second point; the autobahn is a very smart highway. each speed limit is posted on an electronic board. These boards occur roughly every 2-3km and post speed limits as well as warnings that match the current state of the highway. for example, earlier in the day, the speed limit was 100 km/h along with a sight warning because in the morning it was very foggy on the highway. Later, the sign warned us to slow down to 80 because we were approaching a construction zone. Construction zones are so much more efficient here. Only one lane at a time is ever closed, and despite the fact that there are more cars here than you would normally find on a Canadian highway (think long weekend traffic if you're from Revelstoke), there is very rarely any holdup.

I think most of you knew this already, but just in case, an agreement was signed a while ago between many countries in the European Union that allows all traffic to pass freely without border control. This meant that my host family and I were able to travel from Germany to Austria to Slovenia to Croatia without having to stop once at a border. Very useful, especially in Eastern Europe. Of course, going through Austria meant travelling through the alps. The alps are an incredibly spectacular mountain range. Its kind of like what we have in Canada, but instead of forests and trees everywhere,  you have quite a few grassy meadows, with large wooden houses predominating the landscape. Sometimes, these wooden houses condense into villages, but you can hardly ever see them because the Autobahn manages noise very well. When you are in more urban areas, the Autobahn is completely walled off. There is always a large wooden barrier put on the outside of the highway between the highway and the rest of the world, so that the noise from the highway doesn't keep people awake, allowing people to build houses very near to the highway without too much of a noise problem. However, the main feature of driving in the alps is the tunnels. In Canada, we hop, skip and jump around mountains, placing tunnels only in very avalanche prone areas that last for about 600 meters at the most. In the Alps, they prefer tunnelling directly through mountain passes as opposed to going around them in any way. this leads to 5-6 kilometre tunnels, with an occasional massive 15-18 kilometre tunnel. As far as I know, this is a european thing that occurs all over the continent, so it is not just in the Alps, it is also in the mountain ranges in Spain and Scandinavia.

Finally, their cars are smarter than ours. WAY smarter. Although it has been a while since I've been in a car with the full GPS setup, I'm pretty sure that the cars here are far more advanced than the ones here. If not, feel free to correct and call me stupid and backwards in the comments. So, essentially what this GPS has is a display of the up-to-date speed limit in the top right hand corner (reminder that the speed limits in areas are constantly changing), a map (obviously), a little screen pops up welcoming you into a country every time you cross a border. Finally, and most impressively, a driver alert system. How this works is that when you cross a sideline, change lanes without indicating, or drive unsteadily, a beeping alert goes off. If enough of these go off, the car determines that you need a rest, and a coffee cup icon lights up on the dash. I'm sorry if we do have this in Canada, but I had never seen anything like this before and I think it should be required to be installed in all new cars by law. Very helpful device.

Ok, I'm sorry if I bored you all to tears with this, but I felt it was something I should cover at some stage. As always, if you have a question or a recommendation for a new article or how to improve future articles, post it in the comments below. Sorry for the lack of photos (again!) but don't worry, I'll have plenty of pictures of the alps for you later (you can call that a preview, if you like).

See you all later