‘Shouldn’t the title be ‘dual carriageway’? I hear you ask.
No, I chose my words carefully, because many drivers’ everyday experience owes more to a battle of wills than a smooth run on a road with plenty of room for everyone.
We have a lot of roads in this country. The trouble is many aren’t particularly wide, and not just the country lanes. Our towns and cities – with a few notable exceptions – have street layouts that if not medieval, certainly predate the arrival of modern motor vehicles.
Even where there are two lanes there’s generally nowhere to stop without bringing it down to a single lane that has to carry traffic in both directions.
Civilised ways
It sounds intolerable, and it would be if we hadn’t learned civilised ways to get along with each other. And that brings me to two hand signals that are not in the Highway Code.
The first is the ‘thank-you wave’. A parked vehicle means you will have to overtake. But a driver is coming the other way. So you wait, they come forward, and give you a ‘thank-you wave’. They don’t have to. But it is one of those courtesies that make living on a crowded island a bit more bearable.
Consider the opposite scenario – the parked car is blocking the other side of the road, you approach with caution and an oncoming driver sails blithely toward you, swinging onto your side of the road forcing you to stop, before going on their way. Not a wave, not a nod of the head, the driver doesn’t even spare you a look.
What does the Highway Code have to say about buses having to stop from time to time? “Give priority to these vehicles when you can do so safely, especially when they signal to pull away from stops.”
It is in the nature of buses that they need to stop from time to time. That, frankly, is the whole point.
Thumbs up
So we stop too, and we wait while the driver deals with their passengers before signalling to pull out and then, on a good day, sticks out their hand with a thumbs-up. That’s the second signal, the bus drivers’ version of the ‘thank-you wave’.
It is particularly pertinent when the bus needs to rejoin the carriageway from a bus-stop lay-by, nosing out into the traffic flow.
It isn’t compulsory. But whenever it happens to me I feel just that bit better about complying with the request to ‘please let the bus go first’. And that, I think, is what we all want.
