Driving around the world

Somehow, despite being working class white trash from the arse end of the world, I've driven cars  in different countries all over the world. It's fucking scary when you don't know the language and can't read the road signs - and I remain deeply apologetic to all those poor bastards I held up while I was crawling around some of the great regions of the world - but it's always been incredibly fun, and allowed us to get to places we could only ever have dreamed about before.

After all that, I'm confident in saying that my least favourite fellow drivers in the world are New Zealanders, who can turn passive aggressiveness into an artform in all walks of life, including out on the road. It's immensely frustrating, and as one of them who has driven on a daily basis since the early 90s, I can say they are terrible motorists, just terrible.

But my favourite drivers to share the road with are the Americans. No question.

Americans in general are remarkably polite They can sometimes be the most boorish and crude people when you see them while traveling around the world, but are always welcoming and generous on home turf. There's a lot of different sides to all the different parts of the USA, but this is a universal.

I'm not sure how much of it has to do with the idea that people are just nicer to each other because they're all scared the other guy might be packing a gun, or because it has a big tip culture that requires fake politeness to gather desperately needed revenue, but I'm just going to assume it's just because they're all very nice people. 

And they actually know how to drive. The freeways and cities get crammed like anywhere else in the world, but drivers across America are comfortable with merging, and know how to use a goddamn roundabout, and fully understand the appeal of acceleration.

The country is built for it, escaping the ancient street patterns of Europe and Asia, every town with phenomenally wide streets to spin your tank around, with massive links between all the great cities.

And a lot of the culture is burned into that white line nightmare. You can do a road movie in any country, but America has the distance and the existential void behind the bravado. It has the endless interstates, those weird offshots into Buttfuck Indiana, and the gothic rot of the deep south hiding beneath concrete overpasses. It has the infinite desert which sucks you in, the long roads through ancient mountains still covered in heavy woods.

The age of the private car might already have peaked, because we can't all keep driving like we're do without facing some severe environmental consequences. But while it lasted, Americans were the best drivers I ever knew.

Australians are the second best drivers in the world, and not just in a Mad Max way. I still think they're a pack of lousy motorists, but they'll tell you about it to your face and get it out of everybody's systems.