I seem to recall that, in Ontario at least, there was a deliberate policy of not marking roads very well. The rationale was that good, easy to see, unambiguous road markings encourage faster driving, and therefore more accidents! If the roads are badly lit and marked, people have to drive much more slowly, therefore it's safer. There was something on TV about this a few years back in a program on different road standards around the world.

I must say that I can't really agree with this logic. Remembering driving around Belleville, where my family used to live, during winter nights, you certainly saw plenty of locals roaring around at 50-60 miles an hour on roads where you could barely see the lane markings on a sunny day, never mind at night when it was snowing The lack of markings didn't seem to make them slow down at all.

On the other hand, the 401 highway, which by UK terms is a fairly good dual carriageway with wider-than-normal lanes seemed to inspire fear and awe in most of the local inhabitants, where a UK driver would just drive happily and safely down it at 80MPh. Going this slowly, of course, because it was after all a different country with different rules

It was always amusing to hear it described as packed, when in UK terms it was practically empty. Packed is three lanes of traffic doing 70+ four feet apart on the M3, not two lanes of 55-60 traffic with two hundred meter gaps between vehicles.

Despite that, we seem to get a lot less accidents in the UK than I saw in Ontario on a per mile basis. Florida, on a trip there a few years ago, was almost unbelievably worse from that point of view, and even less traffic as well.

pca