An American Driving in Europe, [part 2]

 Part 2: Hitting the road…

Alright… you’ve read our ‘part 1’ blog on things you should know before driving in Europe and now find yourself behind the wheel and ready to explore. Although none of the following is rocket-science and can all be figured out as you encounter them, there are a few I wish I had known ahead of our time road-tripping through Northern Europe.

GPS reduces the road-trip workload substantially; especially with CarPlay. That said, there are a few gotchas. GPS does not work great in cities who route ring-road traffic underground. Remember that notion of excellent walkability and bikeability? Oslo is a good example. As soon as you get near the city, you go underground. This means your GPS no longer works. The exits off the ring-road are also underground which means you either need to pay attention to the exit names (which is some cases are VERY long Viking odes…), or you need to pay attention to mileage in between way points. Either way, it requires a bit more effort than driving the blue line, even when traveling from one part of the city to another.

GPS pro-tip - In cities with underground traffic… When you want directions from one place in the city to another by car, you can’t simply enter your destination and hit “Start”. If there are underground roads beneath where you’re starting, the GPS may think you are already on that road (even though GPS doesn’t work underground) and try to route you that way… through the center of the buildings on the surface. When you start driving above ground, the GPS freaks out and can’t recover. To prevent this you need to also put in the starting point of your journey rather than allow the default, “current location”. We had one very frustrating drive to a ferry through downtown Stockholm due to the starting point at our hotel being located directly over one of the main underground roads in Stockholm.

In case you're wondering... this is the German sign for "No Speed Limit"

Speed Limit enforcement varies widely country to country. In Czechia there were times when the flow of traffic was about 100kmh (60mph!!!) higher than the posted limit (Woo-hoo!). The converse to that is The Netherlands where I got a ticket for 4km (~2.5mph) over the posted limit. Ironically, Germany with its stretches of unlimited speeds is also known to be very legalistic when enforcing posted limits.

Speed cameras are everywhere. This was especially a bummer for those of us who live in California where speed cameras on the highway are illegal. We in the golden state can only be penalized for speeding if we get pulled over by an officer of the law. In Europe, it’s very rare to see law officers on the highways. When you do, we were told they could care less about the speeders (unless you’re a danger). Instead, cops on the road are looking for smugglers. They leave speed enforcement to cameras, but even this varies from country to country. So far, we believe The Netherlands has the most speed cameras of any country we’ve driven in. In some areas they were less than a mile apart, and there’s no warning with some of them being hidden on the backs of signs making them invisible until it’s too late. In other countries, they would put signs up saying, “Hey… we have a speed camera in 4.5km. Slow down.” In both cases, it was clear that the locals were able to game the cameras. I’ve been passed by cars going 160kph+ in The Netherlands, and then slamming on their brakes just before a speed camera to go by at 100kph. I’ve thought about simply following one of the faster drivers who knows where the cameras are… but how much could I trust them?

Keeping windows clean is difficult. Unlike the US, gas stations typically do not have window washing equipment available for use. We learned to keep a bottle of Windex and some paper towels in the car with us. Similarly, it’s important to make sure your window-washing fluid is topped off at the start of your journey. That said, many gas stations had special pumps selling windshield washing fluid.

Gas in Europe is FAR better than what we have in the US. The lowest grade EU gas is better than our high-octane gas in the US. The higher grade gas you can find in nearly every EU country is closer to race fuel than to US gas. The nearest station to our house has 98 octane gas. In Germany I pumped 100 octane. The only bummer is the price. In Sweden driving between Copenhagen and Oslo, we paid about $9.17 per gallon. The lowest we paid was just under $6 per gallon in Lithuania. Our gas in Amsterdam is roughly $8 per gallon.

Parking… Ugh. This is likely the worst part of driving in Europe. When we planned our trip, we had to do extensive research to determine what hotels had their own parking. For many hotels, they don’t have parking, and are a mile or more from the nearest public parking. Worse still, in at least two of the hotels we used, parking was extremely limited with a “first come, first served” policy. When we rolled into our Helsinki hotel, we got the last spot in the garage and got to witness the next unlucky guest show up ~10 minutes after us and be told there weren’t any spots left.

You will also need a parking timer for many areas you want to stop. Because parking is so much of an issue, cars will be ticketed or towed if left for too long in public parking. Unlike the US, there are no parking meters. There are lots where you pay at a central box, but for most public areas, parking is free for 2 hours. In these cases you will need a parking timer to show when your parking started. We were warned in German strip mall that we would receive a ticket within minutes without one.

Car sizes are also problematic. In the US, we seem to think bigger is always better. Suburbans, Wagoneers, Hummers, all full-size trucks… none of these would be driveable in most of Europe. The older sections of most cities are over 1000 years old. Streets are narrow and wind in ways that simply won’t accommodate a vehicle that’s 20 feet long and weighs over 4 tons. Even if you steer clear of city centers, you’re still not gonna be able to park. On our journey, our Cayenne (which is small in comparison to most American SUVs) struggled in some of these areas. In one parking garage, Laura and Alex needed to exit the car before I wedged it into a tiny parking spot with one mirror less than an inch from a wall so that I could barely open my door to exit the car. In another parking garage, the Cayenne had less than 6” at both the front and back on the elevator that took me underground to the parking. We loved having the Cayenne on our trip, but there were some anxious moments. In multiple underground garages, you drove a spiral down and up. In all of these, it was a trick to go down and up with the bumper sensors at the front and rear of the car yelling at me the entire time. Before this trip, I didn’t know the sensors at the front and rear had different tones… you only realize that when they’re both going off at the same time!

Our Dutch garage...

In our case, deciding to have a car in Amsterdam limited where we could live. Unlike the US, most homes do not have driveways and garages in the Netherlands. Garages originally built for a home have in most cases been converted to offices, playrooms, or extra bedrooms. In the Amsterdam city center, a permit is required to park on the street, with some permits taking months to get. We were exceptionally lucky to find a home with a garage that had not been converted. As expected, we are the only one of our neighbors that uses our garage for a car. 

Roads narrow to better control speed. This takes some getting used to… even in smaller cars. In the US, we have wide roads nearly everywhere. In Europe, cities have figured out that changing the width of a road better controls the speed of the cars on that road. For instance, a road through residential area might only be the width of a single car and two bike lanes. What this means is that cars must drive slower as you’re much closer to the bikers, and need to pass oncoming traffic with extreme care. In more densely populated areas, they might also have chicanes or choke points with special barriers that literally squeeze all traffic in both directions down to a width barely wide enough for a single car. In other words, you know that jackass that gets off work at 1am and screams through the neighborhood at 3-4x the speed limit? That’s not possible here.

This same logic of changing the road to influence driving speeds is also done on highways. In areas where they want cars to drive slower, they reduce the lane widths. On a highway with two narrow lanes in each direction, it's extremely difficult to speed. There were sections in Poland where I could not go faster than 55mph without dramatically raising the risk of crashing into the guy next to me. Ironically, we saw zero accidents in these areas. In at least one section of Netherland highway, we saw one lane of a 4 lane highway shutdown for no other reason than to slow the speed of traffic… something you would NEVER see in the US.

Bathrooms on the road are not always available, and when they are, they are paid. This doesn’t seem like all that big a deal until you stop after 4 hours on the road really needing to relieve your bladder only to find that there is a bathroom, but it requires coins in a currency you don’t yet have in your pocket, and can’t get until you find an ATM, and a place to get change. Some of the bathrooms took cards… but not US credit cards. We practiced the habit of always keeping .5, 1, and 2 Euro coins in the car for this reason. The good news is that all the paid restrooms we used were exceptionally clean.

Safety was never a concern on our trip. We were told to be wary of pick-pockets, but never worried about our physical safety. We also never worried about the car, but we seldom left stuff in the car unattended. In general, the EU cities we visited were FAR safer than American cities. I can’t think of any major US city I could visit for the first time with Alex, and send him to venture off on his own at 12 years old… yet that’s exactly what we did in Brno, Czechia. Without getting too political here… the main difference is that EU countries have much better social programs which narrows the gap between rich and poor. Put simply, you don’t have people stealing in order to feed their children.

Traffic in Europe is much more orderly. In 7000kms, I had to pass someone on the right twice. In the US that would have been hundreds of times. Other than drivers pulling caravans, I would rate the average EU driver a B+. In comparison, I would rate the average US driver a D. You simply don’t find the cluelessness of US drivers in Europe. The left lane is for passing The right lane is for slower traffic and trucks. Amazing how hard that is for US drivers to understand. That doesn’t mean EU drivers don’t drive aggressively. Drivers in Czechia were a level above those in major US cities (think: LA, SF, DC, Atlanta, etc). Even more nerve racking, they’re aggressive at the higher speeds. We had one instance in between Brno and Prague at ~140mph where I had to back off and yield to someone who wanted a piece of road more than I did. He wasn’t driving dangerously, just aggressive.

The one exception to the EU drivers being much better than the US is… eh-hem… Holland. Interestingly enough, the Dutch have some of the best roads in all of europe… but with the lowest speed limits, and the worst drivers. We see the highest rate of accidents in Holland of all the countries we’ve visited so far… even though they are driving substantially slower on excellent roads. Also very strange - Dutch highway speed limits are 100kph during the day, and 120kph at night. Yes. You read that correctly - When visibility goes down and people start drinking, the speed limits go up. As a car guy, Holland might be my least favorite country to drive in of the 20+ I’ve driven in around the world. To be fair, this is one of the few negatives I can say about The Netherlands.

Road quality is generally quite high in the EU. That said, in the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, Estonia… and even remote Finland) Carplay routed us onto dirt roads. Other than driving to the Russian border, this was usually to route us around heavy traffic. In a Cayenne SUV, this was fun. It would have been less fun in a Porsche 911. Other than these few areas, even the roads to the remote areas were very high quality. Driving through Czechia to reach the remote towns around the Punka Caverns, the roads were awesome. If I ever do a European Delivery option for a new Porsche 911… I will be heading back to Czechia! 

Conclusion - we highly recommend road-tripping through Northern Europe if you get the opportunity. This might be our favorite family adventure of all time.