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Perhaps middle-aged blokes SHOULDN'T try 34-hour-long road trips

Not if it's just to dodge some taxes, anyway ...

Choose a lane, gawd dammit

Or perhaps there is: I could imagine that it should be the faster people who have to merge just because, hmm, they're faster and more manoeuvrable. The point being though that no one is going to change this. Not so much because of the expense of changing all of the road markings, rather the expense of changing all of the drivers' habits of the entire nation.

So I don't think that anyone will ever change this: just as I don't think any country, not now (as far as I know, the last was Iceland in the 1960s), is going to change left hand or right hand drive. But, youse guys is mostly engineers and, who knows, perhaps one or more of you works with or as a roads type engineer. So which, in theory, is the best system?

If we were starting with a blank slate would we have the slow lane merging back into the traffic flow, or the fast lane?

The other thing I noted was that the various governments are pretty good at skinning you with motorway tolls. Well, as that free market type that I am I should probably approve of this: users of such infrastructure should be the people paying for such infrastructure.

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But in the middle of the boring night part of the trip (before the terrifying bit of it, zooming around Bilbao's vertiginous road system during a 3AM thunderstorm) I noted that the French and Spanish systems are really very different.

South of Bourdeaux, near to Biarritz and on the way to San Sebastian, etc, the French have a series of tolls. You are charged a flat fee for each segment, money you throw into an automatic collector. If you need to pay by note it will make change, it counts the change you throw into it: it's an auto toll.

On the other side of the border in Spain there are similar tolls leading to Bilbao and Burgos. But these are not automated. They have a live human being taking your cash, even if it's the exact change, for each segment. Spain is thus using a labour intensive toll collection method, France a capital intensive one.

And if we're to be honest, collecting tolls at 4AM from angry Englishmen* is probably one of the first jobs that we'd like to automate.

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