This is something I’ve been meaning to write about for ages but keep forgetting! The Winchester to Birmingham Megabus route uses the A34 from Winchester until well past Oxford where we join the M40. And it’s the A34 which I nominate as the politest road in the UK. This is a busy dual carriageway road linking the South Coast with the industrial Midlands and consequently has a fairly high proportion of lorries using it. For those who don’t know both lorries and coaches have speed limiting devices fitted to them by law – lorries are restricted to 90kph and coaches 100kph. So the differential means that coaches are quicker than lorries, but not that much quicker, and coaches can therefore take some time to pass a lorry, or several in convoy. Of course, the cars are quicker still and it’s the cars which are reluctant to let a coach into the outside the lane to overtake a lorry. On many similar roads you can be following a slower lorry, have your right hand indicator flashing away because you want to pull out and overtake, but still the cars keep passing you nose to tail (as tight as possible) and ‘defending’ what they see as their sole property, the outside lane. Sometimes you just have to be a little assertive if you ever expect to get by the truck :-( Not, however, on the A34 :-) On the A34 as soon as you indicate that you want to pull out and overtake you see a headlight flash to say ‘OK pull over’. Such politeness gets a return for the car driver too, the coach will pull in quickly once it’s passed the slower vehicle because it knows it can get out again when it needs too. If getting out is difficult human nature says once you’re there stay there as long as you can and overtake those lorries on the horizon!