One of my serious concerns in moving to Edmonton was, how will the driving be? This is not a flip question, as any Angeleno can confirm. Driving comfort matters in city life, especially in big, spread-out post-automobile cities like LA and Edmonton.

Edmonton's pretty good. The speed limits are funky -- I still don't have a visceral understanding of 50, 60, 80, 90, 110 kph the way I understand 25, 35, 50, 65 mph. People don't really know how to drive here, especially when there's a little traffic. People check for space but ignore speed on freeway lane-changes, a typical bad habit in low-density traffic areas (I've noticed the same thing in Albuquerque).

Where Edmonton mainly suffers is in the road design. Somehow, Edmonton managed to hire perpetually drunken road and highway engineers to creatively destroy the driving habitat of the city. I feel certain that these engineers were imported from the San Francisco Bay Area, which is the worst driving environment I've ever had the extreme discomfort of living and driving in. Some examples follow:

Suicide Merges: A "suicide merge" is a freeway entrance/exit that requires exiting freeway traffic to cross the traffic stream that's entering the freeway. Typically, the entrance rolls onto a new lane parallel to the freeway, lane-changing is allowed between the new lane and the freeway for some distance, and then the lane exits from the freeway. Suicide merges are tempting because they're economical in land, but they can't handle traffic growth the way a conventional cloverleaf merge can. They're very popular in the Bay Area -- sometimes only allowing about 50 yards (about 12 car lengths) for merging traffic to get up to freeway speed, find a slot in traffic, and merge in. Bizarrely, they're also popular on Edmonton freeways, where land is ... shall we say, not at a premium.

Bizarre lane direction: This is a problem of design which can sometimes be fixed by repainting or re-signing. Even though cheap fixes are available, nothing is done about it, leading me to believe that the engineers in charge are criminally stupid.

One Bay Area example: about two miles before the 13 southbound terminates into the 580 (a two-lane freeway joining a five-lane interstate), the left lane is signed as "580 East" and the right lane is signed as "580 West". The conventional interpretation of this signage is if you want to go east, you'd better get in the left lane. In fact, to go 580 West you must soon exit right from the right lane. If you stay in the right lane, you pass first the 580 West exit; an ordinary street exit; and then you get onto 580 East. (That's right: both lanes ultimately go onto 580 East.) I can't count how many times I've seen Pokey the Family Minivan switch into the left lane on seeing the first sign, and roll on in the left lane for two miles at 50 for no reason.

Edmonton example: If you turn left from Calgary Trail Northbound(*) (major N-S surface street corridor) onto the Whitemud Freeway (major E-W highway), there's a four-lane rollup to the freeway entrance. Left lane is turn only onto Calgary Trail Southbound; the next two lanes (#2 and #3 lanes) are freeway entrance lanes; from the right lane, after crossing the intersection, you can either get into the #3 lane and try for the freeway or else go straight ahead and go on a service road paralleling the freeway. On the freeway, the #2 and #3 lanes merge with the three existing freeway lanes, sort of. Actually the #2 lanes merges immediately with the freeway #3 lane (looking over your shoulder as you're coming down a hill, look out for semis), and the #3 lane becomes the freeway's #4 lane which is exit-only for 111th St. -- the same destination as the service road. The exit ramp for 111th St. is approximately twice as long as the suicide merge distance between the Calgary Trail entrance and the breakoff for 111th St.

What makes this all worse is that Calgary Trail Northbound is Highway 2 (Alberta's major N-S road; incidentally the main access road from the international airport) up to the Whitemud, and then the 2 continues along the Whitemud. So in order to stay on the 2, you have to do the following:

• Get in the #1 lane of Calgary Trail as you approach the Whitemud.
  
• After the big blue building (it's an IKEA, but you can't tell that from this direction), change into the new leftmost lane that was just created.
  
• Turn left at the second light, making sure to wind up in the #2 lane.
  
• Go straight through the next light, getting on the onramp to the Whitemud Freeway.
  
• Accelerate downhill and merge left with freeway traffic at 80-100kph. Beware of merges from your right as people try to avoid the immediate exit/suicide merge onto 111th St.
  

But overall the driving in Edmonton is decent. The drivers are courteous, at least compared to Berkeley driving practices, which is what this post was originally going to be about.

* "Calgary Trail" is of course the traditional Edmonton name for the road that leads to Calgary -- which is Highway 2 for most of its length. Inside Edmonton, it's a major N-S surface corridor on the south side of the city consisting of two one-way roads a block apart called "Calgary Trail Southbound" and "Calgary Trail Northbound". Recently, the northbound road was renamed "Gateway Boulevard" because some astute idiot pointed out that you can't get to Calgary by going north. I will continue to use the traditional name, because everyone else in Edmonton still does. Twenty years from now people will still be saying things like "Get on Calgary Trail Northbound -- you know, Gateway Blvd -- and ...." My wife's relatives still give directions in terms of "the first old traffic circle" and "the second old traffic circle" -- and these traffic circles were removed at least ten years ago.