OddThinking

When I moved to Sweden, I was a little inexperienced with manual gearboxes. I had driven them before, but not much.

So my first day driving to work alone was a challenge – it wasn’t far, but I was driving on a different side of the road, with a different car, with an unfamiliar gearbox to an unfamiliar location.

I boldly set off, and without any hesitation, turned the wrong way at the very first intersection. I had driven a couple of kilometres before I convinced myself that this was not looking good, so I turned right at a traffic light, off the main road into a small side-road.

I did a U-turn in the side-road, and drove back up a little hill, coming to a stop at the red traffic light – which was suddenly green! I lurched forward, still in a high gear, and the car stalled. The light turned red.

I mentally steeled myself for a hill-start, and waited for the light to turn green…

…and waited.

…and waited.

I was just mulling over how ridiculously long the traffic light cycles were in Sweden, when I noticed something odd: the red light wasn’t a circle, but a letter S… and the unlit green light was a vertical bar.

Artist’s Impression of the Traffic Lights

I was just wondering what the special symbols could mean when a bus came up behind me, beeping his horn and barrelling straight towards me, barely slowing down!

I was, perhaps, a more than a little bit offput by this… I was offput shitless! So, it will come as no surprise to learn that the lights turned green at that point and I stalled the car for a second time.

The bus screamed to a halt right behind me… and then it started reversing!

I looked around wildly trying to guess what the driver was up to. Did he want to go around me? Overtake me? There was nowhere to go. What did he want me to do? I had a stop light in front of me. Well, more accurately, a red S light, but surely that means stop, even to the crazy Swedish bus-drivers?

He kept going back, and back, and back. His seemed to think he was a tram, reversing back to the depot. Before I found out his plan, the green vertical bar lit up again, and I managed to get around the corner without further excitement.

I arrived late at work that morning, instilled with a strong sense of fear about driving in the suburbs of Stockholm.

It was some time later that I pieced together the facts, and the whole incident started to make sense.

The side-road was a one-way street for cars. The lane coming back the other way was a bus-lane only. I’m sure it was explained very clearly in Swedish.

The buses were given priority at the lights – there was a sensor in the road back from the lights which caused them to change. I triggered the sensor, the lights turned green, I stalled the first time, the lights went to red, and stayed red, until the bus triggered the sensor.

“Get ready to go now!” the bus driver was probably muttering to me as he beeped his horn. “Go now! Let’s go through the green light cycle together!” Well, he probably wasn’t muttering that, but maybe a Swedish equivalent.

When I stalled the second time, I think he probably stopped muttering and started yelling.

He realised the only way to get of this impasse was to back the bus up over the sensor to get the lights to change again.

That’s about when I escaped.

I would like to humbly apologise to the bus-driver for the stress caused, to the passengers in the bus that were thrown around by the sudden stops, and made late by unnecessary reversing and also to the Swedish Road Administration whose images I hacked.