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Apple says Edinburgh to Skye is a 3.5 hour drive, mostly along the A9. My understanding is A roads in the UK are much like USA interstates. What makes the trip
by theoreticalmal 7mo ago
Apple says Edinburgh to Skye is a 3.5 hour drive, mostly along the A9. My understanding is A roads in the UK are much like USA interstates. What makes the trip terrifying and slower than what Apple says?
- mm0lqf 7mo ago> My understanding is A roads in the UK are much like USA interstates. Not in Scotland, some of them aren't dualled (just a single carriageway in each direction), narrow, windey, full of terrible potholes and animals you can hit etc... its a 5-6 hour drive in reality source: Live in Edinburgh
- tolien 7mo agoGoogle Maps says between 5 and 6 hours and 227 miles - doing that in 3.5 hours would be averaging 65mph. Good luck with that, especially when the speed limit on the A9 itself is 60 mph for cars! The US interstate is probably more comparable with UK motorways.
- ErroneousBosh 7mo agoI can safely do it in good conditions in six hours and I'd consider myself a very experienced driver for that route, having driven from Skye to Glasgow or Edinburgh and back a couple of times a week for years.
- tolien 7mo agoAbsolutely, doing it in half that time would be madness though!
- ErroneousBosh 7mo agoDoing it in half the time would be impossible. To travel 250 miles in three hours you'd need to keep up an average of 83mph-ish for the whole journey. I shouldn't think there are many places you can reach a peak speed of 83mph for long on the whole road.
- tolien 7mo agoSome lunatic will take it as a challenge :-) (and become a statistic)
- ErroneousBosh 7mo agoBoth Apple and Google Maps greatly underestimate travel times on anything other than perfectly straight motorways. If you've never driven here before you can at least double their estimate, easily - and that assumes you are at least reasonably proficient at driving on the left at all. The A9 is the most dangerous road in Europe, and you'll be doing 50mph at most along that because there's nowhere to overtake and that's the maximum speed trucks can go at, so you'll end up in a queue behind a truck. Depending on the route you take, you might go through Inverness, in which case once you get off the A9 most of the road you'll be on looks like this, for about 120 miles: https://maps.app.goo.gl/9L5cSejT1eyAVR2E7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/9L5cSejT1eyAVR2E7 Once you get to Dalwhinnie you can turn off the A9 and start heading across to the A82, which is really pretty especially in the snow but will be mostly road like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/qv1L21jk59EEAHZs9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/qv1L21jk59EEAHZs9 Notice how it's not actually wide enough for two cars? But that's still a 60mph road, although you'd be lucky to be getting up to more than about 50mph. And you'll be driving on the wrong side of the road, in an unfamiliar car, with a manual gearbox. Good luck.
- arethuza 7mo agoThe A9 is actually pretty scary in parts because it alternates between dual carriageway and single carriageway and people have been known to get that wrong and thing they are on a dual carriageway when it is a single carriageway...
- ErroneousBosh 7mo agoI've done that and I've driven on the A9 hundreds if not thousands of times. What's worse is that the inbuilt mapping in a lot of new cars think bits of it are 70mph dual carriageway when it's still single carriageway, and vice-versa.
- arethuza 7mo agoSame - driven up and down there countless times, but I still sometimes get alarmed on some of the dual carriageway parts where you can't see the other carriageway and I have a momentary panic of "This is a dual carriageway, isn't it?".