In the UK it's actually not illegal: it's just advised against, and considered bad form in most situations by most drivers. And, of course, if you cause an accident by undertaking the police will (rightly) throw the book at you.

Examples where it's considered acceptable to undertake:

- In heavier or queuing traffic inside lanes might move faster than outside lanes: this is OK, and it's considered better and safer to stay in lane than keep changing lanes to overtake.

- Motorcycles filtering through traffic, which generally occurs between the middle and outside lane on motorways. Where gaps are bigger motorcyclists will often move from the outside to middle lanes to get around slow moving vehicles in the outside lane. Again, this tends to apply when traffic is heavier.

Perhaps worse in terms of consistency. Private drivers education, public school drivers education, or uncle Bob can just teachya!

The testing is remarkably pathetic. It's impressive this system works as well as it does. Red light runners, meh, just fine them! Pot smokers, fine and imprison them even if they weren't near a vehicle!

Honestly it's so backwards.

My experiences of driving in Italy point to a slight disregard for the law in that case - I've never seen more egregious undertaking than I have on the motorways there... .

I used to hold that position too, but then I realized a couple things that could fill several books. It boils down to the fact that the USA was essentially first to build a road network based on assumptions of low population density, high abundance and first to access requisite resources; and assuming a civilized society with a baseline of standards, culture, and customs that were essentially tacit and implicit to the system without having to be regulated or explicitly managed.

If you are European, although the significantly increased government control of its population will mitigate things somewhat, reality is that as Europe has now imbued itself with third world people and the customs and proclivities they carry, the road behaviors will also change even more than they clearly have, as anyone who has driven in Europe for more than 20 or so years, can attest to.

And before anyone gets triggered on some conditioned and well trained pavlovian assumptions, what I described above was equally observable when East Germans started meshing with West Germany, where after 55 years of having been exposed to relentless psychological engineering to break East Germans of their German-ness and proclivities and identity, they lacked what are commonly understood to be certain German traits and preferences for methodical order, systematic structure, and social courtesy; all of which the East Germans had far less of a connection to. That led to a lot of poor driving on roads and that has really not changed all that much either since as anyone who spends any distinct time on West German Roads and East German roads can attest to, even though the impact is being muddled by things like Polish drivers in East Germany and increasingly foreign drivers from all over the place.

Essentially it also comes down to the fact that now people with drivers licenses from various other European countries with lower driving standards, are also just allowed to drive in Germany without having to meet the far higher German driving class standards. It's yet another way in which democracy itself is being utterly disassembled, as foreign minorities are advantaged over native majorities … a total in version of democracy and even basic morality and ethics.

As for the USA, things have gotten so bad in many states that just ignoring the overcapacity of most of the road system due to unfettered and uncontrolled invasion by foreigners driving on US roads, you now have a whole ethnic driving license racket going on where an ethnic communities pass their own in spite of essentially not passing or being safe drivers.

I know that is not what people here want to hear, but reality simply is that this whole system is failing and it is failing due to deliberate bugs intentionally injected, and instead of fixing those bugs, people are just covering them up and making excuses and using ever mounting number of hacks to obscure and hide the ever more brittle system. It's quite telling that even in this kind of forum no one seems to understand that they are looking at a totally broken system and one that is failing at every increasing speed; all while willfully ignoring the inevitable cascading and total failure.

So many aspects about driving in the US are so terrible.

The road conditions are pretty bad, and what i would like to understand are the gas taxes and other taxes which ostensibly go into road infra.

We have high gas taxes and drive more miles than most countries on the planet - where is that money going?

Some countries have high vehicle costs and their roads to me seem pristine and perfect by comparison. Specifically in fresh memory is both Singapore and Hong Kong.

The condition of their roads just seem to be flawless.

In the US we even have potholes jokingly having birthdays thrown for them, gas prices include large per gallon taxes and road conditions never appear to improve - and yearly reports of “crumbling infrastructure” and “deteriorating dangerous bridges” keep coming out.