Usually what they do here is they have a white line painted on the side of a wide road to divide the lane from the hard shoulder, my guess is to narrow it, could be another reason though, even on our narrower roads there is still a white line on the side, even though there is no hard shoudler there. It also depends, if it's a road with more than 1 lane there is often a concrete barrier down the middle where the painted yellow line would be. Also you'd be surprised at how many people here are driving regular old sedans and hatchbacks, of course there are still a lot of big trucks and suv's here still, I don't think those are going away here any time soon.