Category: Road Life

Let’s de-toll the M6 Toll

In the wake of yesterday’s court ruling that the extension of London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to the outer suburbs can go ahead in the face of opposition from Conservative-controlled outer London borough...

An unfortunately necessary upgrade

Last week, the government announced that a proposed upgrade to the M3 motorway’s junction with the A34 outside Winchester, a cause of major delays going back years, had been accepted for consideration by the...

Let’s put a stop to the dashcam vigilantes

In recent years a genre of videos has emerged on YouTube: compilations of dashcam clips, showing everything from actual crashes, some of which look like they must have been fatal, through hair-raisingly stupid and...

It’s not just Brexit

Anyone who shops in any British supermarket (which is to say, pretty much anyone who lives in the UK) will have noticed that there are shortages of some goods, with some whole areas of...

How our road rules feed road rage

A couple of weeks ago I saw a video shared of a driver of a large car using his vehicle to damage someone’s bike (nearly injuring the cyclist’s leg in the process) before driving...

What3Words, 999 and faulty geography

Earlier this week it was reported that the mobile app What3Words, used to generate ‘unique’ three-word codes for any location so as to direct rescuers or the emergency services and is used by some...

Stonehenge by-pass is vital

As a truck driver I have regularly had to use the A303 which goes past Stonehenge, the prehistoric stone-circle monument in Wiltshire. In today’s Observer there is a piece by Tom Holland which claims...

Time to put a stop to the 20mph zone fad

Over the past few years, a number of boroughs in London have imposed 20mph speed limits across most or all of the roads under their control (which in London is all except motorways and...

Yes, we need our hands-free phones.

Last week it was reported that the UK Parliament’s transport select committee (a committee of MPs drawn proportionally from each party with seats in the Commons) had recommended that consideration be given to the...

999 (is no joke)

Last Saturday I was driving an articulated lorry down the M1 in Derbyshire, on the way back from delivering a trailer load of Mars bars to a depot outside Chesterfield, and I saw a...

The distraction of in-car touch screens

From Popular Mechanics, via OSNews: When I’m in charge of a car company, we’re going to have one strict rule about interior design: Make it so it doesn’t cause you to crash the car. You’d...