Just after a major motorway crash is probably not the best time to be discussing raising the speed limit, but having driven on motorways many a time lately (namely those from here to Maidstone — M25, M26 and M20 and, occasionally, the A2/M2 from Dartford to Chatham), I think it likely that not many vehicles in that collision were doing 80mph. There were several trucks involved, and if some of them had been overtaking others, none of them would have been doing much more than 56mph, as they have limiters fitted which prevents them going faster than that, by law. So, two of three lanes would have had traffic going less than 60mph. The other lane (trucks are banned from the outermost lane on carriageways with more than two lanes) might have included cars trying to overtake the line of trucks. What often happens is that a truck will suddenly pull out in front of a car that is coming up behind, because the truck in front slows down, causing the driver of the car to swerve into the outside lane, which might well cause cars behind to brake suddenly. Visibility can often be reduced drastically by spray and low light (or night), and on many motorways (the M26 in Kent is one example), the cats’ eyes are no longer there. Throw in a bit of smoke or fog and you have a recipe for a big pile-up like the one that happened in Somerset last Friday night. Nobody has to be doing much more than the car speed limit, which is 70mph. It is quite likely that nobody was doing 80mph or more on the M5 last Friday night.

Wilby makes the point that raising the speed limit to 80mph would bring us into line with Hungary and Slovenia, which have the highest limits and the worst road casualty rates, while the countries which have set low limits also have low casualty rates. However, this is only one part of the story: we do have a culture of adherence to road rules and of careful driving in this country, while anyone who has driven in the Mediterranean region will tell you that people there drive fast, and not just on motorways. I saw this in Greece when I was there on holiday in 1994: the taxi drivers will drive fast, even on two-lane roads which are not open roads. People in this country will speed, but will speed a little bit, particularly where they judge it to be safe or where a particular manoevre began at the speed limit leads to them not checking their speed for some time, and they will generally not cut corners.

Wilby also writes that motorists speed “not just because of a wish to cut journey times but also because speed is thrilling, particularly to men”. The problem is that speeding for a thrill can be done more effectively on two-lane roads — the sense of danger is somewhat heightened when visibility is lowered. It is also quite possible to get a “speed thrill” by doing 40mph or 50mph on a rural road where the speed limit is 60mph but the road conditions do not really permit doing anything like this safely. I have been with drivers delivering small commercial vehicles (cars and car-format vans) and I found that this behaviour is quite common, particularly when groups of (certain types of) young men are together. I would add that it is a thrill to the driver, because he is in control, and perhaps to like-minded passengers. It is not a thrill to someone (of either sex) who is not along for a death ride but simply wants to finish their job and go home. For someone like that, it is just frightening.

I am not convinced that there are compelling environmental or road-safety reasons which prohibit raising the motorway speed limit on rural, open, six-lane motorways (not stretches like the M25 in west Surrey, which is covered by a variable speed limit already, or motorways such as the M26 and M50 with two lanes in each direction, all of them open to trucks). If it is raised, however, the new limit ought to be strictly enforced, such that anyone driving faster than that, except by the smallest of margins, should receive a fine and an endorsement (or perhaps it should be accompanied by a campaign encouraging drivers to stick to 70mph, treating the extra 10mph as a buffer zone). This way, the law is brought into line with common driving practice, yet the excessive speeds some drivers travel at can be curbed and punished.

However, when I was setting out on my work journey this morning, the cab radio was tuned to LBC, a commercial London talk station that I don’t normally listen to; I normally listen to BBC London. The callers and texters were coming out with the most outrageous things, insisting that the closure, and the works that were going on to make the bridge safe again, were all just “jobs for the boys” (i.e. they are just making work for the sake of it). I’m sure I heard mention of men standing around in yellow jackets doing nothing, and the repeated insistence that the people who had taken the decision to close the road did not know what they were talking about. One guy said he had seen the bridge and there wasn’t a scratch on it.

I don’t know if any of these people had seen it up close, or had done a thorough inspection of the fabric of the bridge, because whoever did decided to build another bridge underneath the present one to support it, as they had never seen a bridge that badly damaged in a fire. I understand that everyone is frustrated by not being able to use the road, but surely it’s better than the whole thing collapsing and people driving into a concrete ditch at 70mph. Why is it that people cannot accept that sometimes people know more than they do, even when they make unpopular decisions?

The Royal Mail is a heavily unionised organisation; they have stiff competition not only from the Internet, which makes the sending of an awful lot of letters simply unnecessary, but from the courier companies which seem to use an awful lot of casual labour, which frequently includes me. I worked for two of them this past week, in fact, delivering parcels to villages outside Guildford on Monday and Tuesday and offloading parcels from trailers in another big depot early on Friday morning (something I hope I don’t have to do too often). I got the impression, in that last job, that health and safety isn’t taken altogether seriously and frequently found myself dodging flying and falling parcels.

The courier companies rely on drivers with sat-navs, and commonly print address labels themselves rather than letting the customer address their own mail. This particular company prints labels which give a broad post town rather than the actual village the address is in, so an address in Worplesdon or Puttenham (both GU3 postcodes) is frequently given as Guildford, when in fact they are well outside Guildford. My A-to-Z atlas has the actual villages in the index, but not the postcodes, so looking up an address in GU3 is next to impossible as I don’t know what village the place is in. Worse, in rural areas they don’t use the “door number, street name, postcode” system, relying on house names, so we have to put the postcode into the sat-nav which takes us to a particular stretch of road. Well, if the street is a narrow, busy main road, we have to drive at 10mph while looking at the house names (not always prominently or legibly displayed) rather than at the road, and if we don’t see it, there is no place to turn round.

My local knowledge of the villages round Guildford is pretty limited, as I’ve never lived there and haven’t been able to walk the round to know where the houses are, which you do if you’re actually a postman. A courier company will get something through if it’s an easy delivery, preferably in an urban area. If your parcel is addressed to someone in a rural area and goes to a courier company’s depot on a day when the regular driver is off sick, the chances are they will send a driver from well outside the area to look for a needle in a haystack, and several relief drivers may fail to find it, resulting in a delay of several days. If you’ve got a parcel to send, it may well be better to send it by the Royal Mail, as the guy delivering it is much more likely to know where he’s going and won’t be a casual van driver as they don’t get postmen on a day-to-day basis from agencies. (Or at least, it’s not work I’ve ever been offered in ten years of agency work.)

(Image courtesy of FreeFoto.)

England is a small, densely populated country, and much as some say that we cannot keep allowing all and sundry in (as if we actually did that), we also cannot keep covering large tracts of productive land, which could be used to produce food or house people or situate industry, in tarmac. Or stones and metal, come to that — one of the less mentioned objections to this ridiculous railway they propose to build from London to Birmingham, to provide expensive journeys that take 15 or 30 minutes less than the tilting trains out of Euston (and along a much less direct route), is that it will take up an awful lot of productive agricultural land, besides cutting straight through sites of natural beauty in the Chiltern hills.

The same would be true of some of the motorways the geeks found on some road forums propose, such as the South Coast motorway. One of the more reasonable posters on one of these forums recently called these people “blue magic-marker fetishists”, referring to the colour for motorways on signs and most British maps. Currently, the main road across the South Coast is part motorway, and in parts dual and in parts single carriageway, the motorway part being the link between Portsmouth and Southampton. That’s because both are major ports serving traffic from all over the country. The same is not true of the towns along the rest of the route, although there is a by-pass around Brighton which is dual carriageway, because it provides a fast link from London to the ferry port of Newhaven.

However, one of the major industries of that region is tourism; there are the South Downs, which (along with much of the interior of West Sussex) is to become a national park; people come to walk in the beautiful valleys, and open spaces of both parts of Sussex. Building motorways in these places would ruin places of enormous visual beauty which are the reason many people come to the area at all; the economy of much of Sussex would wither if six-lane highways were built there. Of course, having truck traffic passing through some of these villages is an inconvenience, but that could be cured with short by-passes as a motorway would just drive tourists away and close many of the small hotels and other tourist-related industry. This is quite apart from the fact that it would be terrible environmental vandalism, destroying or despoiling places of beauty, and depriving people of places they go for peace and tranquility.

Then there are the occasional questions of why bits of A-road near motorways are not themselves motorways. Cases in point are the A23 from Crawley to Brighton and the A38 from Exeter to Plymouth. The reason in the case of these two roads has much to do with the landscape, which is not conducive to building wide motorways with relatively smooth gradients but can accommodate a four-lane dual carriageway which would be half the width of a normal British motorway. To make the land suitable, it would mean levelling whole hills and constructing vast, expensive cuttings and embankments. In the case of the A38, it’s a heavily touristed area in between of Dartmoor (a national park) and the south Devon sea resorts (Torquay, Paignton, Brixham etc). Dual carriageways have more exits than motorways, making them useful to local people; a motorway would have a small number of exits, which means the locals would lose out, with direct access to property cut off and people forced to use the older two-lane roads, or make long detours, when they previously could use the dual carriageway.

Of course, big roads are sometimes built in places of great natural beauty. There are lots of motorways in the Alps, which doubtless spoil a few views and places of former tranquility. However, it’s a big mountain range and the motorways link major cities, being the major road from France (and England) to Italy, so anyone going from France or England to Milan or Turin, both major industrial cities in northern Italy, can take a reasonably direct route rather than making a detour of hundreds of miles via the Cote d’Azur. This is also true of the stretch of the M6 through eastern Cumbria: it is just not feasible to have a two-lane mountain pass (the old A6 over Shap Summit) being the main road from Glasgow and Edinburgh to Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and London. The same cannot be said of any motorway from Folkestone to Hastings. The distances involved are smaller and the environmental costs are just not worth it.

George Monbiot wrote an article for the Guardian in 2001 (available on his website) in which he described the proposed Hastings by-pass as an effort to generate traffic in order to necessitate building more roads to link up to them. As he points out, one of the major reasons to build roads at all is to generate contracts for those who build them. Still, those who look at gaps on the map and fantasise about drawing a blue line through them aren’t interested in that; they just see something apparently amiss and have the urge to fix it, and they do not have to have visited the places affected. I may have a fascination for roads and I enjoy travelling, but it doesn’t mean I want half the country bulldozed to build more of them — there would not be much to see out of the window if we did that.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

The London mayor’s office has been running a campaign to dissuade people, particularly women, from using unlicensed cabs, because a fair number of rapes and other violent attacks were perpetrated by drivers of fake minicabs at night. Only black cabs (i.e. official London taxis, which are in fact not always black but are one of about three specific classes of large car) are allowed to pick people up by the roadside, and their drivers have to do ‘the knowledge’, meaning learn a particular area of London (usually central London) like the back of their hand, and pass various other tests of suitability. They can also stop pretty much anywhere, they frequently block traffic at green lights, and are pretty expensive nowadays. Minicabs have to pick up passengers from pre-arranged points and cannot drop people on red routes or anywhere else that an ordinary private car cannot stop.

Taking an unlicensed cab that stops by the side of the road is pretty foolish at the best of times, and when you’re the chair of the London Assembly and the authority is running a campaign against cowboy cabbies, it’s the kind of inconsistency which should provoke a resignation. However, bragging about doing something stupid which could get you robbed or murdered is an obvious sign of arrogant male privilege at work: a man showing that he is invulnerable while you, girls, aren’t. Don’t do what I do, do what I say. Of course, men are often much less aware of their own vulnerability in general than women, but the risks of diving into shallow water, for example, are the same for a man or a woman (and a fair number of women have broken their necks this way), but the risks of being sexually assaulted are much less (although not absent). His action shows obvious contempt for women and surely it is inconsistent with the Green Party’s progressive reputation. I would hope that they would give him a sharp dressing down, but he should do the decent thing and resign his chairmanship.

This article has an astonishingly charitable attitude towards cyclists who hit pedestrians and then get angry with them, but suggests that fair weather brings out an awful lot of cyclists who don’t know how to do it properly because they would otherwise drive. As a regular myself, I have to say that a lot of real regulars use cycle routes which aren’t widely known, i.e. the back lane routes rather than main roads. However, the idiots are out in all weathers and are not seasonal cyclists.

I have to say that stupid cyclists bother me hugely as both a cyclist and a pedestrian, including those who cycle recklessly along shared, or outright pedestrian-only, streets, or along pavements without good visibility when there is a perfectly good road right next to them. A few weeks ago, I was outside the Kingston Guildhall and heard some guy shout “CYCLIST!”, twice, basically to clear “stupid pedestrians” out of his way as he turned out of the main road from Esher into the Market Place, which is a dead-end leading to a shared foot/cycle road. This moron was cycling at speed through an area where there are lots of pedestrians and thought he had the right to do it without slowing down.

I’ve also seen plenty of people cycling in Clarence Street, which is a pedestrianised street and often crowded, but some of these people don’t even ride slowly, they barrel along, and on one occasion I was coming out of a shared path and one of these morons nearly shot into my side from the pedestrianised bit. I’m not one to harp on the law to people, but if they want to ride illegally, why can’t they at least do it considerately? These idiots risk bringing consequences such as closures of shared paths — or worse, compulsory insurance and number plates — on all of us.

Normally, I would agree with them - as a cyclist (and not a motorcyclist) myself, I have personally complained about people motorcycling through a subway under the A3 near my home, which is open for pedestrians and cyclists (who do not have to dismount), but not to motor vehicles of any kind. They have to use the main roads, i.e. the A3 and Malden Road. There is a good reason for banning motorcycles from narrow subways like that one, namely that visibility is restricted as it’s a short subway with a sharp dip in the middle. Bus lanes are not like that; you do not cycle in them expecting not to meet motor vehicles, because it’s a bus lane, and in London black cabs are allowed to use them as well. So I do not see what the cyclists are complaining about.

Besides which, motorcyclists are also vulnerable, because they are easily knocked off and can suffer worse injuries than cyclists, so they are best off away from other motor vehicles - especially cars (buses and trucks accelerate much more slowly than either cars or motorcyclists). If they are in a bus lane, they will cause far less delay than cyclists might (I recall driving along the side of Clapham Common in a truck, and getting stuck behind a cyclist because the road’s lanes were narrow and the pavement was too wide). While some have claimed that the new measure encourages overtaking on the left, I would prefer this to having them coming down the narrow gaps between cars, as they commonly do on the A40; there is plenty of room in a bus lane, and besides, overtaking on the left is legal when there is a slow-moving queue of traffic on the right, as is common near junctions. Motorcycling also causes less congestion and pollution than cars, being smaller and (usually) with smaller engines, and everything should be done to encourage commuters towards less congesting and polluting forms of transport.

The BBC’s report says that bikers “have been advised to make sure they know which lanes are open to them as the trial applies only to TfL [Transport for London] bus lanes”. You can find that information here, as it’s not directly linked off the BBC’s website, in five PDF maps and one PDF summary, and it turns out that very few lanes are affected as most bus lanes are not on red routes, but on local main roads, and some of the lanes were already open to motorcyclists, such as the one on the A23 through Brixton. Most are in what TfL strangely calls the “central” area, which covers Hackney, Islington and Lambeth boroughs (yes, all the way to Stamford Hill and Streatham) as well as the City and Westminster (but not Kensington and Chelsea or Southwark), and huge parts of Greater London are unaffected or barely affected. Their maps should really contain information on which routes are not affected, since some bikers would expect the M4 bus lane to be included, but it’s not (at least, it’s not on the map as motorways are not under TfL control), and since most bus lanes are in fact unaffected.

Finally, there are other problems with bus lanes in London, among them the fact that some of them operate at times when vehicles are parked on the other side of the road, causing traffic to swerve from the other side into your lane, and some are intrusive, cutting in at the apex of a bend (e.g. the start of the northbound bus lane in Mitcham Lane, Streatham) or narrowing the other lanes making it difficult to avoid either the bus lane or the oncoming lane at normal driving speed. I would also advocate colour-coding the parts of signs which advertise operation times, so that 24-hour bus lanes are obviously distinct from peak-hour ones, for example. I am all for making the buses run faster, but not at the expense of danger for other road users, or making them a “fine trap”.

When I took my test back in 1995, I do not remember even doing a theory test; the only theory test I’ve done was during a brief foray into bus driving in 2001 or so. Round about 1997, they introduced a theory test for all new drivers, and they have also reduced the number of points a new driver can get (points are penalty marks on the licence) before they are taken off the road. The rules are that learners can drive while accompanied by a qualified driver, but must attach a regulation “L” plate to the car and stay off the motorways. The suggestions raised today include introducing a third test, separating the manoevres from the general driving, including motorway driving.

The problem is that the current system allows learners to drive on dual carriageways, which in some parts of the country (particulary East Anglia) entirely replace motorways and are generally more difficult to drive on because their surface is often inferior, the lanes are fewer (usually two rather than three) and narrower, the traffic just as heavy (both the main dual carriageways into East Anglia, namely the A12 from London and the A14 from the Midlands, carry trucks going to the ports at Harwich and Felixstowe) and the speed limit for cars just as high (70 mph, with some cars going a lot faster). If someone happens to live in a part of the country where there are a lot of these roads, they will get the practice necessary for the motorway without having to go on one.

For many drivers, passing the test with the current system is really quite difficult. Some people do pass on their first attempt; many take more than that; it was four in my case. It is a matter of a half-hour demonstration of your driving to a total stranger who is drilled with the dogma of how to “drive properly”, which includes things like not pulling out halfway across a road when one side is clear and you do not have priority besides the more practical and sensible rules. They also get you to demonstrate some common operations like an emergency stop and reverse parking. Some might argue that the system does need reforming, because this might not be the best way to demonstrate that one is safe on the road. The reforms, however, seem to involve making new drivers jump through more and more hoops.

Let’s face it, the statistic really does not mean much - “20% of accidents are caused by new drivers” means “80% of accidents are caused by experienced drivers”. There is the matter of who some of them are driving with, so prohibiting a young and very new driver from taking round a group consisting entirely of people under a certain age might be worth considering, as might allowing learners to take motorway lessons in a proper driving school car. Perhaps they could even have “driver education” in schools, which would weaken the influence of the private operators, many of whom are cowboys and some of whom charge exorbitant fees. However, I do not think that trotting out well-worn stereotypes about young, particularly male, drivers is helpful; people do not want to be assumed to be bad drivers just because some young men are idiots (and besides, you do get careless young female drivers as well). Making the test harder just because of the “boy racers” just penalises everyone who wants to learn how to drive, and is a gravy train both for the bureaucrats and for the training industry.

To be fair, Cyprus to Egypt is not that far - about 250 miles from Larnaca to Cairo (plus the journey from your resort, be it Ayia Napa or Paphos). There are close links between the two countries, and Cyprus is used as the base for printing newspapers which sell in Egypt. However, I have even seen trips of this type advertised which start in London. Yes, London. The guided tours take you to the pyramids, down the Nile for a few miles, to a museum in central Cairo and to a bazaar (Khan al-Khalili) in the old city. I was told that the museum was badly-organised and disappointing. They also told me that they found the place hot and grimy and noisy, and that they didn’t know how I survived living there when I visited. My friend from Canada, who was there for two weeks, also told me of problems with the heat and of only being able to go out in the evenings, when the sun was not at its peak. I must say that when there, I did go out during the day, but I also spent the first couple of days (or most of them) in the flat. I had a long time there to get used to the heat, and I had the advantage of living in the older part of the city, where the streets were narrow and there was a lot of shade.

Cairo is indeed hot, even to people coming from a Mediterranean climate like that of Cyprus, and noisy. It is also a place with a lot of poverty, and a lot of in-your-face begging, and a fair number of hucksters and scammers around as well. It is also a very interesting city with a long history, and a lot of great architecture, but if you have literally a few hours to spare, and you come in the middle of the summer, and you have no choice but to go out in the middle of the day because you don’t have the benefit of being able to wait until the evening, you are not going to appreciate much of it. Cairo is also a big place. It is not as big as London, although is population probably is (and London’s population count includes places like Croydon and Kingston, which were incorporated into London very recently), but who would take a flight from, say, New York, take a brief ride down the M4 and a boat trip down the Thames, a visit to the Tower of London to take a few pictures of the “Beefeaters”, a two-hour shopping trip in the West End, a drive around Westminster and then go back up the M4 to Heathrow again? It would cost hundreds of dollars, would seem rather excessive, but it is the equivalent of what these day trips to Cairo cost.

Where I live, I’m on the edge of London, which is a major city of about ten million people. We often talk of “going to London”, but what that means is going to the Natural History Museum, or shopping in the West End, or to see a play or musical and have a meal, or to do a bit of business; we don’t think we can say we’ve “seen London” on the basis of a day’s visiting, as there is too much to see. What is the point of making a flying visit to a major city from far away? You will be too tired, after getting up early to make sure you get your flight, to appreciate much, particularly if the climate is inhospitable. The best time to visit a place like Cairo is in the winter, or any time except the height of summer, although this is not practical for a lot of people, particularly those with school-age children.

A better place for a flying visit from Cyprus, if they have to lay one on at all (and if they can manage it with the red tape) is Damascus, because it is not in the middle of the desert and has plenty of history and fine architecture (it is a candidate for the longest continually-inhabited city on earth), it has Roman and other ancient ruins within and nearby (and a lot of tourists who go to places like Greece, Cyprus and Turkey love those ruins), but what it doesn’t have is three stupid stone monstrosities plonked in the desert on its western fringes. Am I the only one who is left cold by the pyramids? They have no intricate stone carvings or other decorative features (admittedly, they might well have eroded over the centuries, like the sphinx) and are not even useful except to grave robbers; they are just monuments to the egos of the idiotic kings who had them built, who could not think of anything more beneficial to leave their people (and posterity generally).

I love travel; I like the excitement of seeing new places, which is one of the positive aspects of working as a driver, even though often I see little of any town or city and much of the countryside (which is fantastic if the countryside happens to be the South Downs, but not everywhere in the English countryside is that thrilling to look at). However, day trips to a city like Cairo, where there is grinding poverty, strike me as not quite right somehow, not to mention the effect flight has on the environment, and the offer of trips like this is a perfect example of the disproportion between the environmental damage caused by flight (massive amounts of carbon dioxide, straight into the sky) and the ease with which it is available.

The same station, yesterday, gave us “breaking news”, apprently shoving other stories further down the list, which turned out to be that a guy who was found guilty of murder a couple of weeks ago (for hiring two hitmen to kill his wife so he could claim her life insurance and move in with a prostitute) had been given a life sentence. This is not “breaking news” because you know someone will get life when they are found guilty of murder (unless they are juveniles, in which case they get indeterminate sentences); the only thing to decide is the tariff (the actual minimum time inside; whole-life sentences are rare in the UK). I don’t want to hang around to hear “breaking news” which I knew two weeks ago.

Finally, whose idea is it to set the speed limits to 30mph on bits of dual carriageway in London where roadworks are being done? On Monday I came off the M3 at Sunbury onto the road it leads into - the A316 - at which point the speed limit came down to 50 (fair enough), and then well before passing over the bridge they were working on, the limit came down to 30. This is really disconcerting for a driver who has just driven straight off a motorway where he had been doing 60 to 70 all the way from Southampton; has nobody ever pointed this out to those who set these speed limits. On motorways it’s rare to have speed limits lower than 50 in roadworks; it seems that since 50 was the normal speed limit, someone decided that it had to come down further because there were roadworks. It doesn’t make sense, and it makes even less to have the limits come down a long way before you hit the narrowed lanes or other signs of roadworks. My impression coming through those roadworks was that the limit did not need to be lower than 40.