Recently in Road Life Category

Recently three people I know visited Cairo. One of them, a Muslim of Somali origin who lives in Canada, spent two weeks there on the way to Dubai and Somalia; the other two, both relatives of mine, went on a day trip from Cyprus, where they had been enjoying a holiday. I have also been to Cairo; I spent two months and a bit there in 1999, learning Arabic (not much in the event). I think day trips to Cairo are a bad idea on many, many levels. Part of this is a bit of old-fashioned moralism mixed with new concerns about the environment; another is that a day trip to Cairo just does not do the place justice.

Why is it that the BBC London traffic news people cannot find any better ways of identifying the location of delays on the roads than a reference to a junction nobody who does not pass that way all the time will remember? Yesterday I heard a report about something happening at the "Movers Lane interchange", and I don't remember them mentioning where that is (as it turns out, it's on the A13 in east London). They commonly give references to side roads, when if you're going along a main road and you are not from the area, you won't know the names. For example, I don't know the names of every stretch of the A24 as it runs from Ewell to Clapham Common. I know there's a London Road, a Stonecot Hill, a Merantun Way (that's new), and a Balham High Road - oh, and a bit of Clapham Common - is it east or south side? - but I don't know each bit, let alone every side road. So, if they want to tell us there's a delay, they should tell us relative to landmarks on that road, not to side streets whose names you can't see from a driving seat.

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.

Wi-fi cameras to track drivers' average speed | News (from Evening Standard)

Today, the Evening Standard reported that a new wi-fi-based speed camera system is to be tried out along the A13, the main road out of London to the east, between Canning Town and the Goresbrook interchange, which is the start of the new A13 relief road across the marshes; this means all of the old A13 between the end of the Docklands tunnels and the start of the Dagenham by-pass. The BBC, in their reporting of the story (they covered it in their London drive-time show), clarified that the scheme was not going to result in any fines, but was just a trial of the system.

From the Guardian: a letter and an article about Stonehenge

I'm sure you've all heard of Stonehenge - a ring of ancient standing stones, on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, which you see by the side of the road down to Devon. The area is one of the few remaining bits of two-lane on the road, and it's been kept that way because having a big dual carriageway so close to the stones would knock them down. Three months ago, the government decided not to build a tunnel for the A303 highway; this past week, the Tesco supermarket company announced that they intended to build a huge depot, the "MegaShed", on the west side of Andover, with a fifth of its traffic going west, past Stonehenge.

BBC NEWS: Cycling fury at beheading 'joke'

Matthew Parris, Times columnist and former Tory MP, has apologised in his column for making a joke about decapitating cyclists. Among those it offended were the Rhyl Cycling Club in north Wales, which lost four members "when a car skidded out of control in icy conditions near Abergele on 8 January, 2006". The youngest was 14.

Actually, the joke is not at all funny for another reason: people have actually been known to string wire across roads to injure cyclists or motorcyclists. I don't know if anyone has ever been literally decapitated, but I remember a local news story about someone being injured when someone tied a wire across a dirt lane I used to cycle down as a child (Baker Boy Lane, near Forestdale on the outskirts of Croydon). It's a dangerous comment and the Times should not have published it; if I'd known before the response became news today, I might well have complained as well.

We motorists are in denial about our terrible speed habit (The Observer)

This is an article about speeding and speed cameras. The author got a speeding ticket and was given a place on a course rather than take points on his licence (which pushes up your insurance premiums and, if you drive for a living, as I do, it may make that more difficult). He found that many of the motorists on the course were "in denial", blaming the camera rather than their own driving, and the course "debunked many of the myths that have grown up around speed cameras". He claimed that the message promoted by a recent anti-speeding TV ad - that 80% of people hit by cars doing 30mph survive, while only half of those hit at 35 do - was not sinking in.

This week it's appeared that serious consideration has been given to building a third runway, and a sixth terminal, at Heathrow Airport. The project will require the destruction of an entire suburban village, blight another tract of London with flight noise, and put a whole lot more traffic on the roads around Heathrow.

I've posted here before about the stupid truckers I occasionally encounter while driving in London, particularly on narrow dual carriageways like the Western Avenue and the one near where I live, the Kingston By-pass. Today I had yet another hair-raising encounter with one moronic trucker driving a Hungarian-registered articulated truck, registered XVV 751, which belongs to the Waberer's logistics company (slogan: "Optimum Solution").

I was driving east along Western Avenue and passing over the Greenford flyover - the junction with the Harrow to Southall road where the Western Avenue has one of its many narrow points, where six lanes have been squeezed into a space only really wide enough for four. This idiot basically raced past me on the left, leaving barely an inch between my truck (a small DAF) and his. I was doing about 45 mph, and in my efforts to avoid a scrape, moved slightly to the right, which risked butting out into the outside lane, where there was yet more fast-moving traffic.

Don't these people realise that overtaking on the left is illegal? It's illegal for a reason, no doubt because it's easier for a driver, particularly a truck driver, to deal with an overtaker on his or her right than on his left, because he's on the right and his offside mirror is right next to him. However, to overtake on the left, at high speed, on a narrow bit of road is just insane, and the only reason you'd do it is because you've got 40 tonnes underneath you and none of these rats under your feet (other road users) can really harm you. I see these idiots brazenly breaking the law almost every day - overtaking on the left and speeding down the outermost lane from which they are banned. When are the police going to crack down on these stupid drivers who are a MENACE to everyone else on the road?

Last week, as I said in my last-but-one post, I went with my family to Wales, specifically Tywyn (pronounced Towin'), the same small town I went to with them for a few days last year. Mid-week I spent in Aberystwyth, my old university town. This was, for me, undoubtedly the highlight of the week even though it effectively meant two days less walking in the hills with my parents (and my aunt and cousin and her daughter, who joined my parents the day I went to Aberystwyth). You might be pleased to know that I did actually do some of the things I mentioned in my post about the holiday last year; but let's start from the beginning. (Update: you can view the full set of pictures here.)

Some people just don't get it about the "road charging" situation.

I signed the petition, along with well over a million others. No doubt, the government will simply brush it off, as they brushed off the mass protest against the war in Iraq.

Does it mean that I want them to just build more roads? Does it mean that I don't believe that congestion needs cutting for the sake of both the health of the country, and the towns in particular, and the environment? Does it mean I don't think global warming is taking place?

BBC NEWS: Congestion rises in c-charge zone

Shock horror: figures cited in a speech cited by Ken Livingstone (mayor of London) himself, in a speech at City Hall today, show that congestion has gone up, year on year, since the congestion charge was introduced in 2003:

While there are 20% fewer cars compared with before the scheme went live in 2003, congestion has continually risen.

In its first year congestion was down 30% on pre-charge levels but in 2006 it was 8% lower than in 2002.

Mayor Ken Livingstone said extra congestion was due to a rise in roadworks but the Tories blamed his policy of extra bus lanes.

He also suggested that works on the water system, involving digging up and replacing old mains, have played their part in increasing congestion.

It's not often that we get snow here in London, and even less often that I have to drive in it. I must say, it's the condition I most fear as a professional driver, because we get almost no training when we learn to drive. You get such training in specialised advanced training courses, but when taking lessons for your normal car licence you learn to drive in whatever conditions exist then. Which is usually neither snow nor ice. I have had a frightening experience involving icy roads, namely nearly crashing into a Class A Merc on a road called Horseblock Hollow, near Cranleigh in Surrey. As I just about brought my little white van to a stop within inches of the Merc, I looked in terror at the woman driving it and she just smiled at me.

This morning on Radio 5 Live, the BBC's AM rolling news/discussion station, they were discussing the topic of whether immigration was good for "your wallet" or not, a somewhat inflammatory topic inspired by yet another anti-immigration report by Migration Watch, claiming that the economic benefit was the equivalent of 4p per person. One caller made the point - with which I've got some sympathy as I'm in the same line of work - about his one-time employer who made his entire driving staff redundant and then used an agency to recruit drivers cheaply from Poland. The drivers, he said, did not need to pay rent, instead living in their truck cabs the whole week and only spent money on food, the rest of the money being transferred home.

Technorati Tags: rod eddington, road pricing, civil liberties, public transport, congestion

This week the old chestnut of "road pricing" - that is, charging motorists by the mile depending on where they drive and when - appeared again in a report comissioned by the Government and produced by the former British Airways chief Rod Eddington, which appeared on Friday (see BBC report; you can download PDFs of the report itself from that page). The report "concludes that the potential benefits of charging motorists for using roads will outweigh the costs of the scheme" and that charging "will put some people off driving entirely, cut congestion and carbon emissions and could raise up to £16bn a year in payments".

Last week Ken Livingstone (mayor of London) announced that he had become convinced of the need for bicycles, and their riders, to be registered and for the bikes to carry number plates in order to deter cyclists from jumping red lights and riding on pavements. The Evening Standard reported on Friday that cyclists were divided over the idea, "with one side bitterly against the move and the other supporting motorists". He also said he supported banning "jaywalking", a term which is almost never used over here but refers to crossing a road other than at a crossing and at a given signal.

The last few days have seen me travel what must be the best part of a thousand miles: from Surrey up to Cheshire and back in a day, and out to west Wales, around a bit, and back. The first was a job, for a Mercedes-Benz dealership, and the second was a holiday.

Technorati Tags: aberystwyth, mercedes+benz, virgin+trains, west+wales

When I was a kid growing up in Croydon, there were two types of buses: red ones and green ones. Red ones were run by London Transport, green ones (including the green and white Green Line coaches) by London Country. You had to get the green ones if you were going out to the country, or if you were going somewhere better, or only, served, by the green ones, like parts of Coulsdon or Sutton. Green buses had 400 numbers (Green Lines had 700 numbers), and anything else was red. Red buses took bus passes, green ones didn't.

Following my entry on dumb cycle lanes in which I linked to some pictures at the BBC news site of cycle lanes through phone boxes and the like, I've posted a few pictures of my own of some ridiculous features of cycle lanes around Kingston, including the one out of town to my neighbourhood:

Flickr: Cycle route 75

A great set of pictures of stupid cycle lanes, like the 15-mile cycle route alternative to a six-mile road journey, the cycle ride straight into a phone box, and this one from Middlesbrough:

I remember the fifteen-mile rides I used to do to my late Grandad's house in New Malden (back when I lived in Croydon) which used to involve riding up the footpath next to Reigate Avenue, near Sutton. I couldn't use the cycle lane because it was full of the locals' parked cars.

BBC News: Crazy Cycle Routes

Anyone who's been reading the London news the last couple of days will have heard that cyclists are getting a bit of bad publicity because of the tendency of some to pass lights at red. We all know that this is dangerous when you are driving a car or, indeed, a train, as we saw at Paddington in 1999. When a cyclist runs a red, the most that can usually happen is that a lot of people will go tut-tut and get really miffed that someone is getting ahead. They'll be particularly narked if they are sitting in a long jam.