Motorbikes and me
This summer I’ve made two attempts to learn how to ride a motorcycle. Both failed. On the first occasion, in early July, I was just getting the hang of riding the bike around the...
Category: Road Life
Let’s do away with these NIMBY zones
I’m a truck driver, and something my MP is going to be hearing from me about after the election, whoever they are, is the proliferation of so-called environmental weight limits or, as they’re often...
Violent people get violent
In the last few years a whole genre of videos has sprung up on YouTube of compilations of clips from people’s dashcams, or from the channel author’s own. Some of these channels (particularly the...
The Auriol Grey case and pavement cycling
Last week a woman who had been imprisoned for (allegedly) causing the death of a cyclist she encountered on a pavement in Huntingdon, a small town in eastern England, and waved her arms and...
Brighton Hill: £20million well spent (at least partly)
Today I saw a video by a couple of guys who make YouTube videos about roads, accusing Hampshire county council in south-eastern England of spending £20 million on making a bad roundabout even worse....
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...
Tories gunning for cyclists (during climate and cost-of-living crisis)
In today’s newspapers there is a story that the Tories have proposed requiring cyclists to have mandatory insurance and number plates, the same as cars and other motor vehicles, and could face licence points...
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...
Relaxing drivers’ hours is a bad idea
Last week the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, announced that the government were going to be temporarily relaxing the maximum daily driving hours for truck drivers in the UK by an hour. Normally the daily...
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...
London driving and the heatwave
So, the heatwave in the UK has finally ended after six days of temperatures in the mid-30s (Celsius) every day. Yesterday or the day before, much of the south has had at least one...
Garmin’s four-day outage reflects incompetence
Last Thursday when I started work, driving a truck for a flooring company, I attempted to connect my new Garmin sat-nav to get software updates. It told me it couldn’t connect to the update...
Trucking in the time of Coronavirus
The last couple of weeks have been a good time for me in terms of getting work, which had been a bit thin on the ground since the end of the last Christmas period....
Review: Britain’s Killer Motorways
This week’s BBC Panorama (available until January 2021) was about a recent report into the smart motorway system, which has been revealed to be what many of us who have to use them regularly...
Essex truck tragedy: why the driver is probably innocent
Note: this was written on Thursday 24th when the story was a day and a half old, the dead were still believed to be Chinese rather than Vietnamese, and Maurice ‘Mo’ Robinson had only...
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...