Bloody foreigners
There’s a letter in the current (July 2014) edition of Truck & Driver magazine from one D Pardner (address withheld) moaning about everything about foreign truck drivers, particularly eastern Europeans. He claims that they...
Category: Road Life
What’s so great about TomTom?
Last week I bought a new sat-nav, a TomTom Pro 5150 Truck Live, which is a specialist one for truck drivers which has information about vehicle size limits and truck speed limits (normal sat-navs...
Taking care of business
The last few weeks I’ve not been blogging as much as I used to, and there’s one important reason for this: I’ve been working on getting my HGV (truck) licence. You have to do...
‘Road tax’ and the state of the A1
The BBC's online "Magazine" last week published three articles about transport issues, one of them about the notion of "road tax" and how it's commonly used as a trump card in arguments between motorists...
Johnson’s cycling proposals are no substitute for new laws
Boris Johnson’s bold thinking could change the future of London cycling | Environment | guardian.co.uk (also see this in today’s Observer) I’ve been a cyclist since I was a child, although these days I...
Will Huntingdon toll scheme drive traffic away?
BBC News – Road pricing: More new roads could be funded by tolls The battle goes on to find a way to fund a supposedly much-needed upgrade to the A14 in Cambridgeshire, which is...
There’s no “war” on Britain’s roads
Last Wednesday there was a programme on BBC1 called “The War on Britain’s Roads”, which was based on footage shot from cyclists’ helmets, and included various encounters with dangerous drivers and cyclists and confrontations...
‘Bonfire of standards’ may cut access in new buildings
Government orders building standards review | Politics | The Guardian The government has ordered a review of building standards regulations, with a view to reducing the number of regulations, ostensibly to facilitate a revival...
Motorists support rise in speeding fines, charity claims
I was listening to the You and Yours programme on Radio 4 early this afternoon, and I heard part of an interview with some woman from the “road safety charity” called Brake, and she...
“Middle lane hoggers” and other driving stupidity
Yesterday morning, Vanessa Feltz dedicated much of her talk show (BBC London, 94.9FM, 9am-noon) to the supposed news that people who drive for long distances in the middle lane on the motorways (rather than...
How dangerous are 80mph motorways?
Recently the government has been debating the possibility of raising the speed limit on the motorway to 80mph, it seems largely on the grounds that most people who can do that speed on the...
Now everyone’s a structural engineer
Most people in and around London know that the M1 — a major road out of London to the north-west, has been closed for several days because a bridge was damaged by a fire...
The problems with paring down the Royal Mail
Earlier this week I heard on the news that the Royal Mail were closing down two of their big London sorting depots, namely Bow and Nine Elms. I’ve worked at Nine Elms and it...
The blue magic-marker fetishists
Since I’ve been a kid I’ve been something of a road geek. I was always fascinated by roads and road signs, road numbers, street lights and so on (although the last faded when I...
Arrogant privilege rears its head again
A while back, before I got the hang of Twitter as a means of announcing blog posts and conducting cross-border conversations without having to log into a chat client (and well before getting my...
Are there more stupid cyclists in good weather?
Tom Meltzer on the phenomenon of fair-weather rage | Life and style | The Guardian This article has an astonishingly charitable attitude towards cyclists who hit pedestrians and then get angry with them, but...
Motorbikes in bus lanes: where’s the beef?
Today an experimental scheme comes into operation in London, allowing motorcyclists to use bus lanes on “red routes” (main roads with stopping restrictions for all or part of the day). They have been allowed...
Harder driving tests again? Please no!
This morning, I was driving to work and was listening to the BBC London breakfast show, which features Jo Good and Paul Ross, who is every bit as irritating as his brother Jonathan (I...
Why long-distance day trips are a bad thing
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...
Brief London driving moans
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...