A13, trunk road to … where?
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...
Category: Road Life
Stealing the view
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...
Not at all funny
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...
In denial about our speed habit?
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...
London’s where we do stuff, innit?
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...
Dimwit truckers revisited
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....
A sentimental journey
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...
Why I signed the road tax petition
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...
Congestion “continually increasing” in charge zone
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...
The city’s in a panic with its first inch of snow
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,...
Foreign drivers and safety
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...
Sat-navs and civil liberties
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. 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”.
Ken proposes to sock cyclists
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...
My travels: Cheshire and west Wales
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...
How to go west when you live in Kingston
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...
Cycle route 75
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...
Pictures: dumb cycle lanes
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...
Cyclists running reds? Tut, tut …
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...
A downright dangerous job
Umm Zaid recently posted about her history of terrible jobs, and I posted on her comments section about my nightmare Saturday job when I was 16 and how certain companies pretend to serve their...
No surrender to the busybodies: a rejoinder to Matt Seaton
Matt Seaton, a long-time writer on motoring matters in the British press, has a column in today's Guardian in which he advocates a licensing scheme for cyclists. This would be a compulsory licence before...