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November 20, 2008
I hate motorways .....
Particularly I hate motorways full of slow moving trucks trying to overtake one another, and motorists who duck and dodge in and out of the three lanes as if it were some sort of old fashioned pinball game. Yes, I know the Highway Codes says one should travel always in the left hand lane, moving to your right to overtake and then ease back into the left hand lane. But the damned book was written in an age when the damned motorways were relatively empty of juggernauts crawling along bumper to buymper in the left lane - and there certainly weren't the number of cars on them either.
I do use the left lane when it is reasonably clear and I can see that I will not have to pull out of it again to overtake a juggernaut in a few hundred metres. What's the point of tucking in behind a juggernaut when you are travelling faster than it is able too and you know you will have to either slow down behind it, or overtake it in less than a mile? Yet that is what a surprising number of motorists in Britain insist on doing. The result is that they weave in and out of the traffic, changing lanes regularly and making driving for everyone else a nightmare. And then there is the idiot who screams past you, dives into the gap in front of you - and slows down. And my other pet hate, the clown who can't maintain a steady speed and increases his speed going downhill, then slows to a crawl going up the other side. I sat behind one man this evening who managed to straddle two lanes and slowed to 40 mph - to the huge frustration of almost a mile of traffic who got stuck behind him.
The real problem here is that there are very few alternatives to getting to some places without using your car. To get to Chester by rail would have taken six times longer by train than by car even in the traffic and involved a vastly overpriced set of rail tickets. It would also have involved two changes of train and then a taxi in Chester.
Anyway, I'm now home for the moment and preparing for my next excursion. I wonder what the traffic will be like on Saturday as I try to get to Heathrow and my flight to Almaty. Hopefully their traffic won't be as manic as our motorways! Mind you, if its anything like Iranian traffic .....
Posted by The Gray Monk at November 20, 2008 07:23 PM
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