Dangerous New 'Games' On The Road

Back in a job, I am driving daily once more, not the hundreds of kilometres I used to do in a week, just 140 Km these days.  However, this does take me around the M25 and into West London, so does expose me to quite a lot of traffic.  In the past:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/new-bad-driving-habits.html  and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/extreme-weather-extreme-behaviour.html   I have noted trends in bad driving that seem to suddenly appear.  Some such as driving with headlights on full beam or using fog lights at all times of day and night except when there is actually any fog, seem to be continuing with us for now.  Tailgating is as popular as ever as is undertaking and slaloming between the lanes of vehicles.  However, ahead of this Christmas season two new bad driving trends have appeared that you might like to keep an eye open for.

One of them was actually suggested in the media a couple of years back when petrol prices rose sharply.  This is the impression that if you drive with your wheels on the white lines you can reduce your fuel consumption because of the reduced friction between your tyre and the road.  Back then I saw a few people try it, and now it is back in fashion, certainly through the areas I drive.  The only problem is the white lines people seem to be favouring are those running down the middle of the road.  I have had to move over hard towards the pavement as cars charge towards me not really straddling the line but certainly with their right-hand set of wheels (given that we drive on the left-hand side of the road in the UK) riding on the white line.  On many roads in London and the Home Counties, with the size of many ‘family’ cars these days, squeezing down the narrow streets, passed rows of parked cars is a challenge, but this is increased if certain drivers intend to dominate the central line.  Of course the ‘law’ of British roads is that larger, more powerful and newer cars always have right of way, anyone in a smaller or older car must give way, no matter what the actual laws, or face a stream of abuse or even being followed until you reach a convenient location where the other driver can get out and either assault your car or you.  I imagine that the amount of fuel saved by driving this way is compensated for by how much such drivers rev up and accelerate away from junctions anyway.

The other habit which certainly seems to be a ‘game’ of some kind or about asserting the size of a driver’s ego over that of people around him/her (and such habits are not confined to men) happens at traffic lights.  What happens is when the lights turn to green, the driver at the front starts off but only moves so far that half of their car is over the stop line.  They then wait until the lights go to amber (in the UK a single amber light precedes the lights turning red) and then accelerate away, meaning that all the cars behind them are compelled to wait at the red for the cycle to go through once more.  I do not really see the purpose of this, I guess the driver pulling away can drive around any lane they choose, as this often occurs, in my experience at traffic lights on roundabouts.  Given how people like to cut across or block people moving to the correct lane, I can imagine this is something desirable.  However, blocking a whole batch of vehicles from proceeding, further congests what in and around London, is already very dense traffic.  The first few times I saw this happen I had assumed that the driver had stalled, though the cars that this happens with are new models and generally powerful or that the driver was on their mobile phone (drivers holding mobile phones in their hands while driving is still incredibly common in the areas I drive through) and was not ready to drive on.  However, it has now happened to me so often in the same way that I can only assume it is deliberate.

One habit which I had forgotten, but seems to be back in a new form, is having a car come hard up behind you, overtake you just to sit one vehicle space in front of you, continuing at the same speed as you.  I know I have an old car, but I do find it incredible that viewing it is so offensive to drivers they have to go around me.  To this, on motorways has been added a new twist.  A slip road appears on the left for you to leave the motorway.  The driver behind me wants to go down that road.  However, rather than indicating to go into that lane, first he overtakes me going into the middle or the fast lane, depending on the layout of the junction, then he cuts diagonally across three lanes just in front of me to go off down the slip road.  This causes me naturally to brake and the cars further back to do so as well.  I do not understand the motives for this behaviour and can only guess that the driver is upset that I have paid insufficient attention to his greatness and it alerting me to what I will be missing now that he is leaving the motorway.

All of these behaviours stem from the fact that UK drivers clearly see driving as an activity in which their dignity is constantly being defended.  They have to assert their right to be first and noticed at every chance.  It is like preening to scare off rival creatures.  It stems from a clear sense of insecurity, that even to have a single car, especially a slower or older one is offensive.  A sense of lanes is ignored and the driver feels he or she can simply ride across them in any sequence that makes his or her journey apparently easiest or more exciting.  The indignation at anyone who does anything which whether intentional or not, disrupts such desires is instant, withering, bullying and sometimes violent.  In such circumstances, with most speed cameras switched off and traffic police numbers continuing to fall in the current austerity measures, it is no wonder that accidents are climbing in number and that daily driving is becoming still more of an unsettling activity.

My Changing Views Of Anger

I suppose many blogs show a 'journey' of the person blogging.  I had never intended that for this blog, it was simply a way for me to relieve myself of many of the thoughts and particularly irritations in my mind.  It was also an outlet when I have felt powerless against what seems to have been an incessant chain of bad landlords and bad managers causing me such grief.  However, recently I read a quotation from Buddha that said 'You will not be punished for your anger, but by your anger.' and I realised that I now understood that statement.  In addition, in doing so I could see a great change from the attitude I had about anger back in October 2008: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/10/anger-reasons-i-have-it.html

Do not worry, this is not going to be some pitch about how I found God or Buddha or anything like that, it is simply me reflecting on why and how I came to hold an opposite opinion to one I held before.  Regular readers will know that it is rare for me to shift my opinion on anything which is what makes this case unusual.  At the time I could see the reasons for having anger and it did make me feel good.  I felt just as powerless as I do these days facing up to the weight of the economy, finding sustained work and maintaining a place to live.  Constantly I seemed to encounter people who wanted to rub my face in the mud and I had no ability to get back at them.  That has not changed, I have a manager who treats me as some combination between a rude idiot and an aggressive threat and picks me up on rules she has made up after the fact.  That is the second manager I have had like that and between them they have ruined my career.  I was able to get away from landlords in 2007 but since being made redundant in 2009 I have regularly faced the worry of having the house repossessed and have only be saved by loans from my family and HM Revenue & Customs accepting that it had wrongly taxed me £16,000 back in 2007.  Thus, problems have not gone away from me and, in fact, unemployment is far higher now and the economy in much a worse state than back in 2008 making the near future appear even bleaker.

What has changed is that I realised that anger was a drug.  Some people facing the difficulties I was facing and feeling so powerless of oppose them would have turned to alcohol or narcotics or over-eating, perhaps to violence or self-harm.  Some people are able to buckle down and simply tolerate what is being inflicted on them, but they are rare.  We live in a society where public anger is now incredibly commonplace.  Every time you drive, every time you go to a supermarket or try to check in for an aeroplane or to catch a train there is a good chance in the UK that you will see unbridled fury.  Typically it is not over anything major, usually the reverse, that someone is driving at a different speed to you or will not let you into a queue or is simply in the wrong car or you cannot find the product you want or it has sold out or the company has made a mistake on your ticket or the flight or train has been cancelled.  These are nothing compared to the anger you should feel against a government which is destroying opportunities, education, pensions and the health service and telling us we should be glad about it.  Yet, while we know we can do absolutely nothing to change David Cameron's mind, we feel, however unlikely, that if we shout and make a fuss, we can squeeze out some change to our benefit; the car driver will feel ashamed or we will be 'bumped up' on to a flight or a train.  Over the past decades we have been tutored to believe this by what we witness in public and on television programmes.  It is strength by the sense that is so powerful of resentment against those who are getting some that we are not.

Over the past few years, even before I went into counselling as a result of mistreatment in my current job, I came to realise that anger achieved very little, no more than getting drunk would do.  It made me feel good for a short time but the come down in terms of high blood pressure and constipation were just like a hangover after alcohol and actually made it harder to deal with the problems the next day.  Being angry you see things only from your own perspective.  You know your limits and forget that those around you do not.  This was the impact on the woman and boy who lived in my house.  They saw me shouting and hitting the furniture and wondered if it would be them next that I would hit.  They saw me revving the car engine and felt powerless as they had no control over whether I rammed into the car in front of me or not.  Reassurance and even repeated examples when nothing dire occurs makes it no less frightening to them wondering if 'this time' something more severe would occur. 

This links to the next issue is that even in a life when everything seems a battle there are scraps of light.  Not going all religious, this is simple things like having a good meal or just all of you sat in front of the television or just laughing about something silly or remembering a good day.  They may only be scraps but I found these were being over-shadowed literally by the 'fear and loathing'.  In turn this meant that I did not even have these scraps of happiness to fall back on so meaning that I then lacked the kind of resources I needed to deal well with all the nastiness I was facing, especially at work.  The two worlds were contaminating each other and that meant there was no refuge.  It was easy to get into a vicious circle.  Whilst unemployment dropped me into new problems it gave me the time to change things.  Partly it was because I was freed from having a nasty manager waiting to pick up any new imagined example of an error in order to hound me with it.  Instead I was in my home all the time and had reasonably behaving job centre staff to deal with once per fortnight rather than malicious colleagues every day.  In between applying for jobs, I also took the opportunity to look at anger management.  This came in part from prompting from the woman who lived in my house, but also from having just one too many anger hangovers - constipation concentrates the mind very well.

Then I found that it is incredibly difficult to get help with anger management.  My experience in this respect was very much the same as when I tried to seek help as I came closer to being unable to pay my mortgage.  I contacted the building society when I had enough money to pay three months' mortgage payments and they would not discuss  the issue with me.  They said I had to be down to the final month's payment before they could even talk about it.  To me this seemed ridiculous.  They did not seem to realise that talking about the situation would have taken some pressure off me and most likely would have meant better performance at interviews and so the chance of getting a job to pay the mortgage.  The same situation occurred with anger management.  I found that in my town the last courses in anger management had ended two years earlier and that nowadays they only train counsellors in anger management for counties around; I would have had to travel to London for such help.  Anger management in my town is only available to people who have been referred to it by the courts or social welfare.  Thus, as with defaulting with the mortgage, it was only at the final stage that help became available.  To me this seems short-sighted, but I guess it comes from targeting money at those who need it the most rather than preventing problems from developing.

Given that I could find no groups or individuals to help, I thought 'well, I am an intelligent man, surely there are some books or something I can use'.  Well it turned out that I could find no books on anger management, again except for professionals counselling people rather than for those suffering from anger problems.  I guess the sense is that someone suffering anger will not be able to see that they need help.  However, I was able to find bits of references from extensive internet searches to Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).  This sounded rather alarmingly like some pseudo-science, but actually turned out to be something legitimate.  It would have been the approach I would have been exposed to if I had applied for one of the courses two years earlier.  What I liked was that looked to treat causes rather than symptoms.  There is a lot on the internet about methods to reduce anger such as meditation but these did not seem feasible when you are driving and experience 'road rage'.  The NLP advocates likened most anger management to fixing a tyre when you had driven over broken glass and their method as being one that took you down a road without broken glass.  Anyway, from various sources I found exercises that I was able to do on my own.  Surprisingly, I found I quickly got into a 'virtuous circle' as being able to break the narcotic pleasure of anger I saw it was only doing harm and as anger became rarer it lost the psychological 'high' and feeling of power it had once given.  I was then able to recover those scraps of life that made me happy and in turn the two people living in my house felt more reassured so a feedback loop developed,

I have not reached a situation in which I am never angry, especially when dealing with computer games.  However, I can identify the symptoms so much faster and change what I am doing.  Probably the largest change has come in driving, knowing that I am giving power to worthless people if I get worked up when they hoot or flash or shout at me.  They are dangerous drivers and I need to get away from them, typically slowing down helps in that situation.  I think I felt I had a 'right' to anger something which was exacerbated because I was told I had other rights, no right to work, no right to enjoy a house without hassle, no right not to be treated as an idiot/inappropriate/to be dismissed, no right to drive my car without being forced off the road and so on.  However, I see now that the anger actually just made the things that I had under-valued, have less value.  Anger contaminates everything it touches and you need to be going in the opposite direction.  If you can derive happiness from lots of small and simple things then you become more robust.  You do not need a god to show you that, you can do it yourself.  Once you do, you then build up a reserve of some sort of energy that allows you to resist the trouble people seem so intent on pressing down on you, much more effectively.  Another trick that I have learnt since from counselling is to keep home and work in different silos, but that is a story for another day.

New Bad Driving Habits

Driving from interview to interview (my record is having covered 240Km between two interviews on the same day) I have been encountering new elements of bad driving.  Of course, we still have the general fact of people feeling they have a right to speed (exacerbated by the fact that they think/know that the speed cameras have been turned off) and that there is no need to signal when changing lanes or going around a roundabout, but I have now spotted three new trends that I thought it worthwhile highlighting.  Driving habits are always of interest to me partly because I am incredulous at how so many people get away with appalling driving and never seemed to get caught by the police.

The first new habit is the least severe.  It stems from how the signal of flashing your headlights to other drivers has been mutated by aggressive drivers on British roads.  In the past, flashing your headlights a couple of times meant 'I'll wait, you come on' and was usually used when in a narrow road to indicate to the person that they should come through the slot.  I also use it to allow people to turn right in front of me, across my carriageway, when I see that a long queue is building up behind them.  However, many British drivers now use the headlight signal in the opposite way, i.e. 'Wait, I am coming through'.  This is the way it is officially used in France, but over in the UK it stems from the very aggressive ways in which people seem not to feel they must drive.  An example is when they come up behind you in the middle or the fast lane of the motorway and flash their lights and sometimes sound their horn too.  They are saying 'Get out of the way, I am faster and you and am coming through', no matter whether that means they break the speed limit or not.  I have had this done to me when overtaking a lorry in the slow lane briefly bringing me into the middle lane of a motorway, but clearly too long for someone racing up behind me who could not be bothered to move over to the third lane.  What has become apparent over the last few weeks is that people, usually, though not exclusively men, but certainly ones driving expensive Audi and BMW cars simply keep their headlights on permanently.  I have wondered if this was a technical element of the car like the Volvos which used to permanently have their side lights on.  However, unless someone can draw my attention to it, I have not become aware that suddenly these cars have headlights permanently on as a feature (I know motorcyclists opposed such a step as it meant they stood out even less in the traffic).  In my view, they are doing it especially on motorways to say, 'Look, I have a big, powerful, expensive car, don't even think of pulling into the lane in front of me, keep out of my way'.  Of course, seeing such behaviour encourages me to pull out in front of them and slow down, but I know that is hazardous, but indicates the kind of problem such posturing can provoke.

The next bad habit is again about bullying.  At a roundabout in the UK you are supposed to give right to traffic coming from the right.  Vehicles in side roads are supposed to give way to vehicles on the main road, there are specific markings on the road to show who has the right of way (if you do not understand these markings, please read your Highway Code).  Now, however, it is a question of judgement: 'ah yes, that car is ten years older than mine/has an engine capacity of 500cc less than mine/is driven by someone old enough to be my mother' and on that basis the driver pulls out on to the roundabout or the main road.  As they roar away, or quite often due to the heaviness of the traffic roar and then brake sharply, they are oblivious to the chaos of sudden stops and shunts they have left in their wake.  At roundabouts I think some of this stems from the fact that often you have no idea which exit people are aiming for and so people think they should jump out and take the chance.  Sat navs do not help with their reference to 'third exit' often not making it clear which they are counting (often leaving off minor road exits) and they certainly cannot cope with junctions when you have to go basically straight but jig a little to left or right (usually comes out as 'turn left, turn right'), they need terminology which more accurately reflects the erratic pattern of UK roads (try using a sat nav to get around Swindon's so-called 'Magic Roundabout' system!).  A lot of it, though simply stems from impatience and arrogance.  It is clear if you do any driving on British roads, let alone the distances I cover, that many people think they have a right to be able to behave differently to the law, let alone custom and practice on the roads.

This combination of arrogance and impatience brings me to the third bad habit which I first spotted comparatively recently, but now seem to see all the time.  This is overtaking people when they are trying to turn right.  I will clarify what I mean, (and if you live outside the UK, Japan and Australia, substitute 'right' for 'left' and vice versa in what I am saying to understand what I mean in your context) of course, when people want to turn right on an average road they move into the centre of the road.  These days they often have to sit there for a long time before someone coming the opposite way lets them turn.  In these circumstances, if there is space, then it is permissible to pass the car on the inside, i.e. in the UK, to the left hand side of it, the one nearest the pavement (though when this occurs between lanes on a motorway it is termed 'undertaking' and is illegal).  What happens now, however, is that people overake the car trying to turn, i.e. they go round it on the right-hand side.  This is madness.  If the person (whose attention is usually focused on the oncoming traffic rather the traffic behind) had decided to turn right at that moment then they plough into the driver overtaking them.  It also reduces their chance even further of getting to turn right so freeing up the highway quicker.  The driver overtaking has to go fully over into the oncoming lane so potentially exposing that car to being hit by oncoming traffic typically charging up the road.  It is no wonder so many accidents happen in low speed limit areas in towns.  However, if you have ever known anybody who has suffered the years of pain that comes with a whiplash injury, you know how bad such accidents can be.

Driving is a job.  It is often boring and needs a lot of patience.  It is not a place to get angry or be arrogant.  When you get in your car you are no longer an individual traveller but instantly a cog in a machine.  If you try to break out of the set patterns of that machine it will break quickly and people will be injured, including youself (your beloved vehicle is liable to be damaged with you to blame as well).  The ignorance of the basic rules of the road in the UK make it hard for the bulk of people whether from Britain or visitors, to drive safely without facing reckless, unexpected, unpredictable behaviour.  We need to stop bullying by drivers, we need to stop them simply focusing on how bored they are or how they want to show off and instead remember their duty to the public as a whole.  They would be furious if someone mowed down their partner or child or parent and yet they behave in a way which risks the health and lives of other people's loved ones.  We need to restore basic manners and consideration to driving and have harsher penalties for those who cannot adhere to those things.  Removing speed cameras was a step in the wrong direction and I can only see the next few years witnessing an increase in death and maiming because of arrogant, selfish driving.

Pay & Display Dismay

One section of the UK population which irritates me immensely, as anyone who reads this blog knows, are those people who believe in a 'freer' Britain in which they can speed around , use their mobile phones and park where they like with impunity.  This is primarily associated with driving, whether in a car or a commercial van or lorry, but in fact this is simply because they feel they can talk about outrageous things in that sphere whereas in others such as re-introducing the death penalty and castration as sentences for courts and expelling any immigrants, would be challenged more vigorously.  In the field of regulation of driving and parking they constantly portray the rules as having nothing to do with safety but simply as a form of taxation.  I constantly come back to the fact that if you do not break the law, then this is a tax you are exempt from.  However, it is clear these people think very individualist behaviour in vehicles, which puts others' health and lives at risk is not a crime so they should face no charges.

Another issue has come up in this regard, brought into view by the Breakfast programme run on BBC1.  This is the rule that even if someone has a valid ticket to park in a particular location, if there are numerous other ones on display, they can still be fined.  The response has been vigorous, that this is another tax.  I am marginally more sympathetic to this argument because if these people have actually got to a car park, rather than believing they have some exceptional God-given right to park on a double yellow line with their lights flashing while they do the shopping, as I see so often, then that is a good step.  However, if your car, van or lorry is full of different, similarly looking tickets, why should you compel a parking warden to read them all to find if one is correct or not.  They complain about traffic wardens anyway, so why are they happy to give them more work.  Perhaps councils and the government should adopt the same approach and never bother taking down road signs when the road layout is changed.  Perhaps they should simply stick up signs that they have lying around rather than ones that actually relate to the towns that can be reached from the location where the sign is.  Maybe we should put up a selection of speed limit signs and say that drivers have to comply with whichever one is correct for the particular road.  This would be a major challenge for many drivers given that many cannot adhere to the speed limit even when there is a single clear sign.

I think, that if you cannot be bothered to keep your vehicle sufficiently tidy so that anyone can see simply whether you have the correct ticket or not, then you deserve to be fined.  The UK is better than some countries anyway.  I remember in France in the 1980s seeing people with a string of road tax stickers down their windscreen, but no-one in the UK would complain that we have to show only the current one on our windscreens.  Potentially I could have thirteen different road tax discs on my windscreen making it a challenge for anyone to spot if I had a current one, but, of course, that is seen as a silly approach.  Simply chuck away old parking permits.  Or, if that is really too much trouble, at least shove them off the dashboard on to the floor!

What this whole complaint stems from is the unhealthy characteristic that seems to have taken root in the UK and is growing like mold throughout our society.  This believes that the individual's desires (not even just their needs) must be satisfied and not constrained, certainly not by the safety or interests of anyone else, and certainly not policed by any state authority (just by who can shout loudest).  This is already impinging on road safety but is likely to spread into other aspects of society effectively implementing 'mob rule' in many things.  Examples of this spread can be seen in Simon Cowell's desire to have a political show that makes decisions by people telephoning in.  Of course, tabloid newspapers have long done this, I remember an opinion poll in 'The Sun' newspaper of the 1980s which told you to ring one number if you wanted the minimum sentence for certain crimes set at 20 years and another if you wanted it at 25 years.  There was no option for no sentence or 10 years or 15 years.  What can be seen as a 'free' choice can easily be engineered to channel you into backing a policy which has already been established (just ask any of the dictators who have run 'free' elections) and so seemingly giving it popular support.  Of course, the people peddling this kind of approach see what they do as simply based on 'common sense' whereas in fact it is based on assumptions and prejudices and excludes so many options that fall outside the very individualist approach they advocate. 

If you want to see this in action just watch an episode of 'Live from Studio Five' which is made by SkyNews (owned by Rupert Murdoch) and shown on Channel 5, Monday to Friday evenings.  It features former model Melinda Messenger, former footballer Ian Wright and a runner-up on 'The Apprentice' television show.  It is a magazine programme which mixes coverage of celebrities with discussion of news items.  This is where it is most dangerous as it presents a very right-wing perspective especially on social and legal issues in a light manner with the presenters indicating that they see pretty extreme views as somehow 'common sense'.  Fortunately it only attracts 230,000 viewers.  However, it is a good example of how the 'me first above anyone else' attitude is being fed into the popular consciousness and it is on this basis of assumptions about 'common sense' that more extreme steps are made to seem unassailable by those of us who would like an inclusive society that does not value freedom to behave how you like over the right of people to live in safety.

Pavement/Road; Road/Pavement?

When I was a boy back in the 1970s it was clear that the only people allowed to ride a bicycle on the pavement was the postman and even he was not permitted to pedal the bicycle, he had to stand on one pedal and freewheel. Back then you were not allowed to cycle on the road until you had passed your cycling proficiency test which was usually taken around the age of 8-10 years old. So there was a period when you had outgrown the pull-along tricycle of a toddler and were on a 'proper' bicycle and yet could only ride in the park or ironically in car parks. I remember being 10 and having cycled along the canal path to the neighbouring town with some friends. We decided to cycle back through a housing estate, but not having passed my cycling proficiency test yet (I think I did it the following Autumn when I returned to school) I was apprehensive about cycling on the road and so while my more daredevil friends cycled down what were in fact very quiet roads leading simply to housing, I cycled on the pavement. We had barely entered the estate when a man probably in his 30s called us to him and questioned me at length about why I was cycling on the pavement and when I explained about the cycling proficiency test he told us we had to leave the estate and go back along the canal and that I should not think about coming to that town until I had passed my test. Highly embarrassed, we complied with what he said.

The criticism of cyclists daring to cycle on the pavement could even extend to crossing less than a metre of pavement. My parents' house like many in their street stands a metre or so above the level of the road, which for some historic reason is 'sunken' for quite a lot of its length. To access the house, you drive up a ramp about as long as single car, across the pavement and on to their driveway, which again, is about the length of a single car. Of course most people who park their cars in garages or porches or driveways next to their house have to cross the pavement when leaving and entering. Pedestrians can get upset about waiting for the car to get clear but generally make no complaint. For bicycles doing the same, certainly when I was a teenager, it was deemed to be sufficient to shout at the cyclist.

A few years after the above incident when I was a teenager with my cycling proficiency under my belt. I left the garage, got on my bicycle, cycled along the stretch of drive and crossed less than a metre of pavement on to the ramp intending to go on to the road. However, because I cycled across those centimetres of pavement a middle-aged couple a short distance away bellowed at me for cycling on the pavement. They expected me to get off and push my bicycle over that short stretch, in fact less than the length of the bicycle itself. I did not run them down or even cycle near them but they were indignant that I had dared cycle across that small piece of pavement. These days they would probably be terrified that a teenager would knife them, I suppose. My elderly next door neighbour was marginally more tolerant, but sitting in my bedroom (at the front of the house) my reading on summer days would be disrupted by him shouting that he was going to summon the police as pre-teenage children cycled past him on the pavement. While I feel young people should be challenged on their behaviour the target of the criticism seems poorly decided upon.

Even as recent as the mid-1990s I was staying in a town and read in a local newspaper that a man had been fined £25 for cycling across a market place in the evening when the market was closed. I went passed that market on a number of occasions and aside from a few official buildings in the centre there were very few structures there when the market was closed and it was empty of people, a cyclist could proceed without hitting anyone or anything, yet that was not the point, he had broken the law and was fined for it. Of course, the man could have wheeled his bicycle across the market place; going by the road meant going through a four-lane one way system that cars hared around. He must have crossed the market in a matter of seconds and there was no-one there, except I presume the police officer who arrested him (there were no on-the-spot fines in those days). Subsequently on a couple of occasions I rode around the market place at night time almost as a dare for someone to come and arrest me. I have cycled a great deal in my life and wherever I have gone I have taken safety of myself and other road users as the prime concern.

These days things are very different and it seems the dividing line between vehicles on the road and those on the pavements has become muddied. I was almost mowed down by a cyclist, a fully grown man, hurtling down the pavement outside a row of shops this morning, seemingly challenging people to get out the way. Conversely on two occasions I have been driving in a queue of cars tailing elderly people on four-wheeled electric vehicles as they make their way slowly along the road. On the other hand in Milton Keynes in the early 2000s I remember there was uproar from the council (who had the oddest attitudes of any council I have lived under and that is saying something) about 'speeding' electric buggies in the shopping centre. These vehicles can reach a top speed of almost 13kph (8mph), twice the speed most people walk at and apparently the honest shoppers of Milton Keynes felt intimidated by them. These buggies are driven by elderly and disabled people, to me it only seems just that they should have a little power over these indignitaries who power around at dangerous speeds in their 4x4s (especially in Milton Keynes where most main roads have a speed limit of 70mph, the highest of any urban roads in Europe). Speed limits and fines were being introduced for electric buggies when car drivers were hurtling about.

I can understand the challenge for people on bicycles and on electric buggies. With the speeds many people are doing even on residential roads (my road is 30mph, but cars often do 50mph+ with impunity) you can understand why cyclists stay on the pavements. Most car drivers do not understand cyclists' signals and certainly do not understand that on a multi-laned road or at a roundabout, a cyclist should be in the right-hand lane to turn right. Cyclists are hooted and even pushed off by car drivers who resent their presence. Twice on my bicycle I have had people get out of cars and come to attack me because they felt I had got in their way. There is a whole liberal middle class vs. bigoted lower middle/working class thing going on here too. In the old days workers cycled to work but now they tend to drive or take public transport and cycling is seen as simply something that woolly-headed liberals who let in immigrants do. A lot of the abuse you get shouted from cars comes from this, that 'real' men do not cycle it is left to the 'poofs' (i.e. effeminate men) or the 'dykes' (lesbians, particularly butch ones). In these car drivers' views 'proper' people need the biggest car they can afford, to be obese and to drink and drive. Contrast this to neighbouring countries, for example in France where the average truck driver is out with the cycling club on a Sunday and cheers along cyclists he passes, giving them lots of space and warning them of his approach. In London, in contrast, lorry drivers are by far the single largest group of cyclist killers.

Some of the cyclists who have been killed over the past few years include Emma Foa, aged 56, crushed by a lorry, the driver Michael Thorn, aged 54, of Headley Down, Surrey was fined £300 and allowed to keep his licence. Just this month Chrystelle Brown, aged 26, a fitness instructor and cyclist was killed in Whitechapel right near where a motorist attacked me, she was dragged for 100 metres by the vehicle. This August, Harry Wilmers aged 25, was killed on his bicycle in South Manchester. In 2006 18 cyclists were killed in London by motor vehicles. You do not have to search far to find cases of cyclists pushed off and beaten up by people and of fatalities not just in London but smaller towns too. A drink driver, David Mark Chandler, aged 41, from Arthington Lane, Otley, who killed a cyclist in Pool, Yorkshire had 50% more alcohol in his blood stream at the time he killed Stephen Granger, aged 50, in December 2007. Chandler perverted the course of justice by concealing the evidence of his involvement. He was sentenced to 4.5 years for killing Granger, but in February 2009 this was cut to 3.5 years and his driving ban reduced from 10 years to 5 years! He had drunk at least 6 pints of beer before driving into Granger and did not stop and even look for the body. If he had shot or stabbed or punched Granger to death he would be in prison for at least 14 years if not longer. Cars, vans and lorries are the weapons that you can use with hardly any come back. The killing of cyclists ironically takes the healthiest people who are doing least damage to the environment and lets off those who are most dangerous and damaging. How can we promote healthy lifestyles and reduce the impact of carbon dioxide emissions if we allow cyclists to be killed in such numbers and barely punish the killers? Researching this I found that people get fined for cycling across Smithfield Market in London despite there being a clear thorougfare and the roads around being hazardous.

It is no surprise then that cyclists ride on the pavement. The reason why electric buggy riders go on the road. This is because the pavement is so cluttered. Navigating around the wheelie bins, the cars parked up on the kerb, the bumps left by the cable television and other installations and mothers pushing vast pushchairs, it is very difficult to proceed in a buggy as unlike on a bicycle you cannot get off and wheel it along. In addition, with cyclists not on the road you have them on the pavement to rival with the buggies. I admire elderly and disabled people who take their buggies on the road, they take their lives into their hands and I salute them for their courage. As yet I have not heard of electric buggy riders being mown down by lorries or cars, I suppose because unlike with the cyclists, the drivers can envisage their granny in a buggy and so hang back. I like the fact they slow up the traffic in residential areas, as too many people drive too fast through them (another wall has been demolished close to my house by a car tearing into it at speed). It reminds me of 'The Straight Story' (1999), a movie based on a true story about an elderly man driving a garden tractor from Iowa to Wisconsin in the USA to visit his brother. The tractor cannot exceed more than a few miles per hour and naturally he builds up a trail of cars behind him as many buggy riders do around my way.

So, we have bicycles you would have once only found on the road now being forced to be ridden on the paverment and electric buggies you would expect on the pavement out in the road. I will set aside the occasions when I have had people driving up the pavement as a short cut as happened to me when walking along the Mile End Road in East London one day and right by a primary school at that. I simply stood in front of the car, but the driver dodged round me on the pavement and continued where he insisted on going, road or no road. More common is pedestrians walking in the road. I do not mean in rural areas, I mean in urban areas where there is a perfectly good (if cluttered) pavement. No-one seems to be able to tell me whether this is a cultural thing as the people who I see walking down the road are either Korean or Afro-Caribbean and are generally women. Are there some countries where it is hazardous to walk on the pavement? Is it that women are not supposed to? I do not know and would be grateful if someone would tell me. In my neighbourhood, despite the fast driving cars, many women would rather walk along the side of the road down street after street than ever go on the pavement. I am surprised not more of them are hit by these dangerous drivers who seem incapable of avoiding inanimate objects such as lamp posts, walls and railings.

I suppose overall the rules for new vehicles such as the ever larger and more sophisticated electric buggies are ill-defined and in general most people whether drivers, cyclists or pedestrians are ignorant of the Highway Code. Signalling seems to be something that has died out no matter what vehicle you are on or in (the 7-year old from my house, today commented that a woman cyclist was making signals in the 'old fashioned way' that I do). The other thing is the constant bane of any activity on the roads and that is the bulk of road users think they are the only thing that is important and everyone else should get out their way or suffer the consequences; they believe signs and speed limits do not apply to them because they are particularly 'experienced' or 'skilled'. Using roads is not a solitary activity. The moment you go on a road or even just step on to a pavement you become part of a complex machine in which real people are involved, people who can easily be injured or killed. If more road users saw their journeys in that way and reacted accordingly, with tolerance, patience and attention to detail (or as on a road safety award my brother once received 'Care, Courtesy and Consideration') then the news of tragic deaths we read about and witness would not be on hundreds of websites and impacting on scores of people across the UK.

P.P. Having written this posting, I turned to read 'The Guardian'. As regular readers know, that arse of a columnist, Simon Hoggart infuriates me constantly with his stupidity and gives me fuel for this blog. As I have commented before Hoggart seems determined to do all he can to increase pollution and damage the environment, particularly though his idiotic opposition to wind turbines. This week he has turned again on cyclists who seem to be perceived as a legitimate target for liberal (though I would hardly categorise Hoggart as this) and right-wing writers. He spends two paragraph attacking cyclists using a cycle path. He complains one cyclist in Brighton shouted 'cycle path!' at him which he equates with 'psychopath' and he lumps all cyclists together with those who he argues are always 'aiming for - then just missing - old people, mothers with pushchairs, toddlers ...' as if cyclists actually drive around trying to hit people. He observes these who are a minority do not actually hit any pedestrians, unlike car drivers who killed 13 child pedestrians in London alone in 2008; 8 in 2007.

In total in the UK 572 pedestrians (down 11% on 2007) were killed in 2008, the only good news is that the figure is declining, with a decline of 19,000 deaths on the road over what would have been expected 15 years ago. Cyclist injuries rose 1% 2007-8, though deaths were down at 115; child deaths on the road (this includes children who are passengers in cars) rose from 121 in 2007 to 124 in 2008. Effectively fewer car and lorry drivers are killing each other, they are still killing other more vulnerable people. I suppose I should be grateful because the UK has the lowest number of accidents in the EU, alongside Sweden. However, having cycled in continental Europe this surprises me as I have had far fewer 'incidents' in which I have been hit on a bicycle and certainly none of the physical violence I have faced in the UK.

Hoggart should get off the cyclists' case. There are far more dangerous people out there than people cycling legally in Brighton. However, he is constantly indignant at anyone who wants to move away from dirty fuel consumption to a cleaner, more sustainable approach. Maybe he is financially backed by an oil company because I can see no rational explanation for his attitude, particularly when writing in 'The Guardian' which has vehemently supported the 10:10 campaign on climate change recent weeks.

P.P. 09/10/2009: I guess that it is because I am not driving so much now I have become unemployed, clearly there is a new trend in driving cars that I had underestimated. While I had witnessed someone driving a car on the pavement once in the 6.5 years I lived in London, today both on foot and while in a car myself I have seen three motorists driving for between 10-50 metres down a pavement. Generally they have one pair of wheels still on the road, but in all three cases more than three-quarters of the width of the car was on the pavement. The slowest was doing 20mph, the fastest something over 40mph (actually violating the speed limit for the 'road' they were driving down, anyway). When did such behaviour become acceptable? Is this the impact of motor-racing console games or car-based criminal games like 'Grand Theft Auto'? It is hazardous enough being a pedestrian in the UK but now it seems that car drivers are not even going to let you keep to the pavement. I suppose this is the ultimate manifestation of the common expectation among drivers that everyone else should simply disappear.

The Cycle Helmet Issue

Helmets for cyclists have been around since at least the 1960s when they used to consisted of padded metal bars across the cyclist's skull and tended to be worn only by racing cyclists. Even then it was well into the 1990s before they became common in long races like the Tour de France and there was resistance to making them compulsory when the rules were changed in 2003. In fact what led to widespread adoption was that teams found it was easier to fit two-way radios into them and keep in contact with their teams to advise them on tactics.

For the general public helmets became increasingly familiar in bicycle shops in the late 1980s particularly focused at children. Also with the increase of mountain biking they seemed to be part of the fashion that went with that sport. There has been much discussion about their effectiveness. The main thing is that people who have never worn one, do not seem to understand the difference between bicycle helmets and those for motorcyclists. Bicycle helmets are made of plastic and foam design to compact like a 'crumple zone' on a car. They tend to sit on the top of the head and give no protection to the back of the neck. They do not contain the head in the way that motorcycle helmets do. Motorcycle helmets are metal or carbon fibre and are far tougher. In an accident they can actually keep a damaged skull in place which is why you should never remove a helmet from an injured motorcyclist and leave it on until they reach hospital. A cyclist wearing a bicycle helmet that had sustained such an injury would be dead. Of course motorcycle helmets were not made compulsory in the UK until 1973 and there were many who protested against this compulsion, I remember one man who was constantly being imprisoned when I was a boy for refusing to wear his and I always wished he would have expended his energy on a better campaign.

Until this week court cases which have implied cyclists are negligent in not wearing cycle helmets have failed. There was an attempt to introduce legislation to make it compulsory in 1998-9 and 2004. One challenge is policing the issue, I suppose we would see police pursuing cyclists not wearing one or more likely neighbours would inform on people not having one. Unlike with cars and motorcycles, the UK has no bicycle licensing system so you cannot take the number of the bicycle and say that a certain person is responsible as you can with motor vehicles. This court case Smith v. Finch 2009 has suggested that a cyclist injured while not wearing a cycle helmet would not be entitled to full compensation and cyclists not wearing one can be seen by the law as negligent even though there is no legal compulsion to wear one. The cyclist Robert Smith brought a claim against Michael Finch who had hit him with his 600cc motorbike. Finch counter-claimed saying that Smith had been responsible for the head injuries he had sustained because he was not wearing a helmet even though he had one.

Medical evidence showed that the helmet would have done nothing to reduce Smith's injuries as the back of his head was hit and he hit the ground at 12mph which was more severe than the helmet could take. The motorcyclist had come very close to the cyclist while speeding and the court put the bulk of liability on Finch. Cycling journals have noted that whilst the judgement does not compel people to wear cycle helmets they can be seen as negligent if claiming compensation and court cases usually see a 25% reduction in compensation if the cyclist is not wearing a helmet. The government claimed that 1,200 children under 16 received a head injury in a year from cycling and crash helmets would reduce this by 85% but they have now withdrawn this claim. Negligence against children is difficult legally anyway. In the UK you are not criminally responsible until you are 10 years old and for children up to the age of 14, in cars, it is the driver who is responsible for whether they are wearing their seatbelt, which is compulsory in the UK. It is hard to get children to wear helmets, in 2004, 29% of adult males; 30% of adult females; 11% of child males and 26% of child female cyclists wore one. Boys are loathe to wear them. Also people in general are less likely to wear them when travelling on minor roads, which is similar to how people used to behave to wearing seatbelts before it became compulsory.

Current cycle helmets are fine for stopping you injuring your head when you fall off, they do not protect you if hit by a motor vehicle. In these cases the helmets generally shatter anyway. A friend of a friend had hers smashed open by something sticking out from a lorry as it drove past.

New Zealand, Canada, the Czech Republic, Iceland and parts of Australia have made cycle helmets compulsory. I would argue that if this is going to be the case then the helmets need to be far more encompassing and far tougher. I am not suggesting that cyclists wear motorcycle helmets but perhaps something more like what mountaineers wear which protects the back of the head as well as the top. In many accidents cyclists are thrown to the side or backwards, and are unlikely to come down on the very top of their head which is the part that bicycle helmets most protect.

Of course the key problem is that drivers in the UK drive so hazardously around cyclists. British drivers drive very dangerously anyway and it seems to be deteriorating. No-one uses indicators any more and a trend I have noticed in recent weeks (I drive over 300 miles per week) is people from side roads forcing their way into the main road without waiting, causing sudden braking on the main road. Fortunately I always leave generous space between me and the next car, but tailgating is so prevalent in the UK that I am sure 'shunts' must be increasing due to this behaviour. In 2006 research found that motorists drove 8.5 cm closer to a cyclist wearing a helmet than a bare-headed one:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/somerset/5334208.stm

For women, wearing a wig is more effective than wearing a helmet because this research showed that it meant drivers gave them an additional 14cm compared to a bare-headed cyclist, which shows how sexist many drivers are that they want to ogle a beautiful blonde whereas they will mow down other cyclists. However, women cyclists are actually more likely to be injured by lorries than male ones, partly, ironically because women cyclists obey traffic signals and signs more than men. Evidence about this was suppressed by the government:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1695668.ece

There has been evidence in the past that cyclists with a helmet on also get complacent as they feel protected, though in fact given the kind of injuries they are likely to sustain, they are little better off than if wearing nothing. Cyclist are generally hit first on their limbs, then their body and finally their head as it smashes into the ground. If motorists are going to drive so dangerously, we need to start introducing armour for cyclists.

A lot of this furore has stemmed from motorists and motorcyclists trying to shift blame on to cyclists. This is a very British attitude. In the UK we have this sense that 'an Englishman's car is his (mobile) castle' which leads to very hostile driving towards all other road users as if any delay in a journey is a personal affront to the driver. If you cycle in continental Europe you find drivers give you so much more space, to the extent that you can tell if you are being overtaken by a British car compared to a French/Belgian/Dutch one. In my experience the difference in the space you are left can be up to 45cm more from a non-British driver, depending on the road. I was often hooted by lorries in France and initially assumed they were being as hostile as British lorry drivers who seem to think that cyclists should be banned from the roads. Many car and lorry drivers think this too and shout it out at you; there was a case I heard of while driving through Dorset of a middle-aged man pushed off last year by people driving by in a car. The rage of British motorists at cyclists who are obeying the law, is incredible. Some cyclists do drive dangerously and jump lights, but it is rarely these ones who are abused verbally and physically by drivers. Simply cycling opens you up to a lot of abuse. This helmet controversy will just add more fuel to their anger at cyclists. Ironically in local newspapers you see numerous complaints about cyclists cycling on pavements but given how hazardous the roads are, is this any surprise?

I wear my cycle helmet religiously these days, though perhaps I should put a long wig on instead. The key issue remains, as on a poster that I saw in the 1980s, that cyclists remain a 'soft vehicle'. In 2007, 136 cyclists were killed and 2,428 seriously injured. Even if we armour cyclists and bicycles, this will always be the case. Even with their far tougher crash helmets and leather clothing, 2,493 motorcyclists were killed in the UK last year and there were a total of 6,737 who suffered an accident, making up a quarter of all road casualties. Given these statistics even stronger helmets and protection for cyclists may not reduce the casualties. Cycle helmets will protect you if fall off your bicycle but not if you are hit by a car or lorry. I suggest we begin moving towards the whole head covering design worn by BMX cyclists which protect the neck and face as well as the top of the head. Yet, even this will not keep you alive if rammed by a car.

What needs to change is the attitude to driving in the UK. Drivers of motor vehicles must learn that the road is not just for them and that there are all sorts of other vehicles out there. People must stop taking it as a personal insult that there is a slower or two-wheeled vehicle in front of them (let alone a horse, I could do a whole posting on how badly drivers behave towards equestrians and their mounts). British drivers need to learn from their continental counterparts that roads are not their for their personal use, but that driving a car or lorry means you become part of a complex system which needs everyone to obey the laws that are clear and well established. Speed limits are there for a reason, however much you whine that they are simply to constrain you asserting your machismo/a. Speed cameras are necessary because so many people think they are somehow exempt from the law and need to be reminded that they are not. If you are not speeding then speed cameras are no worry. Cyclists and motorcyclists have as much right to the road as you do. They should not be persecuted just because they select (or can only afford) a different form of transport to you; certainly you should not try to kill them or cause an accident, that is criminal behaviour even if the law is poor at catching up with you. Stop being so juvenile as to always try to shift the blame on to others, blaming pedestrians for trying to cross a road, especially in a residential area or a cyclist just because they have not got their helmet on. You will encourage responsible use of roads if you behave responsibly yourself. Too many drivers break rules so that they make it seem like some arbitrary thing and that I take a great risk in complying with the laws of the road.

Excuses, such as people not wearing helmets which are always going to be no protection against dangerous drivers, will always be found. In fact arrogance is what kills and it is the key issue that needs to be tackled if we are going to reduce road casualties.

The Hazards of Cycling in British Society

I suppose one of the benefits of driving through an area with a bigoted radio presenter spouting out his views as if he was a talk radio 'shock jock' is that it stimulates me to comment in a way that probably would not happen if the man just got on with his job and played tunes and reported on the traffic. Yes, I am back in the area with that man again and today he was slagging off cyclists. Probably quite a safe thing for him to do on morning radio as the bulk of his listeners will be in cars or the kitchen and not on their bicycles. I was going to email the man directly but I guess there is little point, he is so mired in his prejudices that it would take a miracle to excavate him from them.

Now, it is interesting how much difference 3-4 years makes. If I had started this blog in 2003 or 1999 you probably would see lots of postings about my latest cycling trip around London or Buckinghamshire probably illustrated by photographs scanned in of where I had been. In those days cycling was one of my keen hobbies. I was never one of these people who got out to do his 50 miles no matter what the weather was. I preferred to cycle in good weather if I could help it and I always had a target something like a stately home or a beauty spot or at least a pub for a nice lunch. I would do 25-40 miles on a Sunday and enjoy not only getting out on quiet roads (yes they do exist in Britain) but also a sense of achievement at a time when I felt I was achieving little. I was not fast enough to be a member of a club (in my town of the 2000s you had to be able to sustain 15mph (24kph) for 50 miles (80km) and I could not achieve much beyond 10-11mph average. However, that did not matter, what I did do, I enjoyed. I would spend two weeks in June cycling in northern France, seeing really beautiful landscapes and eating very well too. It could be tough and got harder as my health got screwed up but looking back, as with most things, I see the good points. Having failed with a different type of holiday this year, I am going to revert to that kind of holiday in 2009 and am thinking of the Champagne or Burgundy regions, parts of France I have never visited as yet.

Anyway, it is that context that I write this posting. Drivers hate cyclists but a lot of the time it is on the same basis that they hate small car drivers. Most drivers feel they are the best on the road and think everyone should get out their way. They do feel a twinge of guilt when they see a cyclist because they know actually they are polluting the environment far more than a cyclist. They also feel guilty because they know that that man (and sometimes woman) is far fitter than them and likely to live longer. Drivers always fall back on tarring all cyclists with the same brush as the worst (and yet get upset if we tar all drivers the same way). There are cyclists who jump red lights and who do not have lights on their bicycles at night-time; yet who is it that comes off worse in any such encounter between a cyclist and vehicle. I know to most car drivers that a scratch on their paintwork is more important to them than the life of another human, but I have yet to hear a case in which a cyclist killed a car driver in an accident where as the reverse is extremely common (I remember a poster which stood out showing a cyclist's teeshirt with 'soft vehicle' in the style of those 'long vehicle' signs on lorries, on it. In that case recently of a drive who killed a cyclist whilst she was texting while driving a lot of the commentary was how hazardously the cyclist was supposed to be travelling, not that the woman was behaving so dangerously that she killed someone without noticing! Getting on a bicycle automatically makes you a focus of blame; getting in a car somehow excuses you even from murderous behaviour. Cyclists who ignore the issues of safety and the basics of the Highway Code put themselves and others at risk and should be condemned by all road users. However, the foolish actions of a few should not then provide a carte blanche for attacking all cyclists.

People say that why do cyclists not use cyclepaths where they exist (by these I mean separate routes rather than painted off sections along the side of the road), well it is because they are always covered in broken glass and most of them going in ridiculous, time wasting directions. Milton Keynes has loads of cycle paths, but they were drawn on a map by someone who wanted pretty spiral patterns not to provide an effective way to reach somewhere. They contrast sharply with grid road system in the city. I only found one cycle path that actually saved a cyclist time compared to going on the roads (which as hazardous in Milton Keynes as the in-city speed limit bar on one road and in the real city core is 70 mph (112kph) which madly is the same as a motorway) because randomly it went diagonally across a block. Most of the cyclepaths took longer and were often over hillier terrain than taking the road. I took the cyclepaths from South Milton Keynes to an area near the North end (about 8 miles (12.8 kph)in distance) and did the same journey via the roads and on the roads it was 25 minutes quicker and far less tiring as the road cut through the long hills rather than going right up the side of them. Cyclepaths are fine if you just want to tour around, they are no good if you actually want to get somewhere.

People complain about how cyclists signal, i.e. by putting their arms out. Well, to me this is far clearer than a pale blinking light on a car. You can always see where a cyclist who is behaving properly wants to go. In fact what the car drivers are complaining about is that they want the cyclist to be simply out of the way. Most drivers I meet do not realise a cyclist has the right to go into a right-hand lane at a roundabout if they want to go right (if you are reading this outside the UK, Japan or Australia, think left-hand lane to go left) and they will hoot and shout at you, when in fact you are simply obeying the Highway Code. Like a car or van or motorcycle, as a cyclist you are another road user. Car drivers want you to use lights and stop at traffic lights in line with the law, but then they do not want you actually to get into the proper lane for the manoeuvre you want to do. It is frightening enough trying to navigate around a large roundabout without ill-informed, arrogant people bellowing at you. Of course, many car drivers never signal at all whether going round a roundabout or changing lanes on the motorway or turning into a side road, they just do it and seem to think it is alright.

Drivers complain about cyclists travelling two abreast. Well, I think the only reason why they despise this is because it makes it far harder to push the cyclists into the gutter. Two cyclists abreast is still narrower than the average car let alone a 4x4, so just overtake. One noticeable thing in the UK which is in sharp contrast to cycling in France or elsewhere across Europe, especially Belgium and the Netherlands, is how much space car drivers give cyclists. Many British drivers wobble all over their lanes anyway, but they think a reasonable amount of space to leave a cyclist when overtaking them is nothing (and they only think about the physical space, not how much their passing sucks up the cyclist with its wind and so complain about this reflective bars protruding from bicycles, less popular now than in the 1980s). They resent turning the steering wheel that miniscule amount to move a decent distance around a cyclist. French, Belgian, Dutch drivers all pull out as if they were overtaking another car, British drivers do not. I once cycled, one glorious sunny day along the road from Bolougne to Calais in northern France. This was on the coast road so pretty quiet as most people stick to the motorway in land if they want to get somewhere. However, some people take this route for the stunning views and by the time I reached Calais I could tell you the nationality of the driver approaching me from behind before they had even passed me. The British all seemed to want to strip my panniers off my bicycle they came so close, even though there was never a car coming in the other direction. No British driver will give a cyclist the width of their body let alone a safe distance, and again it stems from British drivers seeing others unlike themselves as scum that it is fine to kill.

This issue of space on the roads even occurs when there are cycle lanes marked out along the side of roads. These are very common in many UK towns and I naturally stick to them, because they go along the way the road is going and get you where you want to be in reasonable time. Many have boxes marked out at traffic lights which allow cyclists to get in the correct position to turn right (i.e. in the UK across the flow of traffic). Once in Whitechapel, east London I was waiting at a traffic light, sitting in one of these boxes. I wanted just to go straight on so was on the side by the pavement. As the cyclist box was ahead of the cars I was peripherally aware of a large car behind me. I set off heading straight on as intended. Suddenly a short way up the road a 4x4 pulls across in front of me, blocking the cycle lane and mounting the pavement. The driver leaps from it swearing at me, trying to snatch my bicycle and trying to punch me. My 'crime' had been to go straight on when he wanted to turn left, somehow I had 'blocked' him from powering away down the side road and so was deserving of being beaten up. Of course I powered away from him leaving him away from his car and unable to get back to it to catch up. I just hoped it had all been caught on CCTV. This incredible arrogance, this assumption that somehow I was out to ruin his day by him having to slow up for a few seconds and that needed me to be punished by violence shows how distorted the world has become. (That was not the first time I was threatened on my bicycle, the first time a man almost reversed into me from his driveway and when I shouted at him to be more careful, he also blocked the road leapt out and started trying to punch me.) Cyclists, to the average driver, we are scum worthy of a beating (just this week someone reached out of a passing car and pushed a 42-year old man off his bicycle: Why? What offence was he causing? He is just a human), not humans just trying, like them, to simply get somewhere. Most drivers clearly only read tiny bits of the Highway Code and have no recognition that actually it is about all road users. I have never ridden a horse, but I am sure many horseriders would simply echo these sentiments. (My favourite joke when passing a group of horseriders when on my bicycle, especially climbing a hill was to say 'I know how they feel').

Another criticism of cyclists is that they look ugly and should not be in lycra shorts. Well there is a simple riposte to that, have you seen the average car driver? At least a cyclist is using their body and even if going aty the slowest speed is getting a lot more exercise than a car driver and at less cost to the world. People disparage cyclists who dress up in team colours, but somehow fat men in football shirts and drivers with Ferrari stickers or baseball caps are exempt from such negativity. People like to associate with a team, cyclists no less than anyone else. Why is there one rule for one set of people and another for a different set?

The dangers that cyclists face stem from an endemic problem in Britain. The boorish, arrogant, consumerist and self-centred section of the population are the ones who define our culture. They kill. They kill cyclists and pedestrians because they are so wrapped up in their egos. Cyclists do not stand around car parks ridiculing the obese as they cram themselves into their cars, they get on with their lives and let other people live theirs. If British culture was more defined by the cyclists (and walkers) of this country not only would it be safer and healthier, but finally we might begin to reduce the level of hatred that the average Briton has for the ordinary people they encounter every day. When radio presenters try to stir up even more hatred against cyclists they simply damage British society (which they profess to love) even further.

What Annoys Me About ... Drivers

As I have commented before I drive around 400 miles (640 Km) per week. Last weekend I covered 680 miles (1088 Km), so I experience a lot of traffic. I have driven in the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Greece so have quite a good deal of knowledge of driving conditions and behaviour in my part of the World. I have heard that in some countries driving is worse than in the UK, and Italy and Malta in particular have been pointed out to me as examples, but I have no experience of driving in those two countries so am in no position to comment. However, I would still imagine that the UK is near the bottom of the table for bad driving.

One reason why drivers in the UK are so bad is because they carry the social consciousness of British society on to the road. Those with big, expensive cars, especially SUVs, expect others to move out of their way and that they are exempt from the regulations, especially in terms of speed limits and parking restrictions. However, at all levels in the UK people feel that they have the right to bully people in a smaller or older or cheaper car with no regard for what the rules of the road are. Every British driver (and this includes many women as well as men) sees driving as somehow a test of their virility (or whatever the female equivalent is) and to be challenged on the road and lose is somehow a serious slight to their personality. This is no basis on which to drive, it is not a gladiatorial competition, it is about getting from A to B as safely as possible, but it seems very few UK drivers recognise that. For them it is about showing off their wealth and status and getting around as fast as they can.

I have already touched on a couple of types of behaviour by UK drivers that I will not revisit here, but will mention again briefly at the beginning for completeness. The first is complaining about speed cameras. So many people say they are simply fund-raising devices and extreme groups even vandalise them. Much print and many hours of radio talk is spent complaining about speed cameras. Of course if you never break the speed limit you will never be fined as a result of a speed camera, but to many UK drivers this insults their freedom to drive as fast as they like (to them it is equivalent to saying to an American that he does not have the right to have bullets for his gun because they may kill people). These people want to the right to drive dangerously and whine incessantly because they are penalised when they do.

Overlapping with the speed camera opponents are those people still using mobile phones in their cars. Hands-free kits have been available for years now and can be bought in any service station. Despite the increased fines and the greater penalties for anyone holding a mobile phone while driving, every day I see people continuing to do it. Their silly phonecall is deemed more important than the lives of the people around them. As with speeding they have the ultimate arrogance that a) they are very skilled drivers b) that laws do not apply to them c) that their petty concerns are greater than the welfare of hundreds of other people. Even skilled police drivers cannot hold mobile phones and drive well; it is not simply the obstacle to gripping the steering wheel but also the mental distraction. You see people wobbling all over the road, braking suddenly and generally causing disruption to the flow of traffic.

Now, moving on to new areas of terrible driving. Different things bubble up through the year, but one persistent one I have faced over the past few weeks is 'tailgating'. If you are not familiar with what this involves, basically it is driving so close to the vehicle in front of you that if it stops suddenly you will be unable not to crash into it. The stopping distance for a car travelling at 30 mph (48kph) in dry weather is the length of 6 average cars (75 ft or 23m) at 70 mph (112kph) - the highest speed you are legally allowed to travel on UK roads, is 24 car lengths (315 ft or 96m). These distances double in wet weather. Now, constantly I have cars behind me at less than 3 ft (i.e. 1m), which means even driving in a residential road where the speed limit is 30mph, if I stop when a child or an old person or a cat runs out, they will definitely crash into me and shunt me forwards quite a distance. You can imagine how hazardous it is on motorways. This is the reason that every day I see cars that have 'shunted', i.e. one has smashed into the rear of another. On a 30 mile (48 Km) journey each morning I typically see three of these accidents. Now, I accept that not all of these kill people, but they wreck cars and contribute to the slowness of traffic.

There are a couple of variations on tailgating. One is the behaviour of lorries (trucks) on motorways (freeways or highways). In the UK their speed is limited to 60 mph (96kph). If you are in front of a lorry and your speed falls to 59mph they will be less than 3 feet behind you, flashing their lights and hooting you to get out of their way, even when you have nowhere to go as there are vehicles blocking the way in front of you. They make no consideration for the fact that you may have moved into the inside lane because you want to turn off, they expect you to charge up to the junction. Having a 30-tonne plus lorry bearing down on you is hardly likely to lead to confident driving. The other thing is the racing between lorries. If one finds that because he is unloaded he can get 1-2mph faster than the one in front he pulls into the middle lane and slowly edges past that other lorry. It is an agonisingly slow race. Of course the lorry on the inside lane never yields any space and sometimes the overtaking lorry has to drop back. All of this is going on for some foolish pride of lorry drivers, but it causes chaos for other road users. It drops the speed of the middle lane suddenly from 70mph to 60mph when the lorry moves out and these large vehicles sweeping constantly back and forth between two lanes sends turbulence and disruption to the other road users that the lorry drivers seem simply to despise. Coach drivers who can go up to 70mph (and usually go much faster despite their passengers) are even worse.

Another variation on tailgating goes back to the social status issue. Many drivers seem to feel that small cars should not be on the road (lorry drivers seem to have the same view of all car drivers). They hoot and flash at them, trying to get them to pull off the road, even when there are other clear lanes to pass on. If you yield the car zooms past and you catch up with it at the next junction anyway. Presumably it is offensive to them to see a small car in front of them and they wish they had some special route just for them (I believe this is one reason why the Conservative Party in the UK want the top speed limit increased to 80mph. Even the Citroen 2CV with an engine capacity of 602cc can make 70mph but most cars under 1 litre [i.e. 1000cc or more usually 998cc] capacity find it difficult to reach 80mph meaning that they would be reconciled to being terrorised by the lorries in the slow and middle lanes). There are drivers who take this further and I have encountered a couple. One will move around back and forth across the road to block your progress and go in front of you and brake suddenly. Another will simply follow you, sitting tight behind you no matter where you go, even if you pull over or speed up or slow down, as if you are in some trashy horror movie. Why these people want to do this I have no idea, clearly they have nothing better to do with their lives.

Other behaviour that is both dangerous and annoying on the road, are people who change lanes, go round roundabouts, turn into side roads, etc. all without signalling. Every car now has clear, easily operated indicators, but some people seem to have an inability to use them. Again they slow up the traffic and increase the danger to others for the sake of them moving their hand a few centimetres. Why people like moving back and forth across all lanes of the motorway I do not know. Then they see their junction and move right from the fast lane to the exit slip road without signalling at all. Again, clearly they simply think the road is just for them.

A similar problem is with people 'undertaking'. By this I am referring not to funeral directors (they at least have the grace to drive slowly) but to people who pass your car on the inside and then pop up in front of you. Like those who wander across all the lanes, they are seeking the quickest route anywhere. By definition they are speeding. The main hazard is that they come back into a middle lane at the same time as someone is coming across from the fast lane and so crash three cars at once. If they have the power and the speed, why can they not simply expend the effort to overtake properly, no-one has any gripe with that. A variation on this comes at junctions when they creep up, say the lane to go left or straight on then jump out right in front of you as you try to turn right. Clearly even a few seconds lost on their journey is more of a concern than their or anyone else's life. The same impatience happens when two roads are merging. In the UK in such situations cars are supposed to merge with one from the main road followed by one from the joining road then one from the main road and so on. However, of course, rather than waiting their turn people push as far forward as they can and shove in as many of them as they can. Again such behaviour not only is hazardous but also actually slows up the whole flow of traffic for everyone, the people carrying out the action too. I must say I have experienced this in Germany as well as the UK, though less often. Another variation is people doing this creeping up when you are queuing to join a ferry or go over a toll bridge or something similar. Why do they think they are exempt from queuing when everyone else has to do it?

In contrast to many of the problems above that stem from arrogance and even self-righteousness, there is one form of bad driving which comes from hesitancy. Maybe this if forgivable given all the overly-assertive dangerous drivers around, but it does add to the difficulties of driving around safely. This is the issue of people who 'hover'. This is notable on motorways where people sit just behind you in the faster lane to you which is a difficult location as it is often in a 'blind spot' for car mirrors. The front of their car is just level with the rear of yours so you cannot move across into their lane and yet if you slow down to get in behind them, they slow too. You end up paying more attention to where they are for fear of them knocking against you, than the rest of the users on the road. Either they should fall back to give you enough space to get in or accelerate and get past you. The same happens with feeder roads, very common on both motorways and dual carriageways. I pass many of these on a daily basis and I know it is often difficult to join the main road from them, so I slow up in advance of the junction and signal for the people to come on, but do they? No. They move forward a little but do not go, then they might go and of course by then I am closer to them and have to slow more, endangering myself from whoever is tailgating me. It also happens in reverse when you are joining from a feeder. Lorries will simply not let you in and you have to hang at the entrance until they all pass, but some cars again will not accelerate past you nor slow enough to let you in and you get pushed to the end of the slip road in a very dangerous situation. Of course I simply put it down to incompetence and a lack of understanding of how the British road system works, but maybe it is malice and they just enjoy toying with you.

I am sure there are probably a hundred more things I witness in terms of bad behaviour on the roads, but these are the most common and probably provoke the most accidents. Other ones that come to mind is people driving around with full beam headlights constantly at night time seemingly unaware that they are dazzling everyone around them, they do this even on well lit and busy roads. People who drive the wrong way into service stations and then expect you to get out of the way when you have come in the correct way and have queued patiently to use a pump. Now that people drive big SUVs they seem to think that the rule that any vehicle pulling a caravan travels no faster than 50mph (80kph) has been scrapped and they charge along at 70mph+ with the caravan flapping side-to-side hazardously. People who do not understand that when approaching a junction what was previously the fast lane, say on a dual carriageway, is now the lane to turn right, so you can go into it and slow down and should not be forced to travel at 70mph right up to the junction just because they think it is still the fast lane.

Generally the quality of driving in the UK is appalling. This stems primarily from arrogance. Most drivers travel around in a bubble and think they are free to drive how they wish with absolutely no interest on anyone else they are sharing the road with, and often with an intention to somehow humiliate many of the people around them. Over 3,500 people are killed each year on Britain's roads; over 290,000 people are severely injured. Of these incidents only around 5% are caused by drunk drivers, which means that 95% of the accidents are committed by someone who is sober but driving in the idiotic ways I see on a daily basis. As the UK's roads become ever busier we need people to wake up and realise when they get in their car they are not starting a computer game or going into battle, they are simply driving and not alone, but with thousands of people around them. The arrogance needs to decrease sharply and a recognition that you are moving with a dangerous weapon in a confined and ever shifting space, needs to come to the fore.

Our Selfish Society 1: Road Littering

There are probably so many selfish people in the world today that I could produce a blog just on that. I envisage a string of postings on such topics: selfishness has been increasing over the last few decades and certainly in the English-speaking world took a real boost in the 1980s, the 'greed is good' era. I drive 60-90 miles (96-144km) per day and on the road is where you see a great deal of selfish behaviour and a lot of bad, arrogant and ignorant behaviour too. There is something about getting in a car which seems to free people from the normal constraints of society and also make them feel they are back in historic times in which they have to fight for their name and challenge others to duels. I intend to do a posting just on the bad aspects of driving in the UK. However, today I am going to focus on just one element of selfish behaviour combined with driving: road littering.

What prompted this was news today that according to the UK Highways Agency the amount of litter along the UK's roads has reached an all time high. It is the agency's job to clean it up and it is taking staff and funds away from road repairs. This is not the end of the problem. They have to employ more people to clear the litter from the road and from roadsides and this is a really hazardous occupation. Last year in one county, Hampshire in southern England, 2 of their staff were killed and 19 were injured, collecting litter along the roadsides. They put signs up well in advance of the litter clearing both in terms of days and in terms of distance on the road so everyone has fair warning. The litter collectors wear high visibility clothing, they keep to the verges not the road, and yet, people are still running them down.

They reckon you have a life expectancy of 10 minutes if you break down on a UK motorway. In the UK, unlike France, it is not compulsory to have high-visibility vests or warning triangles in your car, but many people do. Neither of these, however, seem to reduce your risk of being killed on a UK motorway. It does not matter if you are in the middle lane or on the hard shoulder you are still at risk from drivers in cars and lorries (trucks) drifting over the lanes. It is apparent people pay little attention to what is in front of them and do not slow down when they see a broken-down car or a litter collector; they literally get away with murder.

Litter throwing, and when I say throwing, that is exactly what I mean, not dropping, is in itself causing accidents. UK drivers, according to government reports, are no longer happy simply to drop cigarette butts out of the car window, they are actually throwing drinks cans and fast food packaging out of their windows and across lanes, causing cars to swerve.

Do these reckless drivers and passengers live in some bubble? Do they think they are only playing a game on their Playstation or their Xbox? Have they no thought of what their actions are causing? Have they no idea what it is like to have your car hit by a drinks can at 70 mph (112kph)? These are probably the same people, who despite the higher fines and stricter penalties introduced this year, are still driving one-handed with a mobile phone pressed to their ear. The number of people doing that, in my experience, has not dropped at all. These people are utterly selfish, they have no concerns for anything beyond their petty, exploitative lives. To them disposing of litter or taking a phone call is far more important than a person's life. How sick can you get?!

A car is a more dangerous weapon than a knife and in some cases than a gun. The penalties for using this weapon recklessly should be as high as if a knife or a gun was used. People should not just get 18 months imprisonment and a driving ban for a year, they should get 25 years. If they ran around the town, blindfolded, with a gun, firing off randomly and killed someone, that is what they would get, but somehow using a car so recklessly is seen as alright. It still ends someone's life, it does not matter what the actual weapon is. The only way we are going to change this lethal behaviour which wrecks so many lives is to impose proper penalties on dangerous drivers.