Category - General

This item appeared on my newsfeed. It’s a story about pupils from a Leeds school taking part in a protest about speed (whilst simultaneously trying to set a world record for the Biggest Walking Bus – go figure the logic here)..

Now, don’t get me wrong. Speeding is absolutely wrong, and if someone speeds and causes an accident or injury then they deserve to be locked up for a long time and never allowed to drive again.

But let’s just look at something here and try to stay in touch with reality. Julie Townsend, of Brake, says:

You never know when a child might make a mistake and run out. Your slower driving could save their life.

What this does is create a cosy little image of a Utopian society, where parents all bring up well-behaved and well-balanced children, who always take care near roads, but who – occasionally, perhaps when attracted to a jingling ice-cream van with a smiling Italian driver – can make mistakes due to their undeveloped brains and sense of self-preservation.

It ain’t like that. And especially not in certain large cities.

The reality is that many kids will deliberately walk, ride, or stand in front of your car because they know you won’t run them over. They have been brought up badly enough to develop this attitude themselves, and they are conscious and calculating over it (and a great many other things). The only thing that is “undeveloped” in them is a sense of decency.

I live in a city where kids actually retain some traces of human behaviour, instead of the bestial kind prevalent elsewhere, and this happens all the time. The kids involved can be very young – and I’m always of the opinion that if you know what you are doing then you should expect to be held responsible for it.

And adults – the parents of these little angels – are even worse. I lose count of the number of puschairs I see poking out between parked cars as the “mother” seeks to find a way across without endangering herself – usually 10 metres from a crossing. I also lose count of the number of cars with “child on board” (any of the variants) signs speeding, cutting me up, and driving extremely erratically on any given day – especially from 3pm onwards on schooldays.

If someone “makes a mistake” and runs out in front of you, 90% of the time it isn’t because they’re a kid. It’s because they’re an idiot who has had role models help them develop their behavior to where it is today.

By all means, attack speeding – true speeding. But don’t just attack cars because of stupidity and poor upbringing.

This article is from 2011, so it is very old. However, someone says the same thing every years, so you can just insert whatever year you like into it.

I saw this scaremongering story from ChoiceQuote – an online insurance website.

ATS Euromaster is advising all drivers to pre-order cold-weather tyres for protection against heavy snow and freezing temperatures. Roughly translated, this means “we don’t want to overstock, but we want to increase sales, too. So we’ll start early this year.” ATS goes on to say it could have sold last year’s stock several times over. Well, yes, because it didn’t have significant stocks (no UK supplier ever has – cold-weather tyres are a new fad over here) and the weather caught everyone out.

Then, they’ve got some weather forecaster predicting unsafe driving conditions…

…during what could be the worst winter on record.

The forecaster is from an organisation called Exacta. A quick look at their website reveals this:

Exacta Weather is a non-profit weather organisation that comprises a team of meteorologists from around the world, who share and supply their data and research with Exacta Weather. All the forecast information they provide is on a purely voluntary basis, they simply have a passion for weather and offer proven track records in accurate long range and seasonal weather forecasting. Exacta Weather will also bring you all the latest weather news from around the globe, which also currently includes long range weather forecasts for the UK, Northern Europe, and the USA.

[Paypal donation button here]

Exacta Weather is a FREE long range weather service that does not charge for forecasts or receive any government funding. Any donations towards operating costs will be highly appreciated.

The key elements here are a “passion” for the weather and the fact that they don’t receive any government funding. It means they’re no more likely to hit the mark than some crazy bloke with seaweed hanging up in his garage, and that they probably consist… of a bunch of crazy people with seaweed hanging up in their garages! I’m not sure if the “data” they obtain are from the organisations they work for (in which case those organisations and their supercomputers will be better able to use those data), or self-generated (back to the seaweed again).

So, in summary, it is two companies feathering their nests by gambling on something for which the outcome cannot be predicted, by scaremongering.

I have a prediction for the winter. It will be generally colder than summer, it might be wet, and it may or may not snow heavily at some point.

EDIT 31/8/2011: Someone wrote to me today to point out that Exacta is a reputable company which has “predicted the last two harsh winters accurately”.

I can’t find the old forecasts so I can’t really comment on those pertaining to the last two winters. Weather forecasters have a habit of making sure that their forecasts look right, and old ones that are wrong tend not to hang around for people to see. However, I did point out that one of their forecasters said of this summer:

It would be adequate to suggest below average temperatures in terms of how I calculate solar activity in my forecasts, so it looks like a summer of grey skies and damp weather, and it’s probably safe to say that there will be no BBQ summer again this year”.

I also issued a warning for torrential downpours and severe flooding.

As I pointed out to the reader, that could be ANY summer. And it’s debatable whether we have actually had a “summer of grey skies and damp weather”. Up this way, it’s been mild with few downpours, and there have been hot spells. Nothing at all like the summer we had three or four years ago – where it really did flood.

So, although I take his point, my scepticism of weather forecasting remains – and any suggestion of a forthcoming harsh winter stands a 50% chance of being right. O h yeah. And if the Met Office and NASA can’t get it 100% right, then no one can – no matter how well-meaning they are.

I also maintain my original stance: that ATS – a major supplier of tyres in the UK – has its own interests at heart.

EDIT 30/9/2011: It has been absolutely bloody boiling these last three days – records being broken for the time of year – and it looks like continuing for several days yet. That certainly didn’t appear in any of the long-range forecasts while they were still long range. However, I note that the information is creeping in as part of those forecasts now we’re actually experiencing it, so I wouldn’t be surprised if someone claimed next year that it was forecast.

This is a very old story and all links in it are now dead and so removed. And DSA is now DVSA, of course.

When I saw the headline, my first thought was “about time”. But as soon as I started reading the story in This is South Devon I realised that it wasn’t all it seemed.

When you drive (or teach people to drive) for a living, other motorists behaving stupidly, dangerously, and arrogantly is a major annoyance. One of the worst groups has to be taxi drivers, and it really makes you wonder how the hell many of them get through their taxi test.

The DSA’s website says:

The test is more demanding than the practical test taken by learner drivers, and has elements that relate specifically to driving a taxi or PHV.

So how is it that so many taxi drivers don’t seem to have a clue how to drive safely or with other road users in mind? If they’ve been tested, it can only be deliberate the way they behave.

You can be driving behind a taxi and it will stop – literally stop dead – to pick up a fare. It won’t care if it is blocking the road completely or who is behind it – it will still stop without any warning. You may come across one that has blocked a narrow residential road as you turn round a blind bend (blind bends and other danger areas mean nothing to taxis).

They will stop during the rush hour on yellow lines, on zig-zags at crossings, in restricted stopping zones, or anywhere else that is convenient to them (an individual) irrespective of the mayhem it causes to thousands of people trying to negotiate the rush hour while they block off part of the road – and then pull away as soon as they’re ready to go, forcing everyone to stop.

They pull off without warning and will happily block half of the road while they emerge into free-flowing traffic which has no reason to stop for them other than to avoid a collision. They sit two abreast (blocking off half the road) talking to each other outside their HQ (anyone who doesn’t believe me should go past Southside Cars in Clifton – daytime or night, it won’t make any difference to the taxis). Hazard lights are a taxi’s standard method of communicating that it is illegally parked half on the pavement, straddling double yellow lines.

Taxis will drive at a speed to suit them – very slowly when between jobs, usually in the right-hand lanes; very fast when on a job. When driving on  a job, overtaking on the inside, lane changing, and cutting up is mandatory. If a call comes through while they’re sauntering along or pulling away at traffic lights very slowly, then a U-turn can be carried out in any location and in any volume of traffic using any method that occurs to the driver at that particular moment in time.

The manoeuvre will come as a big surprise to everyone else, because taxis don’t use signals (except occasionally for hazard lights when they are within 500m of where their sat nav has told them they should be and they’re looking for a house number). The idea of driving a few metres in order to do a turn in the road or a corner reverse safely – or going around the block – is not something which a taxi driver is capable of considering. It has to be an immediate and often illegal or dangerous turn right there and then (a favoured manoeuvre outside Southside Cars when a call comes through is the U-turn in the road on zig-zags, usually misjudged (so becoming a turn in the road), and often involving going around a pedestrian island the wrong way depending on where they were parked).

Bearing all this in mind, I was thinking that someone in Devon had got wise to all this and started to do something about it.

It turned out to be three drivers parking a bit outside the overflowing taxi rank, or in a bus bay. In other words, bureaucratic codswallop.