The newsfeeds are alive with American articles about “distracted driving”. Nothing is ever simple in America, and California specialises in taking that fact several steps further. Most American states cannot agree on what is legal and what isn’t (just look at the latest from Jackson, Mississippi to see that in action), particularly when it comes to using mobile phones when driving. On top of that, the American constitution seems to result in almost nothing being legally illegal! This particular story illustrates that clearly (link now dead).
Stephen Spriggs was given a ticket when he used his mobile phone whilst stationary in a traffic jam to look for an alternative route. He challenged the fine, and the appeal court has ruled that the law in question only applies to people “listening and talking” on their phones.
The law the CHP officer used to ticket Spriggs applies specifically to people “listening and talking” on cellphones, not using their mobile phone in other ways, the court said.
Texting while driving remains illegal under another California law passed after the one at issue in Spriggs’ case.
So it would appear that driving around fiddling with your satnav app is perfectly OK in California after this ruling. Heaven help them when Google Glass gains popularity.
I had a political flyer through the door today, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the “Tram Update” in flowery script from Jane Urquhart – the imbecile directly responsible for the tram at this point in time. One line in particular is worth quoting:
All shops will continue to be open as usual during the works.
Sorry, Jane, but you are totally and utterly wrong. The Clifton Chinese on Varney Road and Michael’s Fresh Bake at the top end of Clifton won’t be. Both of those went bust as a direct result of your beloved tram. Outside Clifton, there have been others forced to close. Many others are almost bankrupt, and there’s no guarantee they’ll recover. They’ll certainly never recoup what they’ve lost, and it’s all thanks to the tram and whoever has been its mouthpiece during its construction.
Indeed, Urquhart’s cronies at NET are apparently just as bad when it comes to idiotic and misinformed rhetoric. In that link concerning the Beeston florist, they are quoted:
If the owners of the Greenfingers Flower Shop believed the tram works were affecting the business, we could have looked into it, but they have not been in touch with us.
What a complete and utter arrogant twat. Maybe NET should have looked at completing the work ahead of time instead of allowing it to fall many months behind. What does he think NET could have done? Given the shop keeper a skip full of money? Because that’s the only thing that will work if you have been stupid enough to close a road off for a year, then incompetent enough after that to extend the closure by half as much again.
The tram is a complete screw up. You can make up your own mind about those who are responsible for building it.
When the Somerset Levels got flooded, government response was low-key and sluggish. Now that the “beloved” Thames is brimming over – though not to anything like the extent of rivers down in Somerset – that jackass Cameron is walking around trumpeting that “money is no object”. Funny how it was an object two weeks ago, when Lord Smith said there wasn’t a bottomless purse. But hey, as I said: it’s the Thames, now. So it’s personal.
The media is even publishing photos showing a few centimetres of water in the gardens of multi-million pound properties along the Thames (this one is in Wraysbury).
Meanwhile, in Somerset, many properties are literally waist deep in water (as shown in this picture). Guess where this suggests the money ought to be spent.
To make matters worse, the Environment Agency has had to withdraw staff from Wraysbury because the local morons with the collective IQ of a tadpole decided to direct abuse and intimidation at EA workers.
It’s not clear what form this abuse took, but it appears to have been of a physical nature.
Let’s get a few things straight, here. I absolutely detest this government, but there is nothing it – or any of its agencies – could have done to avoid these floods.
No amount of dredging would have prevented the Somerset flooding. And the flooding on the Thames has bugger all to do with anything. It’s just shit that happens, as the saying goes. Let’s face it: if you’re going to spend the money you made being a plumber buying a semi-mansion next to a big river to park your white van outside of, you’re partly responsible if it gets flooded out. Floods happen. Especially near rivers.
Apart from the fact that a lot of water has fallen, by far the biggest problem is idiot councils building on flood plains and creating extra run-off. But quite how significant even this is isn’t known.
No one can possibly be unaware of the damage caused by the succession of recent storms, particularly in the south of the country. The government has been criticised for not doing enough, though I’m not sure what anyone could do against the forces of nature involved (solid concrete sea walls have been washed away).
But this BBC report highlights very well the sort of misdirected concern that thousands of people are up in arms about. The reporter just rattles on and on about the railway line without even the briefest mention of the risk to the houses along that seafront in Dawlish, Devon.
All of those houses are at risk of falling into the sea. No one can live in them with that sort of damage. Sod the railway line – the houses are far more important. And yet not one word… just the railway.
(Note: One day later, the BBC has apparently seen sense – maybe they read this – and has deigned to mention the people, even though it is still prattling about the bloody train).
This story cracked me up this morning. Arsenal’s draw with Southampton on Tuesday was lessened in its severity by Chelsea’s draw last night with West Ham (a shame Manchester City won again, but you can’t have everything).
Jose Mourinho was obviously beside himself with anger, and is quoted:
This is not the best league in the world, this is football from the 19th Century… The only [other] thing I could bring was a Black and Decker [tool] to destroy the wall.
So, apart from walking right into Eric Cantona territory with that Black and Decker thing, he labelled West Ham as playing “football from the 19th century”. Apparently, when he collared Sam Allardyce about it in the tunnel after the game, Sam was laughing.
It’s a bit rich coming from someone who waited until he’d played Manchester Utd twice before selling one of his best players to them (and before Arsenal had played them twice), when he could easily have got rid of the surplus a week or two before. Those are tactics straight out of the High Seas era of the 1700s.
Big Sam was not in any way gloating over the incident when he said on camera:
He can’t take it, can he? He can’t take it because we’ve outwitted him – he just can’t cope… He can tell me all he wants, I don’t care…. I love to see Chelsea players moaning at the referee, trying to intimidate him, Jose jumping up and down saying we play rubbish football… It’s brilliant when you get a result against him. Hard luck, Jose.
We’re only a few days into the year and already there are numerous candidates for the 2014 Darwin Awards. These early candidates come courtesy of the bad weather we’ve been having recently. The first ones come from Blackpool.
The next one is in Wales.
Not sure about these next two, but they’re from the same BBC news video clip.
But you really need to run that news clip – this guy is current front runner for the 2014 award. He is clearly shitting himself, because he nearly got washed out to sea.
People have already died because they got too close and were washed away. Police have issued warning after warning about staying away.
But still they come – those members of society having only one helix in their DNA, or an abnormal number of chromosomes. Oh, yeah. And they all appear to wear hoodies.
I mentioned a couple of months ago that the Clifton Chinese takeaway on Varney Road had gone out of business – in large part due to the loss of business caused by the tram works. Well, it appears that Michael’s Fresh Bake – the best bakery in Nottingham as far as bread goes – at the top end of Southchurch Drive has now gone under for similar reasons.
All those responsible for the tram and the protracted (and delayed) road works are criminals. Ruining livelihoods and ruining neighbourhoods. A drug-dealing hoodie with form for burglary would get put away for less. But who will judge these prats?
I was going to write this article anyway, but I notice from my logs that someone found the blog on the following search term:
Is traffic worse now on the ring road in Nottingham since the Aspley Lane junction was changed?
The junction was re-opened this week. The clowns responsible have removed the original roundabout and turned it into a light-controlled junction instead. It has been chaos in the several months during which access to Aspley Lane has been for buses only. The council gleefully installed cameras to make absolutely, positively, and definitely certain that it would benefit financially if anyone tried to get down there. Lord knows how much money they’ve ripped out of motorists as a result.
The ironic part is that traffic was at a virtual standstill most of the time during the work, and it wouldn’t have hurt to have allowed access to cars from the Ring Road. In fact, it would have eased congestion dramatically. But the closure was of a punitive nature – it simply satisfied some dickheads in the council, that’s all, and it served no useful or logical purpose otherwise.
Oh, wait. There was one logical reason. Buses.
The temporary lights that were put in at Aspley Lane during the protracted works were set to automatically change to red on the Ring Road if a bus came within half a mile of the junction. Indeed, and for comparison, they were as biased as the lights outside County Hall at Trent Bridge, whereby absolute priority is given to council employees wanting to get into and out of the County Hall car park, and where even a foil sweet wrapper blowing over the road sensors will trigger them to change. And that’s on top of the separate bus lane lights on the opposite side which trigger automatically if anything is in the bus lane (which often includes a car transporter delivering to Sandicliffe or a taxi stopped on them), and which buses skip out of if they’re behind schedule and speeding. It’s always a case of screw the motorist, all hail the bus.
But back to the original question: is the Aspley Lane junction better now?
Well, I’ve noticed a couple of things. First of all, the new permanent lights there are still set to trigger if a bus gets off a ferry anywhere in England. Or if a pedestrian wants to cross the road (and the junction is right next to that bloody school). Or if a cyclist approaches them. Or if anyone is waiting to come out of Aspley Lane (again, it’s right next to that school). To that end, I would say that for 90% of my journeys north along the Ring Road this week I have had to stop because the lights have been on red – and that’s even with me purposely avoiding going anywhere near them after 3pm.
Secondly, I have had time to notice during my frequent stops that the green light doesn’t stay on long. As I say, priority is given to Aspley Lane traffic, which is quite bizarre when you consider the meaning of the term “ring road”. In all honesty, I suspect that some prat somewhere deliberately decided that Broxtowe and Strelley should be favoured – in much the same way that they spent a fortune on “connecting the East Side”, where “east side” means St Ann’s; and in the same way that the tram seems to deliberately go to the same sorts of places, and avoids the posher areas completely. In other words, priority and preferential treatment is doled out in places where you’d think some sort of border control would work better.
Thirdly, every time I have travelled north through the junction, there has been a queue of traffic on the southbound carriageway stopped at the lights and extending back to the A610 junction. And I’m talking about mid-morning and mid-afternoon, here – not the rush hour.
You see, the problems on the Ring Road have always been due to the volume of traffic combined with bottlenecks. The Aspley Lane roundabout was never a significant bottleneck – the main ones were the Crown Island, the A610 junction at Bobbers Mill (which goes to the M1), and Basford. And this is still the case. Why? Because they are light-controlled, and because no matter how many lanes you add the traffic flow is governed by the narrowest point.
And now, Aspley Lane is also light-controlled it has been turned into a bottleneck.
So the answer is yes, the Ring Road is much worse now that they have “improved” the Aspley Lane junction.
I sometimes wish parents would get it into their thick, money-grabbing skulls that you can’t just count on “getting lucky” and pass your driving test if you can’t drive, anymore than you can count of winning the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket!
I don’t think they realise what kind of rubbish parents it makes them by even hoping that little Jonny or Kylie might “get lucky” in the first place – especially because even if they did get lucky, they’d then stand a bloody good chance of getting “unlucky” and killing themselves (or someone else) once they got out alone and started showing off.
Two things got me thinking about this recently. The first was a call from an ex-pupil who’d passed her test in an automatic well over a year ago but who had not driven since. She was taking auto lessons for almost two years before eventually passing her test on her seventh attempt. However, before that she’d been with me doing manual lessons, also for two years, and she never got anywhere near test standard. Don’t get me wrong – I’d tried to get her to switch to auto much earlier on in her training, but she refused because she’d bought a manual car. She was simply incapable of reliably mastering the foot coordination needed to stop without stalling. It was only when I found out she’d sold her car some time later that both me and her son got on to her again and finally persuaded her to switch. But as I say, it still took her another two years and seven test attempts.
Flatteringly, she always credited me with getting her through her test. She was a really nice lady and we’ve always stayed in touch by telephone, and although I hadn’t heard from her for a year, she called me when she recently bought her own car and asked if I’d take her out to get used to it.
I have to admit that I was very nervous. To be fair, she was actually much better than I had expected, but there were still many traces of the old style. For example, as I got her to pull into her driveway at the end of that lesson she nearly ran into a fence as she hit the gas instead of the brake. She planned to drive to work that day, and I warned her to be careful. But when I called her the next day to see how it went it seems she had already scraped her gatepost. To make matters worse, she called me the next day to tell me she’d done it again – this time causing somewhat more damage to the car.
It’s a horrible position to be in. I have no control over her because she is a full licence holder, and yet if I did have any control I would have forbidden her to drive at all. Part of me wonders how she will ever be a safe driver – in spite of having taken over 200 hours of lessons and seven tests! I really feel sorry for her. But this leads me on to the second thing – the thing that I was referring to right at the start.
I’m usually quite fortunate when it comes to people wanting to take tests before they’re ready. First of all, I try to nip it in the bud as soon as it starts – sometimes even nipping it before it starts (it’s in my T&Cs). If they still won’t listen, then the bottom line is that they’re not going to test in my car, and whatever happens after that is up to them. A good illustration of this is a pupil I had not long ago (or his family, anyway). He was a nice lad, but very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that I am certain that there was some underlying issue, though “the family” insisted not – even though they followed him around, even on some of his lessons. He’d apparently had quite a few lessons with a previous instructor, but his dad reckoned he was being taken for a ride. When he came to me he had a test already booked, which I made them cancel after I’d seen him drive. He couldn’t possibly have passed.
The trouble was, the dad kept saying “I’d like him to have a go” (i.e. at the test). I made it clear that there was no way he was going in my car if he was not likely to pass. I always explain that I could lose my job if I send dangerous pupils to test – which is technically true, even if it’s somewhat exaggerated (as an aside, it’s nice when the examiner comments that it was a “nice drive” as they leave the car. It’s less nice when it is obvious the candidate shouldn’t have been there to start with. The examiner knows, and so do you).
So anyway, they reluctantly agreed to “move” the original test back by just over a month. I’d have preferred an indefinite cancel until I could see light at the end of the tunnel, but they were obviously just trying to keep the number of lessons to a minimum. In that extra time, the lad took just three 1 hour lessons (with several cancellations). He couldn’t do any of the manoeuvres correctly, nor were they getting better very quickly, and the pressure to get him to test standard with yet another idiotic test date looming was huge. To be honest, since he also just wanted to “have a go”, the pressure was much worse for me. I had also discovered since taking him on that in the case of reversing into a corner he strongly believed that when the kerb was coming towards him in the mirror then it was moving away in reality (honestly, he said exactly this), and it meant that every single time we did it he would repeatedly and determinedly steer the wrong way (or in random directions if he tried to think about it). With the test only weeks away, and a couple more hours of lessons at best, I couldn’t see how I’d be able to fix this and everything else in time.
The last straw came on his final lesson with me. I asked him to follow the road ahead at a large, very busy, light-controlled junction. As the lights changed we drove into it – and then did an emergency stop right in the middle as he suddenly decided he didn’t know where “straight ahead” was (I stress again that his test was literally a fortnight away). On that same lesson, on three separate occasions I asked him to turn right – either at lights or at junctions with filter lanes – and on every occasion he made no attempt to move the car into the appropriate lane, and would have turned right across other traffic. And no matter how many times we travelled the same road with speed limit changes from 20/30, 30/40, or back again, he would simply not see the signs at least once per lesson and I’d have to intervene. And finally, on that last session, we had a go at reversing into a corner and he just drove straight into the kerb (like he did on every previous lesson).
At that point I terminated the lesson and went to speak to his father. I told him that the lad simply wasn’t ready and that they should just cancel the test and not put him under such pressure. Yet again, the father repeated that he “just wanted him to have a go [at the test]” – at least the fourth time he had said it to me. Yet again, I made it clear that I was not taking him to test because he had no chance of passing as things were. My argument about unfair pressure on the lad was totally lost on this guy. I never heard from them again, and my blood runs cold at what could happen to this obviously vulnerable young man if he goes to test or – worse – if he passes too soon and is as unpredictable on the road as the lady I mentioned above.
What makes it particularly annoying is that my aim is to get pupils to test standard quickly and efficiently. I’m fully aware that learning to drive is expensive, so I push them hard to get them up to a safe standard. If I ever thought I was milking people for money then I’d give the job up instantly – my moral code is better than that. And yet with some people this just will not sink in. The guy in question only wanted his son – a young man who obviously had problems – to take a test that I knew he had no chance of passing on the off chance he’d pass, with no regard for what might happen to him if he did. And God knows what stories they’ll be telling their next instructor about me.
One thing is certain, though. I’ll sleep easier now. I wonder if the young lad’s father will? Unfortunately, he is completely clueless about the matter, so I doubt that it will affect him.
You can donate in various ways, including via PayPal. You can donate any amount, so don’t be put off by the options presented if you can’t afford those. Every little helps.
The appeal has raised over £13m in less than 24 hours – which dwarfs China’s contribution of about £62,000. In contrast, Japan and Australia have both given over £6m. Britain has pledged about £10m so far. All these latter countries are also providing physical aid.
Over 2,000 people are already confirmed dead, but millions are without housing or food as a result of Typhoon Yolanda. Around 80,000 homes have been totally destroyed. The death toll is less than originally thought, but it is rising by hundreds per hour at the moment.
The first ones come from Blackpool.
anymore than you can count of winning the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket!
car and asked if I’d take her out to get used to it.
(with several cancellations). He couldn’t do any of the manoeuvres correctly, nor were they getting better very quickly, and the pressure to get him to test standard with yet another idiotic test date looming was huge. To be honest, since he also just wanted to “have a go”, the pressure was much worse for me. I had also discovered since taking him on that in the case of reversing into a corner he strongly believed that when the kerb was coming towards him in the mirror then it was moving away in reality (honestly, he said exactly this), and it meant that every single time we did it he would repeatedly and determinedly steer the wrong way (or in random directions if he tried to think about it). With the test only weeks away, and a couple more hours of lessons at best, I couldn’t see how I’d be able to fix this and everything else in time.
You can donate in various ways, including via PayPal. You can donate any amount, so don’t be put off by the options presented if you can’t afford those. Every little helps.