I can’t quite get my head around him being found guilty of “driving without due care and attention while over the prescribed alcohol limit”. He was guilty of dangerous driving whilst pissed and whacked out of his skull at the very least. He’s been jailed for 5 years.
Pembridge’s car was a Rover MGF convertible – just about the most classic pratmobile available (apart from a Corsa or any model of Audi). Even without alcohol he was an accident waiting to happen. Naturally, everyone is crowing about Joshua Williams and how nice he was, great sportsman, and so on. He was still a willing passenger in that car at 4 o’clock in the morning, and was quite possibly as drunk as Pembridge – that accident could, and does, happen to far too many young drivers who think they’re brilliant when, like Pembridge, they absolutely are not.
The solution is a curfew and strict controls on carrying passengers. And mandatory black boxes.
There are probably quite a few people out there who don’t know what a “verderer” is – particularly among those readers who aren’t from the UK. For all practical purposes, it is an antiquated title referring to a long-lost time. The technical definition can be found here, although I’d just like to advise overseas visitors – Americans especially – that Britain doesn’t just consist of London and places near London., and the definition deals wholly with such places.
Anyway, according to this story which came in on the newsfeeds, it appears you don’t need to be very bright to rise the the heady heights of being a Verderer’s Clerk. All you need is an acute ability to not understand statistics and their relationship to cause and effect and it seems you’re a shoe-in.
It would appear that animal deaths due to road incidents in The New Forest have risen “sharply” this year – 67 compared with 40 in the same period last year. The animals involved are primarily ponies and cattle (probably – it isn’t made clear). Sue Westwood, Clerk, says:
So far in July we have already received reports of a further 10 accidents in which four animals have been killed and two injured.
This must indicate either a complete lack of awareness or consideration for the Forest’s animals on the part of motorists driving through the Forest.
Ms Westwood seems to be under the impression that motorists don’t have any concerns about driving into one tonne of livestock at speed, and blames the toll wholly on the road user. Had she mentioned that animals might be straying into the path of oncoming traffic as a result of the extreme weather (in search of food, or because of increasing numbers) she might have made a little more sense. She might also have mentioned that the verderers she represents had been asked to do whatever they could to address this to the best of their ability, thus making it slightly less of a ridiculous accusation. She could even have appealed to motorists to take more care without laying on the blame with such a large shovel. But I would imagine that didn’t occur to her.
Once, about 10 years ago, I was driving through the Cotswolds on a 60mph road. There was a Transit van, a Ford Ka, then me. All of a sudden a herd of deer ran out from a gap in the hedge right in front of the van (deer, like most animals, don’t have any road sense, you see). We all did emergency stops, but the van had no chance and just smashed into them. The road was littered with injured and panicking deer. From what I could see at the time, a large piece of the van’s engine had fallen on to the road – and there was oil and water everywhere.
The van driver was not at fault. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. The deer, on the other hand, were.
Fortunately, down in Hampshire, people who are a little better qualified to do their jobs are also involved in the original story:
Nigel Matthews, community and visitor services manager at the New Forest National Park Authority, said a number of initiatives are running to combat animal accidents, including reflective pony collars, changing road warning signs to keep drivers’ attention, traffic calming measures and enforcement of the 40mph speed limit…
…This is a notorious high-risk route for animal accidents…
Hopefully, this more practical involvement will go some way to reducing the risk, to wild animals… AND humans in cars.
All the details are in that link, but in a nutshell, Bushra Chughtai (55) and Andrew Cursley (46) took bribes and passed test candidates who either didn’t show up or who drove so badly that the examiners had to take control of the car. In one case a candidate actually hit another car, but the test continued and they still passed.
Investigators were on to them and they were caught. Chugtai was jailed for 3 years, Cursley for 18 months, and an accomplice/fixer – Mahomed Ibrahim (47), who appears to have been an ADI from other reports – for 15 months.
There is a funny side, too. Chugtai apparently made £6,000 out of it. Cursley made about £3,600. It isn’t made clear, but Ibrahim may have made significantly more, though he doesn’t sound like the sort of person you could trust and probably no one will ever know. You can’t help wonder at the sort of mentality that puts such small sums of money higher up the list of priorities than prison and a future with almost no job prospects when they get out. Absolute idiots.
Picture this. After sanctioning multiple (and I mean absolutely dozens of) simultaneous work sites for National Grid Gas to dig up roads and put in traffic restrictions everywhere, the jackasses who comprise the two local Nottingham councils then allowed Morgan Sindall to do the same thing for the electricity cabling. All this started at the same time, by the way. Most of the work – particularly that being carried out by National Grid Gas – is still on-going, and it sprouts a new bud every few weeks, spawning new road closures and restrictions. This has been going on for more than a year with no end in site. National Grid in particular seems to have virtually abandoned many sites, leaving holes with coiled yellow piping sticking out and “safety” barriers around them..
At precisely the same time as all that, work on Phase II of the idiotic waste of money that is Nottingham’s tram system began. There have been multiple long-term road closures and frequent alterations to priorities (sometimes, these changes occur on a daily basis) for the last 12 months at least. Work is already behind schedule – the chaos on Abbey Bridge Road in Lenton has a sign proudly proclaiming:
Work starts here 7 July for 12 months.
That’s LAST July – July 2012! One look at the state of the work will tell you that they are MONTHS away from reopening any of those routes permanently.
The tram is another council project, remember, and traffic trying to avoid the aforementioned gas and electricity work just gets stuck at the tram works instead. These move around and get worse daily. If you look at NET’s own official timeline it clearly states that Ruddington Lane/Wilford Lane was to be closed for “approximately” three months from the end of September 2012. Again, work there is nowhere near being completed after 10 months. The project is therefore at least seven months behind schedule.
The situation is currently just as bad, if not worse, in Clifton, Beeston, and Chilwell for all the same reasons. In Clifton, the businesses around Varney Road have seen a massive drop in trade. There is no way some of them can possibly survive, and the ones that do may never recover (one of the fast food outlets has noticeably cut back on portion sizes, and that will inevitably push more customers away). It is bound to be the same for those along the Chilwell High Road – in spite of the pathetic yellow signs declaring “businesses open as usual”. All of this is entirely the fault of the Council for the incompetent management of an ill-conceived idea, and the shopkeepers in Chilwell who held a “staying open” street party might well be laughing on the other sides of their faces in 12 months’ time.
I have never used the tram, and I cannot see that I ever will, so until a few days ago I had no idea how much it cost to travel on it until a pupil told me. She said that they’d put the prices up so that it was no longer cheaper than using the bus (and in any case, since trams run on rails – like trains do – unless you want to be somewhere near a stop you’re still going to have the inconvenience of a walk or a separate bus journey). For most people it would now be cheaper to drive, and certainly a lot more convenient. In spite of all the gushing claims, far fewer people use the tram than the Council would have you believe. I rarely see it anywhere near full – you get train after train of empty seats every ten minutes for most of the day. There is no way that even the original tram can remain financially viable under these circumstances, let alone with the additional cost of Phase II on top. And add to that overhead the un-budgeted cost of the compensation the Council is apparently having to pay to businesses it has ruined, the picture of the future looks even worse.
Anyway, bearing in mind that every single on-going project I’ve already mentioned is massively behind schedule, and major routes are therefore still closed, traffic is being forced to use the Ring Road. So it beggars belief that the City Council has now begun work on “improving” the Aspley Lane junction along that road. The mind boggles over precisely how the Council thinks it can “improve” this junction – so much so, that you start to wonder who they’re actually “improving” it for. You see, the rest of the Ring Road is only two lanes wide, and Aspley Lane itself is only one lane wide. Council brains being what they are, it is possible that the concept of fitting a square peg into a round hole is one they are able to grasp (but I wouldn’t put money on it), but they have clearly overlooked the fact that they could make the Aspley Lane junction ten lanes wide if they wanted, but it wouldn’t make the overall flow along the Ring Road any better. Deceit is something councils are pretty good at, and the fact that Aspley Lane runs into Strelley and Broxtowe, combined with the fact that there is a school about 100 metres along from the junction, would make me strongly suspect that the “improvements” are not aimed at motorists, but at a species which occupies a far lower rung on the evolutionary ladder. The Nottingham authorities have a penchant for spending lots of money on areas which couldn’t possibly appreciate it.
No doubt the original “plan” was to start this work after some of the other jobs had been finished. However, as I have already pointed out those jobs are all massively overdue, and this latest debacle is now running concurrently with them all. Even though they have only properly restricted traffic on weekends so far (with flow down to a single lane), the actual effect on queues along the Ring Road is already quite dramatic. Pallets of barriers have been delivered and stacked two high right up to the roundabout on both sides. This means that traffic approaching the island now has to slow down much more than it had to previously because it can’t see properly. Slowing down more means having to stop more often, so the tailbacks are horrendous even when traffic is lighter during the day. It is a Health & Safety nightmare, but since it is only the motorists’ health & safety at stake, no one seems to give a flying fart about that. I imagine it would be a lot different if any of the Council’s own muppets was put at risk, though.
But it gets even worse. The idiots have also sanctioned further road closures all over the city, mostly due to road resurfacing from what I can gather (though Severn Trent is now eager to get in on the act). Yellow signs are already up gleefully announcing week long closures, where once upon a time the work would have been completed over a couple of nights (and still could be if anyone with any sense was involved). I have seen them warning that Station Road in Plumtree is shutting for a week, as is Somersby Road in Mapperley (and there are several more). They’re not primary routes in the normal sense of the word – but they are when you’re trying to avoid the chaos caused by all the other crap the council has instigated.
And we’re still not done!. The County bumpkins have got the road up yet again in Ruddington on the A60 at the junction with Kirk Lane and Flawforth Lane. Over the last couple of years that junction has been dug up more times than a dog’s bone. This time, it’s the County Council’s favourite job of replacing traffic lights which are perfectly functional, and taking a week or more to do it. Naturally, it is essential that 4-way temporary lights be set up while this needlessly long work takes place.
Then there is the current vogue for changing speed limits without any obvious advanced warning. The 30/40 change on Lougborough Road in West Bridgford has now moved about 300 metres up the road – meaning that every car travelling away from the city will have to use more fuel as it reaches Wilford Hill and has to use a lower gear in order to accelerate harder in order to be able to change up on the hill itself when the 40mph limit kicks in. This goes hand-in-hand with the 20mph limits which have appeared all over (my favourites have to be the ones they’ve put up in Sherwood on narrow side roads which have speed bumps and lots of parked cars on them already – anyone who did more than 20 on those will still do it, signs or not. It’s a total waste of money.
But it’s still not finished. Nottingham Train Station is now closed for a month while they carry out signal work. All passengers are being ferried out to the Parkway – some 10 miles away. Of course, on paper that would only be a 20 minute ride by bus – unless you factor in road works. According to the local BBC news it is taking more than an hour and people are missing their trains, but even more significant is the fact that they are using 750 extra buses to move people to and from the Parkway. That’s 750 extra vehicles on the A453, a road which has just had a 40mph limit imposed on it as – yes, you guessed it – road works begin on widening one of the busiest and most congested routes in the country.
The examples above are still only a sample of all of what is going on. When you add the numerous restrictions resulting from house building, tree-felling, verge maintenance… it is beyond a joke.
Nottingham is currently the absolute pits. The council – that is, both City and County – are intent on ruining it completely. They just don’t have a clue.
This story from the BBC confirms the disruption that the Ring Road “improvement” will bring. It is due to be completed in Summer 2015 – the same time the A453 widening work is due to finish. Aspley Lane will be closed to normal traffic from August. The story doesn’t say how long for.
If everything I wrote above wasn’t enough to convince you about the incompetence of the City and County Councils, surely this will.
It means that every possible route both into and out of Nottingham will be blocked or impeded – deliberately – for normal traffic for a period of two years from now (assuming they don’t overrun, of course).
And anyone using the Ring Road also needs to be aware that “Bridge Repairs” are scheduled for Clifton Bridge from the start of August (these were originally started and then discontinued a couple of months ago). You couldn’t make this level of sheer incompetence up if you tried. It just has to be deliberate.
Oh, and I neglected to mention an unreported side-effect of the month-long closure of Nottingham Station. It is being used as an opportunity to do work at the various level crossings and at the time of writing (24 July) the road through Sneinton is closed, and the one in Netherfield has temporary lights installed.
However, these days – and particular in places like Manchester – people seem to be sufficiently mentally challenged that they go too far without passing through any of the more traditional intermediate stages first.
In the story, a woman tried to order from the drive-thru lane at a McDonalds branch on horseback. Staff refused to serve her, no doubt because there are numerous food hygiene and safety regulations such food outlets are supposed to adhere to. But it then gets nasty. The pathetic Mancunian chavette in question decided to take her horse INTO the restaurant. That in itself is pretty bad, since even dogs are not allowed in there. But then the horse did the inevitable and dropped a load on the floor.
This was while people were eating, you understand. Can you imagine tucking into your lunch, only to have some vile little bitch drag a horse into the restaurant while you’re eating and allowing it to defaecate right next to you just because she’d not got her own way over something? I wish she’d been named in the story, because I’d happily repeat it here (edit: Her name was Christine McGrail – see the Mail story below).
To make matters worse, it appears that she may already have been allowed to breed. She was accompanied by a girl on a pony, who quite frighteningly could have been her daughter. Mind you, it is even more frightening to think that she could have been someone else’s daughter, having dangerously been left in the care of this example of the lowest caste of society.
The woman was issued with a fixed penalty notice by police. She should have been made to lick up the mess.
And the RSPCA should have been informed. First of all because she took a horse and pony to a McDonald’s outlet in the first place (they tend to be located in busy areas with major roads and lots of traffic, and the animals would almost certainly have been distressed), and secondly because she forced the horse through the electric doors into an enclosed space with irate and frightened people in it. The horse must have been terrified, and anything could have happened. She isn’t fit to own one.
As a footnote, the story has been picked up by various sources. This one is from Horsemart. Note the comments at the bottom – particularly the one from a so-called “Business Intelligence Developer”. The word “intelligence” is a classic example of an oxymoron given his opinion on the matter. What a prat.
More detail in The Telegraph (but still no names). It seems McDonalds staff merely asked her to tie the horse up outside – they just wouldn’t serve her whilst mounted in the drive-thru lane. This makes her even more of a vicious and seriously disturbed individual.
A-ha. Trust The Mail. The unfit parent in question was Christine McGrail. It seems that she allowed her daughter to take her pony inside – clearly, then, a deliberate act as she left her own full-sized horse outside. The imbecile admits she…
…acted ‘rashly’ after the pony opened its bowels in front of diners but claimed the treatment of horse riders was inconsistent.
Too right she did. An unfit mother who clearly coerced her daughter into leading a pony through the doors of a McDonalds restaurant, unfit to own a horse herself, and clearly dangerous to all when allowed outside without close supervision. An absolute mental case.
…young motorists should be banned from driving at night, carrying a certain number of passengers and after drinking any amount of alcohol to reduce the number of fatal road crashes, a new report has recommended.
Everyone knows – and has known for many years – that most accidents involving new drivers tick all or most of the following boxes:
driver aged 17-24
occur at night
on rural roads
on bends
with passengers in the car
with no other vehicle being involved
excessive speed is identified
Everyone also knows that although young drivers only make up about 12% of the driving population, they account for 33% of all road fatalities.
It all comes down to two main factors: inexperience and stupidity (aka attitude).
Every new driver who has ever lived has been inexperienced when they passed their test. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about that, and even if they had to take more lessons or extra post-test training they would still be inexperienced. You see, inexperience is a function of time, and time cannot be made to run any faster in spite of what politicians and newspaper editors might think. And we’re not talking about a few hours of extra “experience” – it requires years of on-road practice to become a completely safe driver. But you can be a responsible driver from the first moment you go out.
So, anyone with any sense would decide to attack the stupidity/attitude issue. After all, none of those drivers was ever taught to drive the way they do now back when they were taking lessons, so why try to blame those lessons for the way they choose to behave now?
Having said all that, I am all for anything which puts the brakes on stupid behaviour. If you want to be treated as an adult, act like one first.
The term “road rage” was coined as long ago as the late 1980s in America as a result of a series of roadside shootings. It was quickly bastardised to mean anything – from a slightly elevated pulse rate, all the way up to mass murder and genocide. The Wikipedia entry makes amusing reading. After effectively identifying every single human behaviour as “road rage” (if it occurs within 50 metres of a car), it then goes on to suggest that road rage is a medical condition. What a load of crap.
But what made me mention it was this story in a Scottish newspaper. Admiral – a company whose purpose is to make as much money out of motorists as possible for the service it knows they have to have – has done some “research” (i.e. it asked some people), and claims that:
As many as 32% say they are subject to road rage more than once a week, a new survey by insurance company Admiral found.
Of those road rage sufferers, 21% have had full-blown arguments with another motorist, while 36% said experiencing road rage made them drive more aggressively.
Believe me, if someone does something stupidly dangerous in front of me, they are going to get a little bit more than the total understanding and complete acquiescence Admiral appears to be suggesting they should merit. Shaking my head, or – if they can lip read – words along the lines of “clucking bat” are not road rage. Nor is there a medical condition anywhere inside my car – any such condition lies wholly with the prat who caused the alleged “road rage” in the first rage.
Road rage is actually when someone takes their anger to extremes and starts physically assaulting people or property. I’ll go as far as saying that physical intimidation is also road rage – where people aggressively tailgate you or deliberately cut you up, for example. But it isn’t just someone being annoyed at someone else’s stupidity, nor is it necessarily any sort of verbal exchange. It’s when it goes beyond that.
Admiral has basically allowed crap drivers to define what “road rage” actually is, and then they’ve run away with the results. I’d lay odds that of the 32% who have apparently encountered it “more than once a week”, most of them will have completely overlooked the fact that they were the fundamental cause of it to start with. If they learnt how to use roundabouts properly, how to drive at the correct speed, how to get into the lane they need more than 5 metres before they need to make a turn, how to signal (it’s that little lever on your steering wheel), how to queue for the next available pump, and so on, there’d be a whole lot less “road rage” around. At let’s not forget that many of them behave the way they do on purpose (especially if they’re Audi owners).
What should change first? The people who drive badly, or the people who they annoy by doing so?
I get a lot of hits from people asking various questions about using a translator for their tests. It always strikes me as odd that anyone who can search in English and find an English language blog should find themselves in urgent need of a translator for whichever driving test they are taking.
A Chinese translator, Peter Hui, has been jailed for giving people the answers as he translated the theory test for them. Police estimate Hui scammed around £50,000 in 2012, with another £25,000 worth of bookings before he was caught. He is believed to have made money from the scam in 2011 as well.
It makes you wonder how it is possible for people to be so stupid – and I’m referring to the idiots who pay people like Hui to do this sort of thing for them. It works out that Hui was earning the equivalent of about £1,000 a week out of this. The story doesn’t say how many translations he was doing per week, but even if it was 5 per day, he was obviously charging at least £40 a time – and the candidates would have had the £31 test to pay on top of that, and they still had to do the Hazard Perception part on their own, with the risk of failure that goes with it.
The Theory Test isn’t hard. All you have to do is read up a little on the subject. If it’s too hard for you after that then you really shouldn’t be let out alone.
The report also notes a separate issue where an Urdu translator believed to have been helping bus and HGV drivers cheat has been bailed until September. Of course, this begs the question: why the hell was someone who can’t speak English being allowed anywhere near a bus driving job in the first place?
Bloody hell, it’s hot! Hard to imagine that back in June the Daily Mail – and all the other main comics – was telling us (following a séance run by the Met Office, I believe) there’d be no summers for the next decade. Even The Guardian was at it.
The fact is that what ever happens for the rest of the year, the recent hot weather has already gone on for long enough for this year to be genuinely cast as a “barbecue summer”. In fact, it looks like we’re set for it to stay like this until the end of July, if the non-Met Office jet stream predictions hold up. So much for the prediction of 10 summerless summers!
Personally, I hate the hot weather. I always have, ever since I was about 11 on holiday in Skegness and got sunstroke (my back peeled less than 4 hours after exposure). I keep out of the sun as a result – just in case! But the humidity is what really gets to me. I hate sweating when I’m working on something, and on lessons I have to use the aircon. I don’t mind that too much (apart from the extra fuel cost, which is noticeable), but it does dehydrate you even more, which means drinking more water, which means having to find somewhere to take a leak several times a day.
And don’t get me started on summer holidays. My idea of heaven is going skiing in the depths of winter. I much prefer the cold weather, although snow in the UK no longer makes me as happy as it used to do because of the adverse effects it has on this job.
Going back to that jet stream a moment, a few days ago the forecast was for it to drop into Europe around 23rd July. The forecast now is for it to drop around 27th or 28th July. So it’s already changed, which just goes to show how forecasts can never be relied upon. But looking at the current forecast, if the jet stream does drop as far south as is predicted at the end of the month we’d better get ready for some seriously Biblical (as in “Genesis”) weather.
(Edit: I wrote all that on 16th July. As of 19th July it looks like things might break again around the 23rd/24th July).
This is funny. Nigel Deans is a driving instructor in Huddersfield, and he was conducting a lesson with his pupil driving in a bus lane outside of its hours of operation. The bus driver – irate at the fact anyone dared enter his own private driving lane – pulled alongside and gave them a mouthful.
When the ADI complained to Huddersfield Bus Company, they responded by informing him that the bus driver knew the rules of the bus lane – quite the opposite of what the actual events seem to suggest.
He said: “They said the driver knew I was able to drive in that lane but he was running late and trying to keep to his timetable.”
Huddersfield Bus Company obviously figures as a prime nominee for the Prat Of The Year Awards. They cement this position even further:
A spokesman from Huddersfield Bus Company acknowledged the incident but would not confirm if the driver had been disciplined.
He said: “The driver will be dealt with how we see fit, within our internal systems.”
Here in Nottingham, buses are as big a menace as cyclists. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that their uniforms are made of Spandex. In the last couple of days my pupils have had to deal with one who was indicating to pull off before he’d even stopped to let passengers off on two stops – so determined was he not to let anyone pass; with one other who stopped short of the bus stop and so blocked the road because of the stupidly placed central pedestrian reservations that someone at the council decided we needed several thousand of a few years ago; and numerous others who start moving while you’re overtaking them. They don’t stay within speed limits, they deliberately jump out of light-controlled bus lanes when they see there are no people at the bus stop to avoid having to slow down while the lights change (and which are, in any case, biased in favour of the bus to change immediately one of them trips the proximity sensor), and if they’re actually ahead of schedule they will sit for 10 minutes or more at stops on narrow roads causing chaos while they read the newspaper.
The ADI also makes some valid comments about normal motorists’ use of bus lanes. My favourite around here is on Mansfield Road heading into Nottingham. Absolutely no one goes in it, then there’s a major free-for-all as they all try to move over when it ends. Or, no one goes in it until they see me in it – then they will move over to make sure I don’t get ahead of them. Or, when people are turning left into Mapperley Hall Drive, they wait until they are exactly level with the junction and then attempt a 90° turn into it – usually just in front of me, and without any form of mirror check.
Picture this. After sanctioning multiple (and I mean absolutely dozens of) simultaneous work sites for National Grid Gas to dig up roads and put in traffic restrictions everywhere, the jackasses who comprise the two local Nottingham councils then allowed Morgan Sindall to do the same thing for the electricity cabling. All this started at the same time, by the way. Most of the work – particularly that being carried out by National Grid Gas – is still on-going, and it sprouts a new bud every few weeks, spawning new road closures and restrictions. This has been going on for more than a year with no end in site. National Grid in particular seems to have virtually abandoned many sites, leaving holes with coiled yellow piping sticking out and “safety” barriers around them..
However, these days – and particular in places like Manchester – people seem to be sufficiently mentally challenged that they go too far without passing through any of the more traditional intermediate stages first.
The fact is that what ever happens for the rest of the year, the recent hot weather has already gone on for long enough for this year to be genuinely cast as a “barbecue summer”. In fact, it looks like we’re set for it to stay like this until the end of July, if the non-Met Office jet stream predictions hold up. So much for the prediction of 10 summerless summers!