I’ve not done one of these for a while, but today has been particularly bad for morons on the road and I had my registration plate file open in my graphics programme from that last story.
One of my pet hates is when people use the wrong lanes to cut ahead of everyone else and avoid queuing, especially when it’s only a small queue. LD61 JOJ – a Red BMW – did it this morning at the Nottingham Knight roundabout, and then shot off down the A60 at speed. He was initially going to queue properly – for all of 45 seconds – in the correct lane, but then his BMW brain kicked in (it’s a small thing about the size of a peanut, a few centimetres above the anus). So he cut sharply out and used one of the left-turn only lanes, then cut sharply back over on the roundabout.
A dangerous one, this. On the approach to the roundabouts at the junction of Mansfield Road and Gregory Boulevard this dickhead in the black saloon, reg. no. FD09 KTP, overtook my pupil (who wasn’t driving slowly) a few car lengths before the give way line. I saw him approach at speed, cut sharply out, and then speed past. He also sped around the two roundabouts and went back up Mansfield Road – so as well as being a dickhead, he was also a crap navigator.
Another one of my pet hates – people texting when they have already demonstrated that they can’t drive in the first place. This black Peugeot 107, advertising Martin & Co (a local letting agent), overtook a pupil on South Sherwood Street near Trinity Square. I’d already noticed that the driver was distracted when it was behind us, but when it cut sharply back in because it had used the wrong lane to gain advantage, I pointed out to my pupil that the driver was doing something in her lap (we could see her chav hair bun going up and down). She had no idea what was going on around her, and she continued to concentrate on whatever she was doing while stopped at subsequent lights on both Bluecoat Street and Woodborough Road. Come to think of it, she may not have been advertising Martin & Co – she may have been working for them, and was trying to navigate to a location.
On a lesson this afternoon, we were driving up Woodborough Road and – surprise, surprise – there were road works. They were controlled by manual STOP/GO signs.
Anyway, we were approaching them and several cars had already gone through. The signs were set to GO, and had been for some time. But some swarthy looking prat in a black sedan, reg. no. BF53 SSK, decided that he had some sort of special privileges and came through, causing us to brake. The signs were still set to GO as we left the road works area, so the big red STOP on his side would have been clear to all but the most stupid of people.
Judging from his appearance, the car he was driving, and the way he was driving it, the police might want to pull this twat over if they get a chance, because those kind of people tend to have other skeletons they’d rather keep hidden in the closet.
63-year old has 12 points for using mobile phone, speeding, and shooting red lights
56-year old has 12 points for drink-driving and having no insurance
19-year old has 15 points for speeding and failing to identify the driver
Of the 20 youngest to have 12 points or more, only two have been banned
All those in the legal system associated with not banning these people are complete arseholes, intent on sending this country into the sewer (and it doesn’t really need much help with that as it is).
These miscreants should be named. Come to think of it, so should the morons who didn’t ban them.
This is not in the least funny, and the poor woman involved is not a last-minute contender for the 2014 Darwin Awards.
— The video has now been removed from YouTube —
She drives on to a garage forecourt and realises that the petrol cap is on the other side of her car from the pump. Note how she keeps checking to see that her flap is on the nearside each time she notices it hasn’t got any nearer to a pump. She drives around in a circle until – on her fourth attempt – she suddenly realises that the nearside and offside of the car remain on their respective sides no matter which way you’re facing. She finally realises that she’s got to actually turn around in order for the nearside of her car to be next to a pump.
What makes it even worse – and none of the media sources who have covered the story seem to have picked up on it – is that the nozzles at that petrol station are on rollers, and they would reach around the other side anyway, no matter which way you’re facing. This is one of my pet hates: sitting in a queue at the garage while several unused pumps remain blocked by old people and… ahem… non-male drivers as they wait to get to their “favourite” one.
Back to the video. You also have to wonder how many times she’s filled the car up before. And she still doesn’t get it.
According to the CCTV stamp, this only happened a couple of days ago.
DVSA has been putting out reminders about the Highway Code and how it relates to driving in bad weather. Quite right, too.
Snow On The Roof
Anyone who drives their car with a thick cover of snow on the roof doesn’t deserve to hold a driving licence. Furthermore, if the idiot in question has kids with them then they are in need of an urgent visit from Social Services to discuss suitable foster homes for the protection of their offspring.
Look at the picture below, which shows how a covering of snow on the roof can suddenly slip and obscure the driver’s view (and this appears to be on a stationary vehicle).
It is not a rare occurrence – it happens more times than it doesn’t in this country, I can assure you. I witnessed it happen to several moving cars while out on lessons over the weekend, but the “best” one was on Sunday.
I’d just dropped a pupil off after a lesson, and on approaching the Crown Island to join the busy ring road I’d already had to negotiate a taxi which was stopped at a set of lights with its hazard lights on (I assume it had broken down, though with taxis it’s hard to tell, and having one of them stop in the middle of a box junction at a crossroads to pick up a fare isn’t as unlikely an event as you might think). Anyway, as I approached the island there was another major hold up. This time some prat had stopped in the right hand approach lane about two car lengths from the give way line. Why? Because he’d got a 3” deep slab of snow on the roof, had braked hard, and the snow had fallen down as a frozen sheet on to his windscreen. It was too heavy for the wipers to clear, so the dolt had had to get out and start shovelling by hand.
He was lucky he hadn’t driven into the back of someone. He was lucky no one had driven into the back of him. He was lucky his wipers hadn’t snapped or burnt out when he vainly tried to wipe the ice clear. And he was lucky he hadn’t discharged his battery. Mind you, come to think of it, any of those last three things could still have happened for all I knew after I’d got past him.
He should have cleared his roof before he left home, of course. But that would have meant dumping the nasty snow in his own driveway instead of on the approach to a roundabout where it could cause significant danger to other drivers. These prats who think it’s really clever to keep snow on the roof – either to amuse the kids, or themselves – inevitably lose it at some stage. Even if it doesn’t fall on to their windscreen it ends up all over the road when they brake sharply, which this kind of person is wont to do at every junction and roundabout. Eventually, there is just the right combination of melting underneath and freezing on top to send the sheet hilariously on to the road where a previously clear road now has an ice patch right where you least want one.
Steamed-up Windows
Then there’s the problem of steamed up car windows. I’m sick of being cut up by cars full of spotty-faced kids with windows completely steamed up. These people can’t drive very well at the best of times, so you’d imagine that they’d want to have a good all-round view, wouldn’t you? Apparently not, though, and they’d much rather just fling the car from lane to lane without having a clue who or what is behind them.
I took a young lad out on a Pass Plus session the other day. He wasn’t one of my own ex-pupils, and he had lots of questions. One of them was:
Is it normal for cars to steam up like this all the time?
We’d been driving for a few minutes and the side windows had started to mist up. I explained to him that yes, unfortunately it was normal. It happens because the cold air cannot hold the moisture that the passengers are giving off, so it condenses out on to cold surfaces. I then gave him my “show me, tell me” question talk, explaining that there are three main ways to clear mist off the windows:
The Heated Window button(s) – to demist the back, push the button that turns on the heated rear window. Some cars have a heated front windscreen, too, which has a similar effect at the front.
The Heater/Fan – by blowing a lot of warm air at the windscreen and side windows, the mist is evaporated.
The Air-conditioning – the aircon system dehumidifies the air, which completely prevents misting up to start with, and eliminates it quickly if it’s already happened. It uses a little more fuel at lower speeds – and I said “a little”.
He was amazed at how the aircon sorted out the problem within a minute. What’s more, after I switched it off the car remained mist-free for the whole 2 hour session. But I am fairly certain that a lot of drivers out there don’t even know about the heated rear window, let alone whether or not their car has a heated front window or air-conditioning.
Note that you can get demister sponges – made from chamois or faux-chamois wrapped around a foam pad – which work well up to a point. They’re ideal for cars which don’t have aircon. What puts me off them is that after you’ve used them a couple of times they pick up grease and leave smears on the glass.
Inappropriate Speed
On Monday this week I was sitting with a pupil outside his house at the start of a lesson. His roads were all covered in shiny sheet-ice as a result of compacted snow and no gritting, and since this was his first time in such conditions I was giving my snow/ice talk prior to going to look for places where we could skid safely. Three or four houses down the road was a t-junction and, as we watched, a Corsa driven by a woman (if she didn’t have kids in the car at the time, she certainly had all the things stuck on the back window that indicate she usually did) appeared. It slammed its brakes on, skidded across the entire road, and ended up almost touching the kerb opposite.
It took many wheel-spins for her to correct her position and carry on in the direction she intended. I asked my pupil what he though would have happened if someone had been travelling along the main road and had this happen in front of them, bearing in mind the conditions on the road? What would have happened to the kids in the back of either car?
Since Friday, when it snowed, I have lost count of the number of people who have overtaken me or a pupil in places where it was only by sheer luck that they didn’t skid or end up skidding as a result of having to brake hard. There is no way anyone can know what is ahead of them, and when your ability to stop is so severely compromised by ice it is sheer stupidity to drive like this. Even up until yesterday (the snow has all melted by this morning) many roundabouts and traffic light junctions were still restricted to one driveable lane because of snow cover, and yet far too many prats were using the snow cover as overtaking space. And yet, without fail we caught up with them at the next junction, so all they had achieved was to behave stupidly, dangerously, and illegally for absolutely no gain.
In this country snow-chains are pretty pointless, as they can only be used on contiguous snow cover without damaging the chains, your tyres, and the road surface. We rarely get those conditions in England or where roads are treated and maintained. Snow socks are an alternative worth considering. They fit easily, and can be used over patches of tarmac, though care is needed as your tyres effectively do not meet the minimum tread depth specification. However, they could get you up (or down) that last hill to your driveway.
Correct Preparation
Just prior to driving off.
Clear off all snow from the windows, roof, bonnet, lights, and mirrors
Use an ice scraper or a car squeegee to help dislodge and move large areas of snow
Use an ice scraper and/or de-icer to remove frost and ice from windows and mirrors
Use the car heater and heated window/mirror controls to help you dislodge ice on windows and mirrors
Use the air-conditioning, hot air blowers, and a suitable cloth/sponge if you like to de-mist the windows inside
Don’t forget that your rear view mirror will also steam up when it is cold, so give it a wipe
All you have to do is wait 2-3 minutes with the engine running and the heater blowing at the windscreen and the windows will demist – do it while you’re clearing snow or scraping ice
There are other car checks that you should carry out routinely anyway, especially if you’re going on a longer journey.
Check your tyre pressures
Check your screen wash fluid level and make sure you have some spare in the boot
Fill up with fuel before you leave town, and make sure you know where fuel stops are along the way
Make sure your screen wash fluid is the right concentration not to freeze
Carry de-icer, ice-scrapers, and clean rags for cleaning purposes
And a few other things that just make sense:
Make sure you have suitably warm clothing with you
Make sure you have your phone with you
Make sure you have money or a means to pay for things with you
Maybe a pair of snow socks just in case
Other advice you’ll see is to carry cat litter or sand to help you get out of ruts if you get stuck, a snow shovel to dig yourself out, and food to keep you going if you are stranded. Well, all that’s up to you – most people get stuck driving home from work or Tesco, and the chances of being marooned for several days until the rescue helicopter finds you are fairly remote. However, if you are planning to drive a long way you can consider these options.
Bottom Line
If you drive with snow on the roof (or anywhere else) or badly misted windows you don’t deserve to hold a driving licence! Don’t be a prat – just clean it off, turn up the damned heater, and find something else that amuses either you or the kids.
I haven’t done this for a while, and I don’t think the Hall Of Shame idea is prominent enough. So I’m going to try this much briefer way of venting my spleen at the arseholes who occupy our roads.
Two questions. What were you doing down the dark road for deliveries only in the West Bridgford Asda at about 8pm on 17 December?
And how the hell did you ever manage to get a driving licence when you pull out in front of people like that? Maybe it was a quick getaway you were after.
I saw this story on the BBC website. It shows a video, which has been released by Norfolk police, of a motorcyclist travelling at 97mph on the A47. He had a helmet camera fitted. The rider, David Holmes, died after he rode into a car which was turning right. The BBC has edited out the impact, which is apparently in the full version – which can be seen on the Suffolk police website (I haven’t watched it here, and have no desire to do so).
Apparently, the car driver was prosecuted for causing death by careless driving. I suppose that the charge of “careless driving” sends something of a message – it wasn’t classed as “dangerous” – but I can’t for the life of me see what the driver could have done to anticipate some Neanderthal halfwit coming at them out of the blue at almost twice the speed limit. Not unless we are to assume that all motorcyclists are the same and they could be behaving like this at each and every junction. Or that the fault always lies with the motorist, and not the rider.
The Norfolk police quite rightly make no apologies for releasing the video, in spite of the negative comments it may attract. I make no apologies for my opinion on the matter, either.
Holmes’ family have allowed the video to be released.
Mr Holmes’ mother, Brenda, is shown on the video talking about the heartache of losing a child and makes a plea for people to be more careful on the roads.
She said if the video could save one life, it would be worth it.
Although I have sympathy for her, I hope she is referring to insane motorcyclists and not just car drivers. But I don’t think she is, because on the Suffolk police site she is quoted:
I know he rode fast that day, he loved speed but he also loved life. This hasn’t been an easy thing to do but I just hope that somebody benefits from the warning; that people slow down and take time to look for bikes.
Holmes was travelling at nearly 100mph, for God’s sake – that’s almost 50 metres per second! From his perspective, the chance of someone turning right at a right-turn junction was a damn sight more likely than that of someone bearing down on you at 100mph – which is how would have seemed for the motorist. I don’t see anyone loudly proclaiming that Holmes should have anticipated things better, do you? It’s bloody obvious who was at fault. If he’d been travelling within the speed limit the accident almost certainly wouldn’t have happened, and the comments by the “expert” rider in the video miss that point entirely. Looking at the footage, if Holmes had been driving at the speed limit (or around 25 metres per second) the issue of whether he could have avoided the accident or not would have been moot – the car driver would probably have seen him, or would have had time to turn safely if he was farther back. At 60mph, it would take about 4 seconds to stop, whereas it would take around 6 seconds at 100mph – and this is for a car (not a bike) under theoretically ideal conditions. The distance travelled in those additional two seconds would be huge, and don’t forget that if you double your speed, your braking distance is about four times longer.
You simply don’t expect some prat to be coming down a hill at that kind of speed. The most frightening thing is that if they are, most drivers wouldn’t stand a chance of anticipating it. And quite frankly, they shouldn’t have to.
Just for the record, any car driver who drives dangerously (or carelessly), or who breaks the speed limit, deserves to be prosecuted. But so does any motorcyclist who does similar.
The show is available on catch-up on ITV Player until around 16 August 2014.
An ITV press release a couple of weeks ago alerted me to this programme, and I commented on that release at the time. Since I wrote the piece – and before the show was aired – both of the people appearing on it have contacted me. Neither was happy with my opinion about these sorts of shows and the type of people who appear in them. It’s also generated a disproportionate (and suspicious) amount of traffic to the blog.
This genre of TV show has become very popular with the media in the last few years. Without exception, those appearing on past programmes have clearly been involved for reasons of self-interest – and I’m talking about the kind where appearing on TV is the objective, not the kind where they actually learn something and change their ways. You see, when someone is eating behind the wheel on the motorway, driving with no hands, texting, speeding, etc., you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realise that this is both dangerous and wrong. However, these previous shows have glamourized the whole sordid business of driving badly by following the contestants – there is no other word to describe them – into bars and other places where they can show everyone how cool they think they are.
My initial assessment of the forthcoming programme – which I stress that I hadn’t seen at that time – was based on all of this. All I had was the press release for yet another hour of bad drivers who the TV company thought made for good TV.
In fact, I was wrong to suggest (or expect) that bad driving would be glamourized here, too. The show did not – in any way, shape, or form – suggest that the normal behaviour on the road of the two featured drivers was anything other than of an appallingly low standard. One of them – the one who wrote to me and stated that he was now a better driver than me – was an accident waiting to happen. He was speeding, shooting red lights 6 seconds after they went red (and claiming they were on amber), and so on.
A simulated (but realistic) collision with someone driving like he did under normal circumstances scared the shit out of him. The programme suggested that this had changed him, and one can only hope that it did. But I have to say that anyone who was driving as badly as this guy was prior to that experience is likely to need a little more than a scare to put things right. As I have said, it isn’t rocket science knowing the difference between right and wrong, and when someone actually denies or defends it then you have to wonder why they are even on the road to start with. And as for driving better than me… well, let’s just say that I’ve never had to make such a huge leap from such a low starting point, so I don’t think so. Let’s just hope he drives a little better than he did before.
The other driver got less screen time, but she was actually more dangerous in her original state. She was eating, texting (almost continuously if the edit is in any way representative), playing with her dog (and letting it “drive”), applying make-up, doing her hair… all the stereotypical things you constantly read about in the press when there’s nothing more important to cover. Although she might resent this comment, she had the attention span of a goldfish, and that’s where the problem was. She, too, was subjected to a simulated incident, and got a serious wake-up call as a result.
Whether the experience changes the behaviour of these two people in the long term remains to be seen. The programme didn’t attempt to suggest that this had happened, and nor could it have. I still maintain that most of what has apparently been “learnt” from the experience by the two drivers would have been available to all but the dullest examples of homo sapiens if they’d have applied some common sense in the first place, or unless they had other underlying issues – like poor attention spans. Unfortunately life doesn’t seem to work this way, and even if they do learn from it, how on earth would you roll it out to the general public?
Each crash involved the writing-off of at least one, and up to several vehicles. These crashes required vehicles kitted out with advanced remote control systems to be totalled. If you did this for the general driving public it would cost maybe £10,000-£20,000 per experiment, and with around a million test passes each year (or approaching that figure), that would add up to between £1 billion and £2 billion! It isn’t likely to be rolled out anytime soon.
The programme was actually well made and somewhat different to its predecessors. But I was right when I said that the characters involved would feature hooks and deviate somewhat from what would be classed as “normal” (in the most general sense). When these shows start featuring boring, ugly people with no trips to clubs or coverage of expensive hobbies and pastimes included, they will begin to chip away at the problem. Until then, they remain unrealistic.
As an aside to all this, the female participant in the show has been plaguing me with emails. She doesn’t come over as very bright, in my opinion, although with hindsight that might also have been apparent in the programme. After all, she did allow her dog to “drive”, amongst other things, and you don’t need to be too smart to realise how dumb that is.
Suspiciously, I received another message on the same subject and using the same pathetic tone from an IP address only 5km away from Miss Britain’s Worst Driver within the time bracket of her first two. She denied this was from anyone she knew, then admitted in passing a few days later that it was one of her friends. Basically, it was exactly as I’d suggested to start with as a result of the suspicious IP addresses – but which she had denied.
I tried to explain to her that her IP address had been routed through Hounslow, and the other one from Staines – about 5km away. I seem to have spent the last two days trying to explain to her that no one has actually said she LIVES in Hounslow, just that the email was routed through there. She cannot get her head around the fact that her email DID go through Hounslow. And the other one through Staines, which made me suspicious. I mean, to get two messages on the same subject, within minutes of each other, with the same snivelling tone, and only 5km apart as far as the logged IP address goes… you’ve got to wonder, haven’t you? She even claimed she had talked to her ISP and they’d told her “only one digit [of the IP address logged] was correct”, which is utter bollocks, since it was a BT address and that means at least three characters would have matched even if it was otherwise wrong.
You know, of all the hundreds, even thousands, of people I have taught, I have never come across anyone like this. Is it any wonder she ended up being picked as one of Britain’s Worst Drivers?
This is in the Irish Independent, but it relates to a UK driver. It reports that a 79-year old man driving a Mitsubishi Shogun was involved in a crash on the A26 in East Sussex last month. When police arranged for a test (not sure if it was roadside, as he had to be cut free from the wreckage after he collided with a lorry), it emerged that he could only read a number plate from a distance of 1 metre!
I can’t even create a scaled graphic to illustrate the severity of this – the red dot arrow is about 3 metres in relation to the longer 20 metre one!
You’re supposed to be able to read a new style number plate at 20 metres (correct at the time of writing), yet this senile idiot – who hasn’t been named, though he should have been – could barely see a plate at less than a 20th of that distance. For all practical purposes, he was blind. His licence was immediately revoked – presumably under Cassie’s Law. At least now this old fool isn’t likely to kill anyone. Hopefully, he will be prosecuted, too.
I have absolutely no sympathy for these people. And still you get those comedians (usually getting old themselves) who believe that older drivers are not worthy of any kind of special testing to make sure they aren’t lying through their teeth about their fitness to drive. It’s “ageist”, they say.
Older drivers are far more likely to become liabilities on the road purely as a function of getting old. It doesn’t matter how poorly new or young drivers behave – it’s a totally separate issue. Nor does it matter how many centuries the decrepit older driver has gone without having an accident. The simple fact is that as we age, we tend towards biological malfunction and eventual collapse (i.e. death). Once you’re over 70, you’re a darn sight closer to total collapse than you are of winning Wimbledon.
Unfortunately, the brain also begins to slide as you get older, and it would appear than this prevents some elderly drivers recognising their weaknesses. Of course, most just knowingly lie in order to keep their licence.
This story beggars belief. Jack Powell was 18, and had passed his test a mere two weeks earlier. He was busy following the script those of his kind live their lives by, and “lost control” of his Renault Clio on a bend.
Just as an aside, there is a massive statistical blip in the accident figures which explains why 17-24 year olds pay sky-high insurance premiums. The most common accident this group experiences is:
on a bend
at night
on a rural road
more than one occupant in the car
no other car involved
In Powell’s case, only the “at night” one was missing from his performance. Unfortunately, although no other car actually caused Powell to lose control, another car did bear the brunt of his pathetic driving skills after he’d lost it.
Kiri Jade Hodgkinson, 14, was a front seat passenger in Powell’s car. She died at the scene. Powell smashed into a Renault Megane travelling the opposite way and this resulted in the death of the passenger, Barbara Ford, 67. A 13-year old girl in the back seat of Powell’s car broke both legs and an ankle. In any right-minded country, Powell would now be looking for ways to justify that he be allowed a PlayStation to while away the hours of a substantial jail sentence. Instead:
Today magistrates handed him a 12 month Community Order with 250 hours unpaid work. He was also given a nine month curfew and a five year disqualification from driving, with an order to have an extended retest before being allowed a return to driving.
Comments by the Police are notable for the absence of any indication that they are happy with this outcome.
This rubbish driver has effectively got away with killing two people. They should have locked him up and thrown away the key. He’s effectively a killer.
