Timely advice from the DSA about wet-weather driving:
Rule 227
In wet weather, stopping distances (PDF, 125KB) will be at least double those required for stopping on dry roads. This is because your tyres have less grip on the road.
In wet weather
you should keep well back from the vehicle in front. This will increase your ability to see and plan ahead
if the steering becomes unresponsive, it probably means that water is preventing the tyres from gripping the road. Ease off the accelerator and slow down gradually
the rain and spray from vehicles may make it difficult to see and be seen
be aware of the dangers of spilt diesel that will make the surface very slippery
take extra care around pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists and horse riders
Rule 121
Brakes affected by water. If you have driven through deep water your brakes may be less effective.
Test them at the first safe opportunity by pushing gently on the brake pedal to make sure that they work. If they are not fully effective, gently apply light pressure while driving slowly. This will help to dry them out.
With all the rain we’ve had, people really need to take notice of this advice.
An email alert from the DSA advising on driving on motorways:
Rule 264
You should always drive in the left-hand lane when the road ahead is clear.
If you are overtaking a number of slower-moving vehicles, you should return to the left-hand lane as soon as you are safely past.
Slow-moving or speed-restricted vehicles should always remain in the left-hand lane of the carriageway unless overtaking.
You MUST NOT drive on the hard shoulder except in an emergency or if directed to do so by the police, Highways Agency traffic officers in uniform or by signs.
Before I comment on the story directly, let’s just clarify something. All travellers – all of them – who doss down on land they haven’t been given permission to camp on (often by breaking and entering) are filthy, parasitic scum. They crap in the bushes, and leave filth behind when the local authorities eventually manage to push through the eviction notices kicking them off.
I know this because we get them around my way from time to time. Anyone with any sense must know that their decrepit caravans mostly don’t have proper toilets and that they are therefore going to have to go somewhere else (years ago, I actually saw the inhabitants of one mobile slum-camp going into roadside undergrowth for the purpose). The last time they camped near my house on a field, the spaces between bushes were riddled with piles of human excrement and used nappies. They also fly-tipped old baths and other stuff in ditches, AND the local house burglary rate went up dramatically while they were there. These are facts, by the way.
A couple of years ago a herd of them got into a farmer’s field near Nuthall. They did so by cutting through a hedge – actually felling trees to get in – and the mess they left behind will take longer to clean up than Chernobyl.
More recently another herd tried to camp on a local farmer’s field, driving over his crops in order to do so. They were kicked off immediately but set up camp on a roadside verge a couple of miles away. In that particular case, all the car registration plates were Irish.
And also quite recently, another herd tried to camp outside the Virgin Media building in Colwick. They were only there for a couple of days before being kicked off, but it took two days for the bin liners of filth to be removed.
Oh, and earlier this year a handful of them took up residence in the car park on one of the vacant Colwick Industrial Estate units.
All this is just what I’ve observed, and is merely the tip of the iceberg. I have never witnessed – directly or otherwise – any illegal encampment that has departed and left the place clean. That’s because it doesn’t happen.
In this particular (Daily Mail) case, the herd entered land belonging to farmer, Dave Dawson, in Shoreham, West Sussex. They cut through a metal gate and put their own padlock on it.
Mr Dawson called police and told them he was going to remove them. He took his digger and was prepared to get them off by any means necessary.
Unbelievably, he was told that they “have rights”. He said:
The police told me that once they are on the land they have rights. But what about my rights?
They should have no more rights than a pile of dog mess, because that’s all they are. And yet in spite of breaking and entering private property, trespassing, and already having the ambience of sewer rats because of who they were, the only person who came close to arrest was Mr Dawson, the injured party and landowner!
Some dickheads out there say that these scum have a right to live somewhere. Yes, they do. On legal campsites (even that is unfortunate for anyone nearby forced to endure them). And only then if they pay taxes.
(If you hadn’t noticed, I am quite passionate on this subject. I see too much of the damage these animals cause).
I was at the dentist yesterday, leafing through a copy of Private Eye in the waiting room. I think my scepticism (of weather forecasters) and derision (of loud and inaccurate weather forecasters) – especially amateur ones, or those who predict Armageddon every time they give a forecast – is well documented.
But this article caught my eye (Monbiot’s blog is their source):
Back in January Guardian columnist George Monbiot took issue with the use of “extreme” weather forecasts by the Mail and Express to generate eye-catching headlines. Spurning the Met Office, both titles relied on these often erroneous predictions on Positive Weather Services (PWS), run by one Jonathan Powell.
Monbiot discovered that the people who Powell claimed were helping put together the “service” did not, in fact, exist. Having been rumbled, Powell explained that “as I can’t find anything to back anyone up then quite frankly PWS is now more trouble than it’s worth and in debt. Therefore, I have taken the decision after six years to close the business forthwith.”
But you can’t keep a good weatherman down. Powell popped up in the Express a few months later, this time under the guise of Vantage Weather Services.
“NEW COLD SNAP TO LAST FOR A MONTH,” howled the paper’s front page on 15 May. Hack Nathan Rao quoted Powell’s warning to readers: “It looks like this is going to continue well into June. Summer is really on hold, with no sign of it in the near future.”
Whoops! Four days later Rao was back on the front page, but this time to report: “GLORIOUS SUMMER IS ON WAY.” He even turned to Powell for his verdict: “We will get a glimpse of summer next week with temperatures reaching 73F in the South [in fact they were up to 80]. It is going to turn cool again after that, but this extremely cold May is a precursor to some extremely hot spells during the summer.”
Phew, what a scorcher!
In actual fact, although May began quite coolly, as most people will recall it ended with very high temperatures indeed. Overall, May was just “average” in terms of temperature, rainfall, and so on. Any extremes were localised. But that didn’t stop the Mail predicting that May would be the “coldest for 100 years” back in April (using PWS as its “expert source”). You can see an example of another PWS forecast here. History obviously reveals how humongously wrong it really was.
It’s worth reading the full Monbiot blog post. Private Eye’s article doesn’t do it justice, and the obvious deceptions taking place are quite astounding. Monbiot asks if the demise of PWS and the deceptions by its founder will stop the Mail and Express using Powell for weather forecasts.
Well, no. Yesterday, the Express – once again using Powell and Vantage Weather Services (which appears to have closed down as of November 2014) as its weather guru(s) – predicted “downpours” in July and August. Much of their evidence seems to be based what the weather is doing at the moment – and Powell’s previous howlers listed by Private Eye and Monbiot followed an identical pattern.
In that same Express article, another group, Netweather, neatly side-stepped the issue of dodgy forecasting and said:
You’d be forgiven for thinking we’d skipped summer entirely and arrived in the middle of the autumn storm period.
So please take care if out and about, and watch for some treacherous driving conditions and possible floods.
It looks like this lot are diversifying into traffic advice instead of the weather. It’s also worth pointing out that Michael Fish is their senior forecaster. Remember 1987, anyone?
But the likes of AccuWeather – the agency which provides forecasting on Android devices – is no better. The information it provides is only accurate for stuff that happened 10 minutes ago – so it’s more of a “postcast”, really. Anything ahead of time is nonsense. Only yesterday (12 June) it showed this on its 4-day forecast:
Already, one day later, it is forecasting this – the first icon in the image below is the same day as the second icon in the one above:
This is minor compared to what it can show sometimes, but the forecast for today was totally wrong only yesterday, and AccuWeather has updated that “forecast” so it was right! The icon showing today’s weather is just a statement of what actually happened.
EDIT: On the morning of 14 June, this is what it says about today (Thursday) – that first icon (they represent “today”, “tonight”, and “tomorrow”) appears primarily because that’s what it’s like outside at the moment… sunny:
Of course, it didn’t say that yesterday or the day before, so its forecast was completely wrong.
Google says this at the moment (and I can’t really comment on its accuracy because I haven’t tried it before, but it’s wrong about today):
Incidentally, with today being 13 June, I predict that the weather will remain like it is now until around 17 June, then it will pick up a little (it won’t be wall-to-wall sunshine, but it’ll at least be a bit sunny) and will stay that way for at least another 4 days after that.
Let’s see if my prediction comes true. If it doesn’t, I don’t care – because I’m not a weather forecaster. But it will be fun to see what happens. If I get it right I’ll see if I can do it again using my information sources. Or I might get bored.
Edit 17/6/2012: Hey, so far so good. Just adding to that prediction, I reckon the way the weather is today is how it is going to remain for at least the next 7 days. Not wall-to-wall sun, but less wet than of late (showers), and with higher temperatures. This mainly applies to the central part of the UK – Scotland might still be shitty (it has a head start anyway) and so might the extreme south.
Edit 18/6/2012: An update to the above. I now reckon that we might have some unsettled weather again around 22nd June, which will last a couple of days, then it will go back to like it is now. I’ve had to revise my previous forecast because the data I am using have also changed.
Edit 6/7/2012: OK. I got bored. But I was correct with all my forecasts unless the source data changed. And when the source data DOES change, it means making a totally different forecast. Any weather forecaster has the same problem, so they can never be totally accurate. Or – as is the case with the “long range” forecasters – they just take a guess.
The latest edition of Despatch is available for viewing now.
It covers driving tests during the Olympics, comments about the CGI HPT clips, news about the new Highway Code app, some check test advice, and a few bits and pieces.
The latest reminder from the DSA, this time concerning motorways:
Rule 259
Joining the motorway. When you join the motorway you will normally approach it from a road on the left (a slip road) or from an adjoining motorway. You should
give priority to traffic already on the motorway
check the traffic on the motorway and match your speed to fit safely into the traffic flow in the left-hand lane
not cross solid white lines that separate lanes or use the hard shoulder
stay on the slip road if it continues as an extra lane on the motorway
remain in the left-hand lane long enough to adjust to the speed of traffic before considering overtaking
I would imagine this is aimed at holiday traffic, though the jackasses who cause whole swathes of the M25, M6, M4, M1, and M80 to be closed daily at other times also ought to take note.
A story from Scotland culled from another pointless FOI request reveals the staggering figure of 46 accidents involving learners on test since 2008.
Simple arithmetic doesn’t seem to be the strongpoint of the author, who wants to make a big deal out of the fact, in spite of it only equating to 10 accidents a year. Considering that there are in the region of a quarter of a million tests or more conducted in Scotland annually, it means nothing.
The FOI data don’t identify WHO was to blame for the accidents, either.
Making matters worse is some jackass from one of the “associations” who reckons that a learner making a mistake isn’t ready for test. That’s bullshit! And so is this nonsense about the word “accident” – three little syllables convey all the necessary meaning in any normal conversation. It doesn’t need some pseudo-academic trying to enlighten us to imagined philosophical connotations of the word.
Without knowing the specific details of each accident – and even insurance companies and the police often never get to the bottom of that – you cannot automatically blame the learner for any they might be involved in. Accidents DO happen – and they happen to innocent parties.
At least someone at the DSA has got their finger on the pulse (instead of up their backsides):
…thankfully accidents on test are extremely rare.
Precisely.
Even big-nuts advanced drivers who are mouthpieces for some of the organisations were not perfect when they first passed their tests. They continued to learn once they got their passes. It’s always been like that… and it always will.
Take a look at this story in the Daily Mail. Someone has posted a link on YouTube to a CCTV video of a man and woman putting their child in a laundromat washing machine, then panicking when they couldn’t get it out as the wash cycle began.
Here’s the video:
This is only a recent YouTube posting, so I would expect the identities of the two people to become known in due course. One can only hope that the authorities in whatever country is involved (it looks like the USA) conclude rightly that the pair are unfit to be parents, and the child is taken into care for its own safety.
The two people involved are clearly front-runners for this year’s Darwin Award.
The DSA has come up trumps with this reminder to cyclists about how THEY should behave on the roads.
Rule 66
You should
keep both hands on the handlebars except when signalling or changing gear
keep both feet on the pedals
never ride more than two abreast, and ride in single file on narrow or busy roads and when riding round bends
not ride close behind another vehicle
not carry anything which will affect your balance or may get tangled up with your wheels or chain
be considerate of other road users, particularly blind and partially sighted pedestrians. Let them know you are there when necessary, for example, by ringing your bell if you have one. It is recommended that a bell be fitted
It’s almost laughable in some respects. You could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of cyclists who are even aware that there are rules they’re supposed to follow, let alone be prepared to abide by them.
The Spandex boys – the ones who think they’re athletes, but aren’t – are the worst offenders. This year already seems much worse than usual. The Olympics has got them all worked up, I guess.
