This BBC story reports that bus lane enforcement cameras make £31m per year in fines. One particular lane, in Newcastle, made £1.5m on its own – and that’s after you consider that the BBC contacted 160 local authorities for financial data.
The fun part is where a spokeswoman for Newcastle said:
We would firmly stress that bus lanes are not there to generate income – they are there to help us to manage our road networks efficiently.
Liar. Bus lanes CAUSE congestion, and they have done so since the day the first one was introduced. You have to be a complete idiot (or pathological liar) either not to realise that, or to argue the point. So sticking cameras on them can only be to make easy money.
A prime example in Nottingham is the A52 Derby Road heading into the city via the Priory Roundabout. It used to be three lanes in merging to a single lane going out, past Wollaton Park. There was always serious congestion during rush hour. Then, they turned the left lane into a 24-hour bus lane, and suddenly three lanes of traffic was forced into just two, with still just a single lane leading out. The only benefit was to buses, which were now able to skip about three-quarters of a mile of gridlock and force their way back in at the roundabout (“force” being the operative word when Barton, Indigo, or YourBus are involved). Since much of the congestion was caused by buses stopping for extended periods of time on the single lane side (all the stops are next to the University, and you can imagine the difficulty most students are likely to have getting on a bus), having them all get down there more quickly made the congestion even worse. Admittedly, it doesn’t have cameras on it, but there are plenty that do.
Actually, it’s only a small section of the M1 – near Sheffield – but the media likes to distort these things.
I wrote about this subject a few years ago. That was at a time where they had only recently been talking about raising the speed limit! My main point was that although cars emit less pollution when driven at 60mph instead of 70mph, they they take longer to pass through a given area at 60mph, so the reduction in pollution is pretty much negligible. It’s a case of comparing a quick but pungent fart with a longer, less smelly one.
The other thing I think I mentioned is the stench when you drive on the M1 past Sheffield and the wind is in the right direction. And it doesn’t come from cars – it’s from the factories around there, and a smell like that isn’t going to contain anything that is good for you.
An even greater irony this time around is that London is currently in the grip of an extremely poor period of air quality. They haven’t quite got round to blaming it on cars and lorries yet – that’s been done before – but at the moment the most direct blame has been placed at the feet of pretentious people burning wood during the cold weather (though that detail seems to have been removed from some reports).
About a month ago I wrote about crap parents who can’t (or won’t) control their kids, with the result that everyone else has to suffer. I mentioned how other crap parents rise up against anyone who objects, citing all manner of illnesses and disorders as possible causes of unruly behaviour, even though we all know that – in the vast majority of cases – it is just crap parenting.
Coincidentally, I was driving between lessons yesterday when movement out of the corner of my eye at lights drew my attention to a passing bus, A woman was lifting a baby/young child in the air – well, I say “child”; actually it was just a huge mouth with tears squirting out of one end and legs dangling out of a nappy the other. I could just imagine the mega-decibel buzzsaw bawling everyone else was having to endure, and I remember thinking “God help anyone who is on that bus”.
Then I saw this story on the BBC website. When you strip it down, it’s just another example of some dipshit who isn’t in contact with reality ranting on Facebook and having it go viral as a result of huge support from a load of other dipshits.
It all starts with a flight from Ibiza to Manchester.
Imagine the situation. You’ve had a nice holiday, but you’re going home in the morning. It was a package tour, so your departure flight officially takes off at something like 5.30am. Your hotel or chalet is at least an hour away from the airport, and you’ve been given strict instructions to be in the car park outside at 3am to board the bus to take you to there. You’re in Ibiza and you’re flying back to Manchester, so there’s a good chance you’ve had to put up with some teenaged yobs for the whole week. Naturally, they will have gone out last night and drunk more than they’d done on any other night. Consequently, at 3am you’ll be sitting on the bus going nowhere while the reps try to find them – at least one will be borderline comatose, and several will be puking up everywhere.
When they eventually do arrive their mouths will be turned up to 11 (the usual yob setting is 9 even when they’re being quiet). The reps will have faces like thunder – quite the opposite of their cheery bonhomie when you were freighted in last week, and you’re now going to have to put up with the loud yobs all the way to the airport (and at the airport, and all the way home). Once you get there, you will have to wait until check-in begins and the couple of dozen seats – totally inadequate for the 200 people milling around at the best of times – will be taken up by a handful of sleeping backpackers. The floor will be covered in sleeping, puking, and screaming humanity, so you’ll have to be careful not to tread on anyone.
Any cafes will be shut, even if your departure hub (i.e. shed) has any, and the vending machines will have been emptied by more yobs providing the traditional Coca Cola and crisps breakfast for their kids. When the check-in call finally comes, all the backpackers and yobs will somehow make it to the front of the queue. The check-in process will take over an hour instead of the usual 10 minutes because the Spanish authorities’ approach to an increased terrorism threat is to use half as many people to do six times as much work. Once through, none of the duty free shops will be open so you’ll have to kill the next 30 minutes watching the planes land.
An hour later, and some 30 minutes after the time you were scheduled to take off, you’ll suddenly realise your plane isn’t even here yet. Eventually, you will casually watch it come in, land, taxi over, disgorge the new intake of holidaymakers and their luggage, get loaded up with your luggage, and refuel. Somewhere around 8am you’ll flop into your seat, simultaneously smashing both buttocks on the arm rests as you do, and then spend a further 30 minutes being jostled by all the other passengers, who appear transfixed by the overhead storage compartments and that clunk-click noise they make, and block the gangway for everyone else instead of bloody sitting down.
You’ll finally take off, knowing that you have two and a half hours in the air plus any time for stop offs. Within five minutes you’ll start to get cramp as a result of the non-existent leg room, and develop breathing problems as you sit with folded arms to try and keep out of the personal space of the person next to you, who is twice as wide as the seat they’ve been given and who has no qualms at all about occupying both yours and their personal space all at the same time. If you’re lucky, the pissed yobs from your hotel will burn out, and the need for an emergency diversion to the Galapagos will be avoided.
The first $64,000 question is this. After all of the above, if someone has a screaming kid which just will not shut up sitting immediately behind you, are you going to smile and ignore it, or get angrier and angrier inside?
The second $64,000 question is: will you blow?
Well, it would appear that on the flight referred to in the story, someone did get angry and blow – if “blow” is the right word to use. When bombarded with the incessant and painful noise coming from a screaming child on a cramped and lengthy journey back to Manchester, a female passenger in the seat immediately in front (from what I can gather) shouted “shut that child up”.
I can absolutely sympathise with her.
But we are in the Facebook age, and nothing is ever that simple. The mother has taken to social media to effectively blame the irate passenger for the behaviour of her child, saying that the kid was having “a meltdown” and that the comment “didn’t help” the child’s anxiety levels. “Meltdown” and “anxiety levels” are the favoured phrases of parents who can’t control their offspring, even though it is they who usually created the environment for such behaviour in the first place. Another favoured ploy is to blame some sort of illness.
In this case, the child apparently suffered from a rare condition called Sturge-Weber syndrome, and naturally her behaviour on the plane was – according to the mother’s implied words – entirely and completely due to all the bad things that go along with that condition. The possibility that she was just acting up because of the early start and all the arseing around at 3am in Spain didn’t enter into it. On the other hand, Sturge-Weber can have some nasty symptoms, though if these were genuinely the cause of any such behaviour you’d have to ask why the child had been taken to Ibiza in the first place (she has a huge port-wine stain on her face, and my understanding is that you should avoid the sun if you have one), and why she’d gone economy (where even a full-grown adult might feel like having “a meltdown” and suffer “anxiety”).
Of course, barring any law which forbids it, the child’s parents had every right to take her to Ibiza in this manner. But then, other people – the majority, in fact – have rights too, one of which is to be able to sit quietly without someone else’s kids bawling in your ear and ruining something you probably paid a lot of money for.
So, it isn’t as one-sided as the mother with her Facebook rant would like to think.
It seems that the accident was the fault of the Google car – the bus didn’t do what the Google-bot’s program said it should – and that’s what caused the collision. Mind you, I’m sure that Google’s scientists see that as a fault of the bus driver, and not of their car. Perhaps the solution is to make autonomous vehicles more visible for we inferior humans so that we automatically sense danger when one is near?
Maybe they could stick a lot of Audi badges on them.
This time of year you get some real idiots on the roads. I’m not talking about boy racers, but middle-aged plus fossils who simply don’t know how to drive. To make matters worse, they usually have big 4x4s specifically to advertise how much money they’ve been able to borrow in order to get it. If only they’d spend some money on refresher lessons.
A good example came just now. I was doing a merge in turn just after a set of lights, and so as not to cut anyone up I was dropping back to merge behind a grey 4×4 in the lane next to me (registration number: FN15 CDK). In actual fact, this would have meant I was giving up my “turn” in front of the 4×4, who had accelerated away just fast enough to show that he was going to “fight” over the issue. At no point did the front of my car extend further forward than his rear bumper while this was happening, so it was obvious I was not in any way trying to get past him. I was freewheeling at about 15-20mph – no gas whatsoever – so he could make progress into the gap. The problem then was that just as the road narrowed the f***ing idiot slowed right down, forcing me to brake quite sharply as I found myself alongside him. He had no reason to do this – the cars in front had accelerated away, and there was a gap.
This, of course, gave him the opportunity to shake his head and explain to the woman sitting in the passenger seat next to him how great he was and also, no doubt, to utter the immortal phrase “[insert adjective] learners”.
He was a silver-hair, and these are among the worst drivers on our roads – irrespective of how many accidents they have. A minor accident was only avoided in this case by me taking evasive action. I have no idea what was going through his fossilised brain cells. He didn’t want me to get past him, that was clear. But having “won” he then proceeded to slow down unnecessarily. Quite possibly just to “make a point”.
Drivers – and especially older ones, who have difficulty in the brain department – need to understand the concept of “merge in turn”. When a road splits into two lanes at traffic lights, it is not a mandate for you to block both lanes or attempt to prevent anyone overtaking you at any cost (it’s actually illegal for you to do that). Nor is it a mandate to sit in the right hand lane and then pull away slower than everyone else (technically, that’s illegal these days, too). Yes, your aged grey matter is probably already thinking fixedly about boy racers going faster than you, but although they are also wrong if they break the speed limit or drive discourteously or dangerously, the simple fact that they’re younger than you and drive faster (both of which are liable to put you off your Horlicks) is not reason enough for you to get involved.
And if you can’t understand that, hand over your licence before you kill someone.
Someone found the blog on the search term “are blacked out windows ok for driving instructors?” I think the terminology used speaks volumes, but let’s look at the Law.
The front windscreen must let at least 75% of light through and the front side windows must let at least 70% of light through.
Vehicles first used before 1 April 1985
The front windscreen and front side windows must both let at least 70% of light through.
You will note that there isn’t that much difference between the two parts of the Law. But there’s even less flexibility when it comes to actually doing it. One window tinting company states:
Most modern car windows are made of glass with a 80-70% VLT [visible light transmission], so even a very light film applied to the front windows will take the VLT the wrong side of 70% and therefore will not be legal.
In other words, “blacked out” front windows are illegal, and even attempting to tint existing windows so they look darker is pretty much guaranteed to make them illegal, too.
Rear windows (side and back) are not included in the legislation so they can be as “blacked out” as you like. Of course, everyone knows that a car with almost opaque rear windows and normal front ones looks stupid, which is probably why people ask questions like this.
The government website also points out:
The police or the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) vehicle examiners use light measuring equipment to measure window tint.
If your windscreen or front side windows are tinted too much you could get:
a ‘prohibition notice’ stopping you using your vehicle on the road until you have the extra tint removed
a penalty notice or court summons
As you can imagine, companies who provide window tinting are anxious to explain this in much greater detail. The same tinting company linked to above says:
An instrumented check is performed by a suitably trained officer with a ‘TintMan’ VLT meter. These checks are normally from Vosa roadside campaigns.
65%-46% VLT: Advise only – The driver will be advised that the legal requirements have been breached.
45%-30% VLT: Delayed prohibition – The driver will be given a prohibition notice and will usually have 10 days to have the film removed before going to a vosa testing station to have the VLT re-checked.
<30% VLT: Immediate prohibition – The vehicle is considered dangerous and cannot be driven until the film is removed.
However, another company is less willing to identify apparent loopholes. It says:
The Window tinting Regulation was amended from 1st January 2004 which now clearly rules out any tinted films being applied to driver windows (Front doors).
What they are saying is what I said above – that windows already have 70-80% VLT, so any further tinting sends them out of range.
Many instructors use cars which have tinted rear windows. They are not a problem on test, though I would imagine that if someone had been stupid enough to tint them so much that you couldn’t see out of them properly, the examiner might decide that they were a problem. And that says nothing of the disservice such an instructor would be doing their pupils by teaching them in a dangerously modified vehicle.
But any tinting of the front windows is likely to get you a cancelled test, a wonderful reputation, points on your licence, and perhaps a shiny new Job Seekers Allowance claim form if you get thrown off the register of approved instructors.
Regular readers will know that I have no sympathy for older drivers who end up killing or maiming people as a direct result of their age and deteriorating physical capabilities. Only last week I wrote about a 98-year old who was complaining that his insurance premium had gone up as a result of his age, and in that article I mentioned how a few weeks before that an 87-year old had got himself on to the M1 on the wrong carriageway near Nottingham and killed both himself and the passenger of another vehicle after he collided head on with them.
A few days later I wrote about an 82-year old woman who had gone missing in fog and instead of completing a 4 mile journey in perhaps 15 minutes, had been discovered by police 6 hours later 50 miles away, having taken a a route that utilised several very busy (and foggy) motorways. Thank God that she was recaptured before she could hurt anyone.
But this story had gone under my radar. It happened in 2012 and involved a young mother being killed when an 83-year old drove into her as she pushed her two-year old son in his pushchair. Another pedestrian was also left with permanent brain damage and the loss of sight in one eye.
That was 2012, remember. There is then a huge gap of more than 2 years until the next update appears anywhere. Geoffrey Lederman, the 83-year old in question, along with his lawyers had apparently been delaying the case going to court, trying to get it thrown out based on his “anxiety” and “stress”. However, once it got there it was the usual tale of an older driver in an automatic car getting confused about the brake and gas pedals, hitting the wrong one, and not having the capabilities to switch to the correct one instead. Lederman failed to see NINE pedestrians on the pavement as he mounted it at an average speed of 54mph (this was in a 30mph zone in West Hampstead, London). It also became clear that Lederman had defective eyesight and had previously suffered a stroke. The report I have linked to here also notes that:
Moments before the crash he had stopped to check his car after ‘nudging’ a pizza delivery man before carrying on his way, the court heard.
Mr Kark [prosecutor] said: ‘He said he lost control soon after that, within seconds he seemed to be on the wrong side of the road going at almost racing car speed.
‘He was tugging on the handbrake with no effect.’
In the minutes before the crash Lederman’s Mercedes was seen revving loudly for up to ten seconds as it sat stationary outside West Hampstead Underground Station.
So, he’d actually hit someone only minutes earlier and had been revving for some reason just prior to that!
There was no mechanical fault with the car, and investigators found that Lederman had mistakenly kept his foot on the gas pedal thinking it was the brake before driving off and causing this.
Mr Kark said: ‘It may be that when Geoffrey Lederman engaged the drive gear when he believed he was pressing the brake or hadn’t realised the car had slipped into neutral.’
At this point in time (2014), Lederman was expected to claim that he’d had some sort of seizure.
In December 2014, Lederman was found guilty of causing death by dangerous driving and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He was also banned from driving for life. It’s worth pointing out that Lederman will probably be out of jail by now, though Mrs Brooks is still dead, and her son still has no mother. You have to read different versions of this latest story to piece together a true picture of what Lederman has put Mr Brooks-Dutton (Desreen’s husband) and Jackson through.
Lederman had been to a 7-hour bridge tournament and was driving home in the dark (it was a Saturday evening in early November). His defence team did indeed try to get the case thrown out on the grounds that Lederman had suffered “an episode” and could not be accountable for his actions. When that appeal failed, two doctors testified that it was “unfair” to try an old man who was now suffering mental health problems as a result of the accident.Fortunately, the judge was having none of it, and he accused the defence team of “holding a gun to the court’s head”. There is no mention of whether the two “doctors” were struck off – they damned well should have been.
Lederman has shown no signs of remorse at any time during proceedings (which have lasted more than two years).
Dr Jonathan Beckett, an expert in old age psychiatry at the private Nightingale Hospital in Marylebone, told the court that Mr Lederman’s mental health had deteriorated rapidly in the run-up to the trial and he had become very anxious.
He said: “He is also a very proud man who has led an unblemished life. He has a very strong moral code. The fact that he would be here in the court being tried in this way… he would have to view himself as a liar.”
Tom Kark QC, prosecuting, said during the appeal: “He is apparently able to conduct his life relatively normally… The court cannot be blackmailed into not trying serious crimes.”
Judge Clarke said: “Do you think that his concern about the destruction [of his reputation] is even greater than his concern that he has caused someone’s death? Does he not regard himself as having any duty towards the next of kin of the woman [Desreen Brooks]?
If ever anything bad happens to me, I want Tom Kark on my side.
It needs a loud voice from the public. Remember that these aged time bombs constitute a significant proportion of the voting population and their political allegiances would, I suggest, make this current government somewhat reluctant to upset them in any way. But the government cannot ignore the majority if that majority is large enough.
Please note that all my “Darwin Awards” posts are my own take on situations and have no connection with any real award. I just like the term, as it describes people who are idiots very appropriately.
It helps if you understand just how fast 192mph really is, because then you start to realise just what sort of value Shaun Davis (and his 23-year old daughter, Jordan) put on anyone’s lives except their own.
At such a speed, Davis would have been travelling more than 3 miles every minute. To put that into figures that the average reader might comprehend, he would be travelling more than 85 metres every second – or about 20 car lengths. If he’d have had to stop, even under ideal conditions it would have taken him about 620 metres (around 140 car lengths).
If you’re still not clear on what this means, 620 metres is more than the length of five football pitches.
However, the distances involved are academic, since initiating an emergency stop at that speed would most likely have resulted in a catastrophic accident. It is simply too far outside the range of human reaction times, and the capabilities of vehicle parts (i.e. tyres on roads). Recording it on a handheld device would make it a hundred times worse.
Shaun Davis appears to be one of those people you’d have reservations about if he moved in next door. It appears that every inch of his body below the neck line is tattooed, and he has a penchant for fast cars. It was that penchant for speed that proved his undoing. You see, Davis – who was the kind of person to get arrested on an unrelated matter – had videoed himself driving at very high speed in several fast cars using his smartphone. Whatever the other reason was for his arrest, it was deemed serious enough for police to examine his phone, and it was then that the videos came to light.
In the video footage, Jordan Davis (his daughter) can be heard egging him on, and for that she earns herself a nomination for the Chav Category of the 2015 Darwin Awards.
Davis, who apparently showed no remorse and who denied all charges, was jailed for 28 months, banned from driving for 10 years, and ordered to take an extended re-test. His daughter, who he had obviously brought up to be just as soulless, and for whom the fact that she was even accused of anything let alone found guilty must have come as a major surprise, was banned for 2 years and given an 18-month conditional discharge.
I’m sure that the Davises will find this assessment harsh, because it’s a sad indictment on our society that a great many people who break Laws often aren’t even aware that those Laws exist. Even more worrying, though, is that they often don’t care. So we can only hope that this is seen as a wake-up call and not something to be proud of.
To add to the gridlock caused by road works – arranged by Nottingham’s incompetent council – an incompetent motorist decided to increase congestion today by “[becoming] wedged on the [tram] tracks” on Lenton Lane. You can’t beat a good euphemism.
I have yet to find a version of the story which makes it clear that the retard who was driving had entered a tram-only area and had actually fallen into the track cut out. The phrase “became wedged” doesn’t tell the half of it.
Whoever it was should be banned for life. If you’re stupid enough to do something like this, God only knows what else you’d be capable of if you were allowed to carry on driving.
This BBC story reports that bus lane enforcement cameras make £31m per year in fines. One particular lane, in Newcastle, made £1.5m on its own – and that’s after you consider that the BBC contacted 160 local authorities for financial data.
Actually, it’s only a small section of the M1 – near Sheffield – but the media likes to distort these things.
