A reader sent me this link from Autoblog about CCTV footage being used to issue automatic penalty charge notices.
It makes unpleasant reading – some drivers never actually stop, but are still issued with PCNs. Others stop for as little as 17 seconds. But only a small percentage (1%) of those caught bother to appeal.
In one case, a car approached an entry way but had to move out of another vehicle’s way, wait for a pedestrian, then another car before going in – but he was still ticketed.
It doesn’t say which councils the scam relates to – and it IS a scam, let’s not be in any doubt over that. These councils are lying and coercing people into doing things that they then fine them for (the camera cars even park on double yellow lines, to play on the monkey-see, monkey-do mentality of motorists).
Driving along the A60 in Ruddington this afternoon, I’d just gone past the roundabout near to the business park heading towards Bunny. I was following another vehicle – a small flat bed truck – when this pale yellow van (reg. no. UP04 BET – but customised to read UP 04 BET) came screaming up and overtook me, swung into a gap that wasn’t there to avoid a head-on with a car coming the opposite way, then swung out and overtook the truck over a solid white line.
He drove off at excessive speed and when I saw the “your speed” sign in Bradmore (40mph limit) after he’d gone through it was reading 50mph.
Not likely to be employed with prat plates, but hopefully the police will take note of his driving standards at some point.
The DVLA’s IT staff are contracted from Fujitsu, and it is they who are involved in a pay dispute. Fujitsu has made a pay offer, but it says:
PCS has decided not to ask its members to vote on our pay offer, which we believe is a fair one, but has decided instead to ask them to vote on whether to take industrial action.
You see! PCS isn’t interested in resolving any dispute – it just wants to take strike action. And to add insult to injury, PCS has said:
[Fujitsu could face financial penalties for missing service agreements if the strike goes ahead.]
How childish and petty can they get?
It seems to revolve around the fact that some senior managers are likely to get bonuses of up to £14k, but the pay offer is for rises of 1.5-2.5%.
This is why unions are outdated and out of place in modern society. They STILL keep harping on as if we were in the 1930s and have failed to learn that senior managers DO earn more than shopfloor staff. And always will.
Well done to Edward, who passed yesterday with just 2 driver faults (a good result, by any standard).
As the examiner said at the end, just watch how hard you yank on that handbrake in your own car, otherwise it could end up being expensive to keep having the cable adjusted or replaced.
And don’t let other drivers get to you. Watch what you’re doing before getting too wound up with what others are doing.
I saw this story in the week (link now dead). The AA is calling for driver education to be part of the National Curriculum. It seems that this is yet another “solution” to the problem of younger drivers having more accidents than older ones.
I mentioned this recently, but I’ll say it again…
Most new drivers are young. By definition, a NEW driver does not have the same experience as an OLDER driver. Less experienced drivers are likely to have more accidents more experienced ones.
Can you see the logical result of that? It means that young drivers have more accidents, BECAUSE they tend to be the new drivers. It isn’t rocket science.
Some thing else that isn’t rocket science is the fact that experience – again, by definition – comes with time. And Steven Hawking would be able to tell you that it isn’t possible to get 5, 10, 15, 20, or 30 years of driving experience into 6 months without some really heavy theoretical events coming into play (i.e. several Black Holes and some gaffer tape).
So, it seems that the AA’s solution to the problem is to start ’em young. However, unless we’re talking about sending 5-year olds out on the roads (and that is obviously ridiculous), anything included in the National Curriculum is not going to contribute significantly to changing the fact that…
Young people are much more likely to suffer a catastrophic crash than older and more experienced drivers.
New drivers have always had more accidents than older ones. You will never stop it completely.
But there is one thing that MUST be stopped, and that is this continued bleeding heart approach which suggests that the fault is with driver education. It isn’t. No instructor teaches people to behave like chavs and drive like idiots, and yet THAT is the cause of most accidents.
The problem starts way back at the moment of conception – and goes downhill from there.
And as if this were necessary, let’s just remember that that National Curriculum contains a lot of things already – like maths, English, and science – but it is not exactly renowned for its production of numerate and literate scientists!
The August edition of Despatch is now available. Click the logo to download a copy.
Articles include a section on the newly launched “Find your nearest instructor” facility on the DSA’s website, a bit about LGV and PCV testing, a useful one about check tests, some Q&A with IRSO, feedback (albeit somewhat biased, I feel) from ADIs about having an observer on test, and a round-up (electric car charging network, and a Facebook show-me-tell me competition).
On the subject of the riots, I was thinking of Victor Hugo’s description of certain elements of society in Les Misérables. Even though it was written in 1862, it is remarkably accurate in describing these rioters:
These beings belonged to that bastard class composed of coarse people who have been successful, and of intelligent people who have descended in the scale, which is between the class called “middle” and the class denominated as “inferior,” and which combines some of the defects of the second with nearly all the vices of the first, without possessing the generous impulse of the workingman nor the honest order of the bourgeois.
They were of those dwarfed natures which, if a dull fire chances to warm them up, easily become monstrous. There was in the woman a substratum of the brute, and in the man the material for a blackguard. Both were susceptible, in the highest degree, of the sort of hideous progress which is accomplished in the direction of evil. There exist crab-like souls which are continually retreating towards the darkness, retrograding in life rather than advancing, employing experience to augment their deformity, growing incessantly worse, and becoming more and more impregnated with an ever-augmenting blackness. This man and woman possessed such souls…
The wild spectres who roam in this grave, almost beasts, almost phantoms, are not occupied with universal progress; they are ignorant both of the idea and of the word; they take no thought for anything but the satisfaction of their individual desires. They are almost unconscious, and there exists within them a sort of terrible obliteration. They have two mothers, both step-mothers, ignorance and misery. They have a guide, necessity; and for all forms of satisfaction, appetite. They are brutally voracious, that is to say, ferocious, not after the fashion of the tyrant, but after the fashion of the tiger. From suffering these spectres pass to crime; fatal affiliation, dizzy creation, logic of darkness. That which crawls in the social third lower level is no longer complaint stifled by the absolute; it is the protest of matter. Man there becomes a dragon. To be hungry, to be thirsty–that is the point of departure; to be Satan–that is the point reached. From that vault Lacenaire emerges.
What is amazing about these riots is the incident which apparently started it. The police shot Mark Duggan – a man who they had had under surveillance, and who had links with London gangs and gun crimes in the black community. He appears to have been in possession of an illegal gun. Of course, his family claim he was a loving “family man who would not have shot at police”.
I’m expressing my own opinion here, but he had a gun. Quite frankly, I don’t care whether he shot first or not, you don’t carry a an illegal gun around with you if you are a “loving family man” who “wouldn’t shoot at police”. You carry it to shoot people.
Ironically, the police are being slated for not acting sooner on the riots. But what could they have done? They’re already being slated for shooting a lunatic with an illegal weapon, so can you imagine what would have happened if they’d have waded in and cracked a few skulls and prevented this whole sorry situation? The Bleeding Hearts Society would have had a field day.
In any case, you can’t just “arrest” a mob which is armed with bricks, knives, definitely guns (several people have been shot), firebombs, and so on. Officers’ lives would then have been compromised.
The police should be given firearms and allowed to open fire on these morons. Society would be better off without them particularly as it appears to have come to murder. Every one of the scum taking part in this is responsible for any death which takes place
Mind you, the riots have had one amusing effect. People who for whom politics is high up on their List of Things They Don’t Understand But Talk About Anyway are having enormous fun.
Funnily enough, though, I sometimes use that line with my pupils! When I know I can get away with it, of course.
But it’s even better when I ask them how they thought something went – when it didn’t – and they say it themselves.
On a slightly different note, I was out with a pupil yesterday. He is classic “that was crap” territory – everything he does is “absolute shit” unless it is 100% right in his eyes. Even when what he’s done is perfectly OK, he’ll decide it isn’t and go into a sulk over it.
One of his more irritating habits is his defensiveness, which often manifests itself as having an answer for everything. I may have mentioned before the time when I was trying to get him to tell me why getting too close to the kerb with the risk of hitting it is dangerous and expensive. I’d managed to get to the part about the damage it can do to the tyre, and asked rhetorically who he thought had to pay for it. He came back with “Me! I’ll pay for it, obviously.”
I just said “look. Let’s get this straight. You are NOT going to drive into the kerb”.
Anyway, he was off on another of his bizarre thought process excursions yesterday. He’d stalled at a roundabout by trying to move off too quickly in the wrong gear. He was annoyed that he’d done it, so it snowballed for a few hundred metres (with him forgetting to get in lane for a right turn, not checking his mirrors or signalling, and so on) until I could pull him over.
Now, the reason he’d messed up on the roundabout was dead simple. He’d intended not to stop, was going too fast as a result, had to stop for a car which appeared after he’d made his initial decision to go, then rushed moving off without having changed gear.
His explanation was far more entertaining, though. He started with:
Well, let me just stop you there. I can tell you exactly why that happened. About 40 seconds ago further down the road…
At this point, my “You’re Talking Total Bollocks-o-meter” had maxed out… he continued with some stuff about another car, and how it had distracted him by pulling out. I listened patiently until he’d finished. I just said “I’m sorry, but that’s a load of bollocks, Dave!”
I went on to question why something that happened 40 seconds ago should in any way justify a dangerous attempt to pull out without checking properly and the subsequent need to brake harshly. I questioned why the same event had apparently led to dangerous omissions from that point onward.
I asked him if it would be OK to drive into a brick wall at 70mph, just because another car had caused some sort of distraction.
He had to admit that it wouldn’t.
From there, we had a chance to discuss the importance of planning ahead and not backwards.
Deborah Hunt, 43, was 2½ times over the drink drive limit when she got on to the M5 motorway and drove for 23 miles on the opposite carriageway. She almost collided with a police car at one point.
She was only arrested when she ran out of fuel.
The usual type of sob story – she’d “been drinking to drown her sorrows over her impending divorce.”
The only bad thing is that it is being dealt with by magistrates. According to the story, she’s “[facing] jail”.
Update: The story was covered in today’s Sun. It turns out this woman simply oozes class. She was also driving whilst uninsured – blame that one on the divorce, too, eh?
The Sun article also has a photo of her showing two fingers to the photographer outside the court.
They’re resurfacing the road on the A60 near to the Kirk Lane/Flawforth Lane junctions in Ruddington. Temporary lights, long queues. The lot.
Three bloody weeks!
That’s what they are saying. Three weeks to resurface a few hundred metres of road. What is the world coming to?
When I was young, they could build a motorway across six counties in that time. So why does it take so long now?
Maybe it’s got something to do with all the workmen standing around thumbing texts into their mobile phones? Maybe it’s to do with the fact they don’t start work until 10am or later, then pack up at 3pm? Maybe if they got on with it – like worked nights to finish it quickly – it wouldn’t take anywhere near as long as three weeks.
And the work is bound to cause problems with the knackered gas mains on that junction, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they have to dig it up again in a few months for a gas leak.
Update: Incidentally, I think I discovered one good reason why it is taking them so bloody long. There’s no one working on it at all today.
Another update: Yep! They dug it all up last weekend, didn’t do ANYTHING all week, and have been back on it this weekend (in fact, they’ve been pratting around in Ruddington centre all week resurfacing exceedingly minor roads – go figure that one. So the three weeks’ duration is actually three weekends. Just think how quickly they could have done it.
Instead, we’ve had people driving at 20mph through the milled road all week.
