I don’t know where to start today.
Fat obstinate old wankers in Mercs.
People carriers, driven by gelded milquetoast men and po-faced women with distended birth canals.
Manual labour scumbags in their variety of rusty conveyances, each with a rolled up copy of the Sun sat in the windscreen.
Narcissistic metrosexual mongs in Audi A3s and Renault Clios.
Lorry driving French putains who can’t stay in their fucking lane.
That is all.
AJ
Seen on the matrix signs on the M1 today (several instances):
Don’t Hog The Middle Lane
Wonders will never cease. And it works a treat for about 2 miles after each sign.
AJ
UPDATE: Also seen on the way back…
Keep Left Unless Overtaking
Also, especially for Obo, is a very dodgy photo of the Don’t Hog the Middle Lane sign, seen on the way back.
Okay, you have to squint a bit, but as the dog is my witness, that what it says.
Should be a quick one, this.
Remember back in the day? Mirror, signal, manoeuvre. Right?
Now, you’re going to be turning left, off a 40mph road into a smaller side road. You will need to reduce your speed significantly.
The manoeuvre begins when you start to slow down. See?
So it’s no fucking use to me, behind you, if you indicate after you’ve slowed down from 40mph to 10mph.
If you don’t get this, you don’t get driving and in Al Jahom’s pending New World Ordure, you don’t get to drive at all you fucking useless cunts.
AJ
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Introduction: In spite of one of the most demanding driving tests in the EU, people in the UK drive with incompetence unmatched anywhere else in Northern Europe. The highway code, along with the plethora of road-signs, cameras, regulations and admonishments we are bombarded with result in nothing but confusion, fear and paralysis. My aim is to boil the essentials of motoring etiquette to a small number of simple principles. |
No manoeuvre should cause any other road user to deviate from their course, be that by needing to change speed or direction.
i) Good manners help road-users keep calm and unagressive, minimising stress.
ii) Causing a change in speed or direction raises the prospect of causing an accident, opening you to prosecution for driving without due care and attention.
iii) There is often a domino effect – if you cause one road-user to deviate, that in turn causes others to do the same. Hence the ripple effect of braking vehicles on a busy motorway for example.
i) Entering and negotiating a roundabout. Keep to your lane unless the lane you are moving into is clear. Do not ’straighten’ roundabouts out when there is other traffic around you.
ii) Changing lanes on a dual carriageway or motorway. Check that there is not a faster moving vehicle approaching from behind in the lane you plan to move to. If necessary, speed up so you can pull out, overtake and pull back in before the approaching car is forced to slow down.
iii) Overtaking on a single carriageway. Do I need to explain this?
Anticipation, smoothness, spatial awareness, vehicle familiarity.
More anon…
AJ
My earlier communiqués may have alluded to my less than glittering mood today.
It has been one of those days where, due to lots of stupid crap going wrong, I’ve temporarily lost the will to live. It’s an inescapable response.
What makes me feel even worse is that I realise that other people have had real tragedy to cope with today. Whereas my boiled egg was overcooked (not literally, you mongs).
A little story that sums up my day:
Ordered new sat-nav on the intermong. Arrived today while I was out. Card left. Courier is 12 miles away – a location that is typically a 20 minute drive away. Except I had to work my way though one of those wonderful sets of road-works.
The courier office closes at 7pm, so I hit the road at 6:10pm.
At 6:25pm, I am 2.2 miles from my destination when I hit a queue of traffic.
At 7pm when the couriers close, I am 1.8 miles from my destination.
At 7.15pm I reach the first point, 1.6 miles from my destination, where I could turn round and head home.
On way home, am stuck behind a bunch of timewasters doing 35 in a 60, on a road with no overtaking opportunities.
I turn off to cut across country, following my nose since I am sans sat-nav.
I hack away in the general direction I need to go. After 7 miles, I re-emerge on the road I turned off earlier, 400yds further down.
Epic fucking fail.
AJ
I’m much obliged to the Quiet Man for bringing this to my attention:
Drivers will fall victim to reforms which will see people who are acquitted by the courts expected to foot the majority of their own defence costs. It is thought some innocent motorists will plead guilty to reduce their costs.
Currently, somebody who is cleared of a motoring offence can expect to be reimbursed most, if not all, of the money they spend clearing their name.
…
Couldn’t possibly affect me or thee, could it?…
According to the Ministry of Justice’s own statistics, 24 per cent of 1.4 million motorists prosecuted in the courts in 2007 were cleared. It meant that nearly 380,000 motorists recouped about 80 per cent of their costs.
Under the new arrangements, which come into force next month, acquitted defendants will only get a fraction of their money back.
The reimbursement of lawyers’ fees is being limited to the legal aid rate of £60 an hour – around a quarter of the what is normally charged.
Defending a speeding case can cost at least £2,000, so under the new system an acquitted driver would be reimbursed just £600.
Legal fees for a drink-driving case can run between £5,000 and £10,000, and the reforms will mean that a driver walking free from court could have to pay as much as £7,000 from their own pocket.
Once again the party of the working man makes justice accessible only to the wealthy. Fucking cunts.
And lets not forget that a lot of motoring prosecutions are the result of police targets and indiscriminate automatic devices, where previously, a traffic copper would have just ‘had a word’. The fines we are faced with are nothing more than extorted taxation, which means that the targets are on a non-stop escalator.
Think the Tories will fix this? Bollocks they will. They were the cunts who introduced speed cameras in the first place.
AJ
UPDATE: Sign the Downing Street Petition here.
People who slow down to go past an average speed camera, then speed up again, only to slow down at the next one.
A-V-E-R-A-G-E SPEED BETWEEN THE CAMERAS.
Stupid cunts.
AJ
Fucking Glorious
H/T Obo
Sadly, if you look closely at the start of the clip, it’s obviously in Holland. UK don’t have the stones.
AJ
if you drive, you don’t need me to tell you what’s wrong with this.
If you don’t drive, think of all the extra taxes you’ll be paying for road maintenance as the frequency with which motorways have to be repaired is doubled overnight. Oh yes – you will pay, because there’s no hypothecation of tax revenues in the UK, so everything comes out of general taxation.
AJ
The deal is done and this time next week, there’ll be a fucking quick Merc on my driveway.
Compared to my BMW, it’s 300kg lighter and has 25% more power.
And now a tip: It’s shod with P Zeros. Buy Pirelli shares. And it sups Optimax. Buy Royal Dutch Shell shares.
AJ
Steve Shark has run a post that touches upon the effectiveness and consequences of cycle-helmets for children, and the merits or otherwise of making their use compulsory. Dick Puddlecote ably assists in the comments section.
This is a subject I did quite a bit of thinking and reading back in my days of motoring activism. The basis of my thinking is Risk Compensation Theory, as written about by John Adams in ‘Risk’.
Risk compensation theory works like this:
Road safety would be massively improved if, in the centre of every steering wheel, were a big barbed spike. Drivers would proceed with unprecedented caution, because the smallest bump would lead to impalement.
With me so far? Good.
Therefore, when drivers are provided with additional safety kit to protect them in the event of a crash, they will drive less carefully than in the above scenario.
Seat belts, airbags, ABS and traction control all provide drivers with a (somewhat false) sense of safety, which reduces the driver’s natural aversion to risk, yes? Interception with the barbed spike – big risk. Run into another car with my airbags and crumple zones – small risk.
According to the associated theory of Risk Homeostasis, the individual has a nominal level of risk they are innately prepared to accept. This is an equilibrium. So if you take some risk out of the equation by making the car safer, the driver will add risk in their driving, until their personal risk equilibrium as been restored.
Don’t believe me? Explain why, then, when seat belts became compulsory in the UK, the reduction in ‘in-car’ casualties was mitigated almost precisely by an increase in out-of-car casualties. I.e. cyclists & pedestrians.
And explain why it has been shown that drivers take more care when passing a cyclist who isn’t wearing a helmet.
And explain why removal of road signs, traffic lights and central white lines on roads leads to a reduction in casualties. This one is tangential, because the answer, simply is that if you treat people like drones, they’ll end up behaving like drones. If you expect them to think for themselves and interact co-operatively with their fellow road-users instead of relying on traffic lights etc.
The reason control-freak lefties hate people, is that people simply don’t conform to the their broken and dogmatic ideological formula for how people should be.
AJ
No… not the Thai variety.
The ‘metro’ men. Under thirty, spend more time on hair and clothes than most women do. Usually wear the sunglasses Beckham was last seen in.
In day-to-day life, they don’t bother me – they’re practically invisible, and impossible to take seriously in a commercial discussion.
But on the motorways, if you’re looking for a collective who are more mirror-blind, ignorant, inconsiderate and dithering than old people and women put together, it is this lot.
Usually in a girls’ car, by which I mean a Golf or anything smaller. A car that was obviously chosen for looks (and possibly status) but has no merits that the enthusiastic motorist might identify. Which is exactly the sort of car many women choose for themselves. Examples include Clio, Mégane (not scenic), Golf, TT, Celica, A3, MX5, or anything super-mini sized – MINI, 207, 107, C2, Fiesta.
It’s a shame their rear view mirrors are only for touching up their foundation, rather than noticing that there’s a cunt like me in a BMW, right fucking behind him, in the outside lane, he’s doing 65 and there’s nothing ahead of him for 2 miles.
This is a generation of men who have grown up with no concept of manhood. At least we can smile in the knowledge that when they’re snared by a woman who wants babies, they’ll be chopping their ‘metromobile’ in and going straight to a people carrier. Do not pass sports-cars, do not collect 200 blow-jobs.
Suckers.
AJ
I do wish the cock-sucking fourth estate would stop framing these bastard initiatives in a way that makes them seem like a good thing.
Uninsured drivers face tighter laws and loss of car
Plans to tighten the law on driving without insurance, making it an offence to be the registered keeper of an uninsured vehicle regardless of whether it is being used, are expected to be confirmed by transport ministers today.
Failure to comply could result in a £1,000 fine and the seizure of the car.
Currently it is only an offence to drive without insurance, but under a scheme announced in January drivers must ensure that their cars are covered at all times unless they are unused and kept off the road, in which case they must register them as such to the DVLA.
Motoring organisations have welcomed the move against uninsured drivers, but said they feared that law-abiding motorists could be penalised for innocent mistakes, such as allowing their insurance to lapse while they are on holiday.
Lovely straw man from the ‘motoring organisations’ there.
The problem with this proposal is as follows: Enthusiasts who keep cars in their garage for restoration, be it as the project, or as a donor vehicle, will be affected by this regulation.
You may have enough land or garage space that when your car gives up the ghost, you leave it in the corner of the yard, or as in the case of people round here, across paddock entrances, as a barrier to stop pikeys moving into your field.
So yes, you’ll still be able to do all these things, but for each car, you’ll have to fill in and send off a declaration each year. And if you forget, then it’s a grand for the fine, and what if the car they want to crush is a 1928 Bentley that you’ve been restoring for the last 10 years since your wife passed away?
It couldn’t happen, could it? You bet your bollocks it could.
And this isn’t the first case of us being required, by Labour, to write to them annually to tell them that nothing has changed.
In each one of these cases, I would already have been in non-compliance with the law, had I used the car on the road without tax and insurance, bought a TV or moved someone in without telling the council.
There were already sanctions in place, should I be found in non-compliance with these laws.
What the fuck were all these new laws for? Why do I have to write to a whole bunch of time-wasting cunts to inform them that nothing has changed since this time last year?
It’s about control and raising money to pay for more jobs for the paper-pushing-mong fraternity.
I’m fucking sick to death of it.
AJ
Just back from another 475 mile round trip to see one of my lovely customers. Another 7 hours in the car, another dozen polarguins on the barbecue.
Another 2 fucking hours in cunting roadworks.
So I’d like to say something insightful about this post from DK. But I can’t be fucking bothered.
Suffice it to say, I agree with Steve Shark, who’s link sent me to DK’s article. That is not to tip the hat as such, now Steve is a member of a cock-munching clique (I wonder if he knows what the initiation ritual involves. A re-enactment of the image Obo linked to here is an understatement.)
Fuck the north.
AJ
if you drive, your bank holiday is bound to be hindered by a bunch of these cunts.
Yes – caravans. And this one is one of the ‘boss creatures’ of the caravanning world. One is able to make this determination, because this particular shed is being pulled by….
.. yes… a VOLVO! DIE CUNT.
I have no idea why these people feel compelled to drag a fibre-glass khazi round the sodding country, getting in everyone’s fucking way.
But that is quite simply all they do.
To this day, the funniest episode ever of Top Gear is the caravanning holiday.
End.
AJ
Is this… and anyone else who drives one of these ludicrous pieces of shite.
I give you the Toyota Prius.
Even über-babe Mary-Louise Parker couldn’t make one of these seem hot, when it was ‘product placed’ in Weeds.
Smug, self-righteous, dawdling, pious, sanctimonious and, most importantly, quite quite wrong.
AJ
In solidarity with the absent, but not missed, Obo.
Cunt of the day:
Sorry Longrider – you bought a Spazwagon, mate. Don’t try and tell me a Saab estate won’t do what your SW does in terms of load carrying. :o)
AJ
