Driving standards

[Reorte]

13 hours ago, ejstubbs said:

To return briefly to the subject of motorways and the presence or otherwise of hard shoulders: up until the mid-1970s the standards for motorways in Scotland did not require hard shoulders.

 

Being pedantic here, but strictly speaking no motorways have ever required hard shoulders - all a road needs to be a motorway is the legal definition that it's a motorway, but you'll have a very hard time justifying building a new one without them so any proposal to do so wouldn't get very far.

[Reorte]

1 hour ago, ejstubbs said:

On another forum, when this kind of behaviour was complained about, someone did actually respond saying that they did it because it meant that they didn't have to turn their steering wheel so far.  This sort of attitude, and other sheer laziness such as people who can't be bothered to use their indicators, really annoys me.

 

Yes, but that's people for you. Life seems to be full of things nowadays that people have leapt on because apparently they're so much more convenient, when I found the supposed inconvenience so trivial as to not be worth mentioning.

[caradoc]

15 hours ago, bimble said:

In non-motorway complaining, I have been annoyed today by people turning right into a side road, but only half pulling into the lane provided for turning right, and therefore blocking the main carriageway until they are able to cross the oncoming traffic

 

That annoys me too ! IMHO some drivers simply have no awareness of any other vehicle on the road except theirs, and do not know, or care, that their poor driving is affecting others.

 

1 hour ago, ejstubbs said:

The other very poor habit when turning right in to side roads is egregiously cutting the corner.  Our street is a bit of a rat run and at a junction just down the hill from us I've seen vehicles enter the side road wholly to the right of the centre line junction marking.  It's not quite so bad these days since the area became a 20mph limit - seeing folks abusing the junction this way at 30mph+, when they couldn't possibly have had time to observe traffic approaching on the side road was quite scary - but it still happens.

 

 

At the exit from my estate, 95% of traffic turns left, so when turning right to enter many drivers cut the corner; If anyone leaving happened to be turning right there would be a head-on collision.

 

[Reorte]

9 minutes ago, caradoc said:

 

That annoys me too ! IMHO some drivers simply have no awareness of any other vehicle on the road except theirs, and do not know, or care, that their poor driving is affecting others.

 

 

At the exit from my estate, 95% of traffic turns left, so when turning right to enter many drivers cut the corner; If anyone leaving happened to be turning right there would be a head-on collision.

 

 

I encounter people just expecting what normally happens fairly often. I join the A6 at a no right turn junction (which some people ignore and turn right anyway). That's fine even though I'm turning right because it's only a couple of hundred yards to a a roundabout, but it's fairly common for people to pull out of the roundabout right in front of you because they're not expecting cars to come right around it.

[TheQ]

On my road to and from work a couple of years ago they tarmacked a section of the verge which people used to pass cars waiting to turn right. Regularly now I find people  stop further left stopping people using the passing point.

The classic being as I was about to pass the car in front had room to turn right , it turned left first as though it was towing an artic trailer causing me to have to slam on the brakes to avoid him..

[stewartingram]

16 hours ago, PhilJ W said:

I had one like that this afternoon who compounded it by signaling the driver waiting to pull out of the turning to go first. 

Probably so that he could cut across the corner, not needing to turn the wheel too much

[jcm@gwr]

17 hours ago, PhilJ W said:

I had one like that this afternoon who compounded it by signaling the driver waiting to pull out of the turning to go first. 

 

I tend to do this when pulling into my own road, but it is slightly different situation,

because there is not a central area to wait while indicating right and, due to the way

the cars are parked in the road I'm turning into (designated bays), there is only room

for one or two cars.

So if you turned in, you could be stuck waiting for a while,for the queue of cars trying

to come out of the road. which might also cause a problem on the 'main' road as others

wait to turn right as well, therefore there are good reasons to wait and let someone turn

right out of a turning that you are turning into. Mainly it can help the overall traffic flow

in the local area, it is polite and a nice thing to do, but also, it might be someone I know!

[Guest]

7 hours ago, Reorte said:

 

Being pedantic here, but strictly speaking no motorways have ever required hard shoulders - all a road needs to be a motorway is the legal definition that it's a motorway, but you'll have a very hard time justifying building a new one without them so any proposal to do so wouldn't get very far.

 

Thinking of the A58(M) through Leeds. No hard shoulder and a 30mph limit. Not sure of the point of it being called a motorway. Maybe they think blue signs are nice.

[PhilJ W]

20 minutes ago, jcm@gwr said:

 

I tend to do this when pulling into my own road, but it is slightly different situation,

because there is not a central area to wait while indicating right and, due to the way

the cars are parked in the road I'm turning into (designated bays), there is only room

for one or two cars.

So if you turned in, you could be stuck waiting for a while,for the queue of cars trying

to come out of the road. which might also cause a problem on the 'main' road as others

wait to turn right as well, therefore there are good reasons to wait and let someone turn

right out of a turning that you are turning into. Mainly it can help the overall traffic flow

in the local area, it is polite and a nice thing to do, but also, it might be someone I know!

I sometimes do the same when turning into my road and for the same reason*. Fortunately the road is wide enough for a middle lane with cross hatching demarked with broken white lines.  *Except that despite the yellow lines cars are usually parked right up to the corner leaving only a one cars width on a blind bend.

[Reorte]

15 minutes ago, 30801 said:

 

Thinking of the A58(M) through Leeds. No hard shoulder and a 30mph limit. Not sure of the point of it being called a motorway. Maybe they think blue signs are nice.

 

I'm not familiar with it, but could be because for whatever reason it was thought desirable to keep non-motorway traffic off it. It also might help for traffic planners, I'm sure I've heard somewhere that having a line blue on a map has quite a strong effect for encouraging traffic to go that way rather than finding its way around every minor road (which, depending on what's in the area, might mean a much lower chance of things like lorries getting stuck under bridges). Just looking at the map though it does look a bit odd, considering the number of non-motorway dual carriageways in the area.

 

Having a bit of a look - https://www.roads.org.uk/motorway/a64m/ (covers both the A58(M) and A64(M)) - it seems that it's a bit of a relic of the concept of the urban motorway, part of something larger planned that never happened.

[Coldgunner]

Someone took exception to me today, think she thought I'd cut her up (pretty sure I didn't) so decided to tailgate me, silly person. I'm getting too worked up on this and have actually taken down all my uploaded dash cam footage, I need to take it easy for my own health.

 

Trains are the best.

Edited January 29, 2020 by Coldgunner

[ianwales]

10 hours ago, ejstubbs said:

The other very poor habit when turning right in to side roads is egregiously cutting the corner.  Our street is a bit of a rat run and at a junction just down the hill from us I've seen vehicles enter the side road wholly to the right of the centre line junction marking. 

 

 

Reminds me of having a chat with the instructor teaching my son to drive and he told me of my son badly cutting the corner into a side street so, trying to point out his error, he pulled him in to the side of the road and asked him " what if a pedestrian had stepped off the pavement and you had knocked him/her down when cutting the corner whose fault would it have been?"  Tom's reply was " the pedestrian for stepping off the pavement",  The instructor said " OK so if you(Tom) had been walking down the street and been knocked over by the car cutting the corner, whose fault would it have been?"  Tom replied "The Car driver for cutting the corner!" Nothing was ever Tom's fault. He has had his comeuppance though, he passed his test on a Monday and wrote his car off on the Tuesday night and hasn't driven since so that is one less idiot on the road.

 

Ian

[Gwiwer]

A quick re-visit to this topic to record a fine example of driving standards - or the lack of them.  

 

I was aboard a bus today travelling from Kingston to Richmond and was approaching Petersham.  As it was school time the bus was extremely full with (so far as I could tell from my position) the lower deck rammed from front to back and the stairs and upper deck aisle unlawfully used as additional standing space.  No doubt running behind time our driver was clearly intent on catching up what he could and had the advantage of being fully loaded and therefore by-passing most stops.  

 

The road is not the widest and indeed was one of the last in London where 7' 6" wide buses were mandatory due to the restricted width.  There is also a nasty right-angle blind bend.  A number of vehicles was parked at intervals on either side of the road but not opposite each other and therefore allowing two cars to pass carefully in opposite directions.  But not a double-decker bus.  Approaching that nasty bend Plod was encountered driving at speed in the other direction and with lights and sirens on.  Cars pulled in as best they could.  

 

And our bus driver?  Took full advantage of the cars pulling in and accelerated along the centre line of the road directly into the path of the approaching police car.      Headlights blazed.  The siren tone changed.  We had nowhere to go but carry on past the parked and pulled-over cars.  An extremely annoyed police officer gesticulated from his driving window as he made an emergency stop to avoid clipping the bus in passing.  

 

With ANPR and everything else these days I would be reasonably sure that our bus driver will be asked to explain before too long.  As such I didn't bother to use the TfL feedback app on this occasion because a higher power had already made their feelings known.  

 

 

[rockershovel]

There are a number of short sections of road which don’t conform to motorway standards, but are rated as motorways because they form links between motorway sections and are not otherwise accessible. The roundabouts at the M5/M50 Junction, near Strensham services, or the M4/M32 junction near Bristol are a typical example. 

[Compound2632]

6 hours ago, jcm@gwr said:

 

I tend to do this when pulling into my own road, but it is slightly different situation,

because there is not a central area to wait while indicating right and, due to the way

the cars are parked in the road I'm turning into (designated bays), there is only room

for one or two cars.

So if you turned in, you could be stuck waiting for a while,for the queue of cars trying

to come out of the road. which might also cause a problem on the 'main' road as others

wait to turn right as well, therefore there are good reasons to wait and let someone turn

right out of a turning that you are turning into. Mainly it can help the overall traffic flow

in the local area, it is polite and a nice thing to do, but also, it might be someone I know!

 

That's very much the situation at the end of our road but the practice of stopping to let others coming out and turning right has been very sensibly formalised by making it a mini-roundabout. The principal hazard now is drivers on the main road choosing to fail to observe that it is a mini-roundabout and that there is traffic turning out of the side road that has priority.

[rockershovel]

13 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

 

That's very much the situation at the end of our road but the practice of stopping to let others coming out and turning right has been very sensibly formalised by making it a mini-roundabout. The principal hazard now is drivers on the main road choosing to fail to observe that it is a mini-roundabout and that there is traffic turning out of the side road that has priority.

 

I believe that’s why the French largely abandoned “priorite a droit”

[Joseph_Pestell]

39 minutes ago, rockershovel said:

 

I believe that’s why the French largely abandoned “priorite a droit”

 

They have abandoned priorite a droite out in the countryside (mostly) but not in towns and cities. Helps to keep speeds down.

[boxbrownie]

18 minutes ago, Joseph_Pestell said:

 

They have abandoned priorite a droite out in the countryside (mostly) but not in towns and cities. Helps to keep speeds down.

I used to love driving around the Arc de Triomphe when working in Paris......great fun 

Edited January 30, 2020 by boxbrownie

[MarkC]

21 hours ago, 30801 said:

 

Thinking of the A58(M) through Leeds. No hard shoulder and a 30mph limit. Not sure of the point of it being called a motorway. Maybe they think blue signs are nice.

The A167(M) through Newcastle has no hard shoulder either - but at least it's 50mph. When I was a cadet at South Shields College, back in 1979, a classmate got a 'tug' from the Traffic Police for going through there on his 'L' plated motorcycle. He got no sympathy for the fine or the points on his licence...

 

Mark

[JDW]

22 hours ago, jcm@gwr said:

 

I tend to do this when pulling into my own road, but it is slightly different situation,

because there is not a central area to wait while indicating right and, due to the way

the cars are parked in the road I'm turning into (designated bays), there is only room

for one or two cars.

So if you turned in, you could be stuck waiting for a while,for the queue of cars trying

to come out of the road. which might also cause a problem on the 'main' road as others

wait to turn right as well, therefore there are good reasons to wait and let someone turn

right out of a turning that you are turning into. Mainly it can help the overall traffic flow

in the local area, it is polite and a nice thing to do, but also, it might be someone I know!

Waaaaait a second, so what you're saying here is that you observe your surroundings and drive according to the prevailing conditions?  I think you need some retraining on modern driving techniques 

[hayfield]

The entrance to the road I live on has been reduced to one car's width, it is impossible for two cars to pass unless one goes up on to the pavement. 

If a car is waiting to leave the road any car wishing to turn into the road has to wait until the car has either moved on or reversed.

Quite often the car on the main road signals for the car wishing to exit to have priority, that said the car exiting must ensure its safe to do so. Thankfully the road is not that busy

[melmerby]

How's this for an arrogant gobshyte:

https://twitter.com/CMPG/status/1222257609685786630

[ianwales]

Saw an interesting one today, There is a roundabout near me where 2 main roads join which is approached over a bridge, it has a set of traffic lights beyond it when heading west so it can become quite congested at certain times of the day especially so when the schools are finishing, the road is an average street width with a pavement either side, so I am sitting in the queue waiting for the cars in front to move when I become aware of a vehicle on my left, someone behind had decided he or she no longer wished to wait and was driving down the pavement to jump the queue and push his/her way in on the roundabout!

 

Ian

[melmerby]

52 minutes ago, ianwales said:

Saw an interesting one today, There is a roundabout near me where 2 main roads join which is approached over a bridge, it has a set of traffic lights beyond it when heading west so it can become quite congested at certain times of the day especially so when the schools are finishing, the road is an average street width with a pavement either side, so I am sitting in the queue waiting for the cars in front to move when I become aware of a vehicle on my left, someone behind had decided he or she no longer wished to wait and was driving down the pavement to jump the queue and push his/her way in on the roundabout!

 

Ian

Had something similar some  years back in pretty snowy conditions

It was on an urban road with a wide grass verge and regular driveways up to houses

There was at least 6 inches of snow and roads were in poor condition.

Most were driving carefully and giving other vehicles plenty of room so progress was slow.

Then some impatient idiot in a Range Rover decided we weren't going fast enough, so he (or she?) took to the grass verge and started tanking it, bumping up and down as it went over the driveways, until it came to a sudden stop.

I guess there was something sticking up from the grass invisible under the snow and they had struck it. (maybe a tree stump or such?)

I laughed so much I nearly had an accident.

 

 

[kevinlms]

4 hours ago, ianwales said:

Saw an interesting one today, There is a roundabout near me where 2 main roads join which is approached over a bridge, it has a set of traffic lights beyond it when heading west so it can become quite congested at certain times of the day especially so when the schools are finishing, the road is an average street width with a pavement either side, so I am sitting in the queue waiting for the cars in front to move when I become aware of a vehicle on my left, someone behind had decided he or she no longer wished to wait and was driving down the pavement to jump the queue and push his/her way in on the roundabout!

 

Ian

So what, it suits their level of entitlement!