1752: Death to Shitty Roads

I may comically exaggerate my dislike of certain things at times, but for the most part these are nothing but exaggerations for (possible) comedic effect. There are very few things in this life that I genuinely hate.

But the motorway that runs along the south coast, connecting, among other places, the town where I live (Southampton) and the town where I work (Havant, just beyond Portsmouth), is one of those things I do hate. Oh, M27, how I loathe and detest you so. How I wish you weren’t so awful. How I wish I wasn’t obliged to drive on you every day since, despite your shittiness, you are the most efficient means for me to get from my home to my work.

The M27 isn’t an especially poorly maintained road or anything — although the patch around Southampton has a somewhat bumpy surface that serves as a convenient “you’re nearly home!” landmark for my return journey — but it clearly isn’t suitable for its purpose. It’s heavily used by commuters every morning and evening rush hour, and it clogs up pretty much every day for well over an hour in either direction. You can set your watch by the traffic reports on local radio saying day after day that the M27 is busy between Fareham and Southampton Airport, since it is literally every single (working) day.

It’s one of those roads that clogs up for seemingly no reason. “QUEUE AHEAD,” the overhead signs will warn, offering a somewhat optimistic recommended speed of first 60mph and then 40mph (which can be translated to 40 and 15-20 in real terms respectively) as the sea of brake lights illuminates ahead and the flow of traffic slows to a crawl. Everyone will proceed like this for a while, and then just as suddenly as it started, it will clear up and start moving again.

There is one part of this dreadful road where it’s possible to see how jams form; I think I mentioned it a few days ago, but while I’m complaining it bears mentioning again. For the most part, the M27 is a typical three-lane motorway in either direction, but for one single solitary mile just beyond Portsmouth, there’s a fourth lane added on the “fast” side, dubbed a “climbing lane”. This is inevitably used by BMW drivers to pull out aggressively, charge past everyone else and then get stuck when, just under a mile later, the lane disappears again, merging back into what was before (and immediately afterwards is again) the “fast” lane. Jams form as those screaming up the climbing lane shove back in to the main flow of traffic, with other cars moving aside in an attempt to get out of the way of these aggressive drivers. Everyone ends up squished against one another and a jam forms; it’s no coincidence that immediately after the end of the climbing lane, the flow of traffic gets back to normal.

The reason I’m whingeing about the M27 this evening is because it decided to be particularly annoying for my journey home. I was tired, I was hungry and I just wanted to get home and relax. But the M27 had other ideas, first throwing a broken-down lorry in the middle lane in the path of everyone, followed by not one, not two, not three but four separate accidents in the space of about five miles. The weather wasn’t even particularly bad; there were just four separate but nearby incidents of disastrous driving; one car with all its windows smashed in the central reservation; another that had obviously skidded off where the motorway and a slip road parted ways at a junction; another where one car had seemingly hit the back of another so hard that the front of the former was practically fused with the latter; and another that I didn’t see just ahead of where I pulled off to actually get home, gnashing my teeth by this point.

I haven’t yet figured out the optimum time to do the commute to and from work. I’m beginning to think it might actually be in the interests of my own sanity to get up ridiculously early and drive in before the rest of the horde hits the roads; that way, I’ll get to come home before the rest of the horde hits the roads on the way back. I’m tempted to try that tomorrow, but it does involve getting up horrendously early, something which I struggle with at the best of times; perhaps it will be worth it, though. We’ll see!

#oneaday Day 72: Jam on Toast

The tail-lights of the cars in front of you brighten as they apply the brakes. Your collective speed drops. There seem to be an awful lot more cars around than there were a moment ago, and a few trucks, too. Your heart sinks.

Yes, you’re entering a traffic jam.

At this point, you will do one (or more) of several things. You may suddenly wonder if you have enough music to cover the entire period this eventuality may cover. You may consider phoning someone at your destination to let them know you’re likely to be late. You may decide that no, this jam couldn’t possibly last for very long because it appeared out of nowhere, so there’s no need to phone ahead, because you left the house with plenty of time to spare just in case this happened. You may emit a string of incredibly loud and offensive swearwords—this is considerably more likely if you’re in the car by yourself and/or are an extrovert/sufferer of Tourette’s.

Then you see the electronic signs warning you of the “recommended” speeds (or, if you’re on the M25, the actual variable speed limit which you can be pulled over and/or caught on speed camera for.) You see it and you figure that hey, 40 mph may not be quick, but at least it’s moving, right?

Wrong. What they don’t tell you is that the “recommended” speeds are actually a cunningly disguised secret code. Fortunately, I have cracked it.

20mph – You ain’t going anywhere for at least an hour and probably more like three hours, plus.
40mph – You will move, but very slowly. You will be lucky to break 20mph.
60mph – You will move at a relatively comfortable speed but will be lucky to break 40mph and will often have to brake suddenly for no apparent reason.
End of speed limit – Theoretically, you are allowed to drive at full speed now, but the volume of traffic coming out of the jam means that this will be very difficult to achieve for at least another half an hour.

People have developed various coping mechanisms in order to deal with the stress and frustration of traffic jams. You could shout and swear some more. You could turn your music up. If you’re a Mercedes driver, you could weave in and out of lanes in an attempt to get as far forward as possible. And if you’re an asshole, you could use the hard shoulder and/or filter lanes for junctions to “jump the queue” and get as far forward as possible by barging in. But if you do this, you deserve to be scooped up by a gigantic super-powerful electromagnet (which picks your car up, obviously, not you, unless you’re a robot) and fed to an ant-eater which has been inflated to unnatural proportions via the ethically questionable misuse of SCIENCE! and which has developed a taste for cars—so much so that the giant form of the ant-eater has in fact been re-dubbed the car-eater.

So yeah. Don’t do that. Sit and wait patiently. Because ultimately, no amount of screaming, shouting, swearing, lane-weaving or driving like a dick is going to affect the fact that there are hundreds of cars stuck in place, just like you. And until the day when all cars have a button that allows them to take off and fly away like the DeLorean in Back to the Future (when, if you think about it, we won’t really need roads at all any more) there’s nothing you can do about it.

So sit. Wait. Suffer with the rest of us.

#oneaday, Day 284: M25? More Like… Hell… 25?

There are many famous roads in the world. The Champs Elysees in Paris (or however you spell it… I have no idea where the accents go and also have no idea how to type accents on my netbook). That really dangerous road they drove along in Top Gear. Yungas Road. I knew that and totally didn’t Google it.

But there’s one road you won’t find in the tourist guides, but it’s a well-known road to British motorists. It’s a name which strikes fear into the heart of motorists from Land’s End to John O’Groats.

It is the M25, the Devil’s Road, also known as the London Orbital. For the uninitiated (or American) amongst you, this is a motorway (freeway) which runs around the perimeter of London (capital of England) and goes round and round and round and round. In theory, this sounds like fun. Who doesn’t like driving laps around things?

Unfortunately, the M25 is the single most frustrating road in all of Britain to drive on, largely due to the fact that despite it being (sometimes) one of the widest roads in Britain it is also one of the fullest. Particularly if they’re digging it up. Which they always are.

Couple this with the inexplicable “variable speed limit” section (“You must drive at 60! Now 50! Now 40! Now 60 again! Now 70! Go wild! Oh! 50! Got you! SPEED CAMERA.”) and you have a road which is infuriating, frustrating and capable of producing some of the most creative expletives on the planet.

Particularly if you drive on it at rush hour, as I did tonight. And Rush Hour on the M25 lasts for approximately six hundred years and features a time distortion allowing six hundred years to take place in the space of a single day. You could read War and Peace in the time it takes you to get from Heathrow Airport to Staines at rush hour.

So fuck the M25. Fuck it right in its stupid ass (somewhere around the Dartford Tunnel) and find another route. Seriously. If you need to go from somewhere north of London to somewhere that is in a different compass direction from London, then for God’s sake avoid the hell out of London. Because for all its good points, London and its surrounding suburbs hate cars. HATE them. They want them to die. And they think that everyone who drives a car should die too, or at least pay considerable amounts of money for the privilege of driving a car.

Which is probably for the best, given that without the various tolls and “congestion charges” in place, London would be more backed-up than an old, constipated man’s bowels. I mean, more than it is already.

This has been a Public Service Announcement on behalf of the Highways Agency, who also think you should fuck the M25 in its stupid ass, which is why they keep smacking it with hammers and diggers. In, you know, an attempt to, like, get at its ass. Or something.

I don’t know. A 2.5 hour journey took me nearly 6 hours tonight. So my brain is addled. I think it’s time to drink Cherry Coke and scrounge a satay chicken skewer. Good night!

One A Day, Day 16: Set a Better Example

I’ve ranted about kids’ behaviour before, and probably will do so again, especially as it’s coming up to the half-term holidays and behaviour takes an inevitable hit at those times as excitement builds. Of course, at this school, behaviour is on the decline anyway, so that’s small consolation.

But what about the rest of us? How are we behaving? Well, when you think about it, there are a lot of parallels between the poor behaviour of children and the way adults act around each other. And it’s not a good thing in many cases.

Look at something as simple as lining up – an activity which my class (and most of the others in the school) seem to have tremendous difficulty with. It should be a case of the teacher saying “line up” and then the kids… well, lining up. It’s not, as they say, rocket science. However, watch these kids attempting to do this simple activity and you’ll see pushing, shoving, kids changing places, pushing in, shoving people around and generally not doing the whole “respectful” thing.

Now think back to the last time you drove on a motorway. One of several things probably happened – firstly, you may well have been driving along in the fast lane, overtaking cars that were going slower than you and possibly (naughty naughty) breaking the speed limit of 70mph a little bit yourself. The longer you stay in the fast lane, the closer the probability of someone driving either a BMW, a Mercedes, an Audi or a 4×4 behemoth coming up behind you at twice the speed you’re doing, flashing their lights and getting pissy if you don’t move, possibly weaving unsafely around the other slower cars in the other lanes just to get past you. There are, in many cases, kids in the back of these cars.

Secondly, if you’ve been stuck in a traffic jam recently (and thanks to whateverthefuck Winchester’s town planners have done to the route to the motorway, I get stuck in one every bastard day) you’ll inevitably see at least five douchebags changing lanes every three second in an attempt to get to the “front” (and I use the term loosely, since I don’t believe there ever is a “front” to a traffic jam on a motorway) and irritate everyone else. Again, there are, in many cases, kids in the back of these cars.

Pushing. Shoving. Being aggressive. See the parallels?

Then there’s violence. Kids thump each other all the time. But why? It could be violent video games (which they shouldn’t be playing). It could be violent TV (which they shouldn’t be watching). Or it could be violent parents or older siblings setting that example.

The list goes on. Alcohol abuse. Drug abuse. Treating people as sex objects rather than, you know, people. I could go on. But I won’t. At least not right now.

My point, then, is this:

Grown-ups. Children are watching, so grow the fuck up.

The best teacher in the world isn’t going to change a child’s behaviour if there isn’t the backup from the parental side of things. And I know there are parents out there who do set good examples, take an interest in their children and make an effort not to turn them into douchebags. But there are just as many – and it’s a growing number – who don’t give a toss, or worse, think it’s somehow funny or endearing that their children act like thugs.

In unrelated news, Mass Effect 2 is frickin’ amazing.