What a F**king day..!

[slice]

So I'm off to see my Mum down in Portsmouth, about 150 odd miles so takes me about 2+ hours to get there from home, I leave the house and not more than 1/2 a mile from home this bloody woman who is following her friend home from dropping off the kids at school apparently and does not want to loose her turns right across in front of me, big black line from the rear wheel down the road and I'm jammed inside the front wheel arch, this while she explains the story of how we arrived at this moment. I am still trying to hold the bike upright while she goes on about this, if you didn't laugh you would not credit it..! NO "sorry mate my fault" just an explanation of how I have made her loose sight of her "NEW" friend.

I'm on my way home and I arrive at a set of traffic lights to find a broken down truck blocking the outside lane, + police car helping to direct traffic from the cake shop on the corner? I stay in the right outer lane and squeeze past the truck and the traffic on the near side which has all had to pull over to the left lane to get by, I leave the lights and find a Merc trying to use me an ornament on his bonnet cos apparently I didn't have any right to use "HIS" side of the road when he had to pull over like everyone else, really you couldn't make this shit up could you?

I'm now on the A34 just passed Newbury and on the home stretch to the M4 when this young woman who I am overtaking just pulls over into my lane, I'm on the edge of the barriers with the horn blaring plus shouting where the fuck do you think I'm supposed to go when she just keeps going I have nowhere to go car behind car in front and this tit trying to squeeze muggings here into a crash barrier. Apparently I'm supposed to vanish into thin air when she decides it's ok to merge with other traffic. Is it just me or are people just getting worse? I really don't remember when it was as bad as this and it's always the bikers fault..!

Fuck it... Had my moan, feel better now..!

[Tommy xs]

Cheer up mate at least you’re still in one peice  what doesn’t kill yer makes you stronger 

[blackhat250]

Standard of driving is woefull,,,,,see it every day,  they dont look at junctions,   txting   , &  fone glued to thier ears,,,,

[Cynic]

yep, getting worse over the last 5 years especially. In parts of Birmingham now they may as well switch off the traffic lights. People either que right through them or ignore them entirely.

The only thing that annoys me more is how fucking bright the car headlights are getting, I live out in the stix and have already had a couple of close runs where some twat with a new car with the mega bright lights has not seen me coming and run the centre line. Makes every corner entertaining.

[bippo]

Oh dear, Slice - glad you made it back in one piece.

I had some guy yesterday overtaking two lorries on a bend with solid white lines down the middle. It was a 50 mph single carriageway and all I can say is I’m glad I was on my bike and not in the car. He was just being impatient and hadn’t read the road. I saw him momentarily panic when he saw me round the bend but thankfully he was in a fast car and decided to continue flooring it to complete his move. Had I of been a car he wouldn’t have fitted through the gap.

[neversaydie]

Got to agree. Driving standards today are shocking, complete loss of control by the authorities, test unfit for purpose, motor cars too big and powerful, too many distractions, no-one prepared to wait or give way. Drivers compelte ignore traffic lights. Ive noted over ecent months that motorists at junction 25 on the M1 (suppose its the same everywhere) dont watch the lights that are in front of them, they are watching the next set around the island, when they swithch to amber they move off before their lights turn to amber. It happens at all of the slips, result is there is hardly ever a gap to pull into.

[drewpy]

geez slice, you don't half pick 'em.

 

Still you're here to tell us and learn (ish)

I once had a guy on his phone with a family in the car on the slip road to the motorway, had to bang on his window or I was going to get hit.

never saw what he said too busy trying to stay alive and unharmed.

 

Hate motorways, but they have their uses if you need to get somewhere.

[slice]

Thank you all for your kind words and support, was feeling really hard done by when I got home, every bugger out there was after me..!

What's the old saying? "It's not that your paranoid but are you paranoid enough".

[DutchFJ1200]

Slice, good to hear you managed to stay in one piece mate. I hope the bike ok also? So you planted the front wheel in her wheel arch, that must have made a bit of a mess ?

Agree what has been said above about driving standards so won't bang on about that but it is truly diabolical and getting worse. 

I'm not a passive driver, by far, and make myself as big as I can on the road - especially dual carriage ways ..... blooming outside lane hoggers.  Hence always high beam and my crash bar LED's which are pointed up straight ahead and not down.  If I do engage one of those bar stewards I always make sure I have an escape route. The speed/grunt of the tank helps too.

 

[Oldfjman]

Glad you're OK Slice. What everyone says about driving standards really resonates with me. In my youth, I spent time working on speed limits, designing roads and white line schemes.

In the '70's and '80's, we used "science" to determine appropriate speed limits and design white line schemes which prevented the main causes of accidents/incidents........Driver Frustration and Vehicle-Vehicle, or Vehicle-Pedestrian conflicts.

Human beings come with an inbuilt perception of risk (self preservation) and behave accordingly. Speed limits and road element design used to take all of that into account so that traffic flowed freely, but safely and drivers didn't get frustrated into making dangerous overtakes.

However, the ignorant Safety-Crats who have successfully created the "Speed Kills" myth, have created a society where the only "known" bad driving behaviour is to exceed the speed limit. Not using mirrors properly, hogging lanes, using mobiles, driving so slowly that you have 20 cars queueing up behind you are no longer considered unacceptable - there are virtually no traffic Police out on the roads dealing with these drivers, only officers in camera vans sat at the side of a dual carriageway targeting people driving at over 70mph - hence the only thing most people see as "bad driving" is Speeding.

in times gone by, when rural roads had 60mph limits, traffic flowed freely and overtakes were minimal because drivers were content that their speed was "appropriate" to the conditions/risk and frustration was limited (this being approximately the 85 percentile speed for humans driving in those conditions with their risk perception). Imposing a blanket 50mph limit to make things "safer" (because only speed kills), now frustrates 85% of the driver population because they feel they are going too slowly for the conditions and the risk, prompting dangerous overtakes - it human nature to get frustrated when we can't do things within our "safe zone".

Conversely, with the increased population and vehicle density in urban areas, speed limits, except near the odd school, have been left at 30mph or 40mph - which in many cases is too fast - and I now experience plenty of drivers who drive at less than 30mph in town centres, because they see the real risk in travelling at 30mph with lots of pedestrians in close proximity to their lane. In a pedestrian-vehicle collision, speed does indeed kill and dropping speed limits will definitely save lives - how about 20mph in every town/village centre where there are concentrations of pedestrian activity (I'd vote for that). 

In vehicle-vehicle collisions, the difference between a closing speed of 100mph and 120mph isn't going to cause a dramatic reduction in driver fatalities (driver will most likely die in either scenario) and having a car hit a pedestrian at 50mph will be just as fatal as one doing 60mph (or more).

Somehow, we need to get away from the message that the only way to drive safely is to drive slowly and to get back to Policing our roads properly and teaching and managing the driver population to drive properly.

in almost every situation we, as bike riders encounter, it's Bad Driving that causes accidents  - that's what our Police and Government should be focussed on.

Ironically, travelling back from Edinburgh on the A1 recently, we saw a big LED traffic sign with the warning message "Frustration Causes Accidents", showing that someone still understands the science..............but then shortly after, there was a speed camera at the side of the road, on a straight, wide, clear section of dual carriageway !!!!!!

 

Edited October 6, 2018 by Oldfjman