Today's rant is about driving standards on the roads.
I had to go down to Hertfordshire over the weekend to help one of my sons clear his house of stuff that my late daughter in law was going to do before they went to live in Japan. Due to the rail strikes and the fact that I might need to bring stuff back up here, I drove down. Going I went via the A1 and returning I chose the M1.
The weather was atrocious on the Saturday which made it a really unpleasant experience especially when overtaking HGVs and it seemed as though no road maintenance had been done for years with potholes nearly all the way down. the worst part of the trip was joining the A1 from the M62 where they were supposedly doing some roadworks on the A1 although for the 2 miles or so of the works, no-one was was actually working and the road was reduced to a single lane. To get to the single lane, traffic was filtering in from both directions of the M62 causing havoc and with impatient drivers swapping lanes that took over an hour which I will never get back.
Although all the A1 should really be converted to a motorway, in the non-motorway 3 lane parts I often witnessed 3 HGVs abreast which would be illegal on motorways although I'm not certain about on other roads.
Coming back on the M1 was an eye opener, and boy did you need your eyes open. Firstly, lane hogging was absolutely ridiculous and it seemed to make any difference whether the drivers were male or female or any creed; they just sat in in lane 2 of 3 or lane 3 of 4 regardless of whatever speed they were doing.
But far, far more dangerous than that was that I witnessed on many occasions that these drivers seemed to dislike being passed by cars that were travelling at just a few miles an hour faster; I could literally see them in front of me accelerating so that they would be keeping pace or going slightly faster than the overtaking vehicle.
I tried to keep a steady pace the whole way and often passed a slower car and then a few miles down the road they would come sailing past and then slow down again to the speed at which I first passed them. One car in particular did this to me a couple of times and it was so annoying that I decided to take a comfort break so that they disappeared rather than playing their silly game.
I used to really enjoy driving, but thankfully I don't need to do much nowadays because I get no joy from it any more. And that's rant over!
