I’ve been doing a lot more driving recently for various reasons, including frequent visits to Scotland, from Devon.  That’s over a 1000 mile round trip, which I’ve been doing several times a month, and its given me a lot of time on motorways, and other roads when satnav takes me off sightseeing due to blockages on the motorways, which is unfortunately quite often.

I do enjoy driving, but the experiences and frustrations I’ve had in all my recent journeys led me to write this.  I don’t intend this to be too preachy – I’m not suggesting I’m the best driver out there, but I do consider myself to be pretty experienced and relatively good (famous last words), and with my career in nuclear design and safety, I tend to approach situations with a positive safety culture and questioning attitude, especially in relation to perception of risk.

So I wanted to talk about some of my observations and discuss my thoughts and views in the hope that it might stimulate discussion, or even better still, encourage people to consider and perhaps modify their driving style if they happen to exhibit some of the behaviours discussed below…

I learned to drive and passed my test in Scotland, which I recognise might not be considered a busy metropolis like London or Manchester to name a couple.  I’ve done a quite few road trips in my time, which have involved driving around the UK, and also in foreign countries, both with my own car and hire cars. 

This means right and left hand drive cars and obviously driving on the left and right hand sides of the road.  I’ve also driven in some very busy places eg. London, Birmingham, Manchester and others here in the UK, and abroad, throughout France, Italy (straight through the city centre of Milan at rush hour (following satnav)), Monaco, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas etc etc…

I now live in Devon and have for many years, and again, whilst you will likely not consider this to be very busy, the road infrastructure is extremely poor and so, actually it is busy, more busy than it should be and more often than desirable.

So let’s get started with some of my observations (in no particular order) – in my 25 years of driving what have I noticed…:

It’s certainly got a lot busier on the roads – that’s obvious and an understatement!

Despite lots of road works, the infrastructure doesn’t seem to be much better.  This might be because the density of vehicles is increasing quicker than the infrastructure is improving…?

People seem to be (becoming) less courteous to fellow drivers.

Bad habits people seem to be exhibiting more – I’m sure these won’t be a surprise:

Lack of indicator use – this is more than just BMW drivers (although they remain bad).

When people do use their indicators, they do so and just pull out, without looking!  This is incredibly frustrating, never mind extremely dangerous.  It seems now, the majority of people feel that as long as they indicate, they have done their duty and can just pull out in front of you, sometimes even when you are along side them.  Its unbelievably dangerous, in addition to being downright rude and discourteous!

That’s not how you learned to drive – the mantra was mirror, signal manoeuvre, with the emphasis on observation and waiting for a suitable and SAFE space to manoeuvre.

Additionally, as well as waiting for a safe gap, it is important to look several times to judge someone’s closing speed before safely pulling out.  I am not defending or advocating people speeding in, for example the outside lane on the motorway, or any other such scenarios, but we should all understand that people do speed and whilst you may think by pulling out in front of them sticking to the speed limit, you’re doing some sort of civic duty to slow them down, in actual fact what you are more likely to do, is cause a serious accident, or as a minimum, cause a tailback, as the associated brake light domino effect rattles back down the road behind you.

Next up – middle lane hogging!  So we all know this is against the law, but so many people do it.  It’s incredibly lazy, unsafe and generally leads to more tail backs, especially in the outside lane, due to more people needing to move lanes to pass them.  It also encourages undertaking, which is very unsafe.  People get frustrated sat behind “Middle Lane Mandy’s or Martin’s” (names selected at random), and with the now, extra busy outside lane, take to the inside lane to undertake, which is unsighted and dangerous!!

Another one I’m still surprised to see so much of is using mobile phones whilst driving.  I’m not talking about handsfree – I mean holding it to their heads, or even worse, holding it down low, which I assume is whilst they are sending a text, or simply trying to hide the fact they’re using it.

I note some road safety campaigners, suggest using handsfree is not safe, due to the distraction of effectively thinking or doing something else when you should be concentrating solely on driving.

I can understand their thinking and definitely support that your primary concentration should be on driving, but I’m an engineer and believe, in many cases, that the technology invented, such as Bluetooth handsfree and even the car reading you text messages, should be celebrated, obviously complemented by the many safety features.

I don’t have experience of driving every car on the market and this blog is not about comparing cars in any way, but across my many recent long journeys from Devon to Scotland, I have learned a lot more about my Mercedes and am blown away with all the features, including safety/assistance features, and think these should absolutely celebrated and used.

This next one is perhaps more of a personal frustration, but I believe it can be detrimental to the driving environment – not using cruise control.

Why why why???  If your car has cruise control and other associated features like lane keeping assistance etc, and the road conditions (weather and traffic) are suitable, why would you not use it??  I always use it (as mentioned above subject to the conditions) on motorways/dual carriage ways, and sometimes just around town

It’s so much easier, results in less pain to your leg, because you don’t need to keep it in the same position for what could be a long time and even more importantly now, its better for fuel efficiency.

If you’re in average speed camera zones, due to roadworks etc, and lets face it, its a struggle to go any significant distance these days without running into average speed camera road works, cruise control removes the stress of keeping to a speed which seems frustratingly slow for the type of road. 

I’m not complaining here about the speed reduction, as i recognise its about the safety of the workforce, but it does seem to be difficult to keep to a speed limit sometimes, when the speed limit subconsciously, doesn’t seem to fit with the type of road and therefore seems abnormally slow.

I also often wonder how some people are going so much faster than me in average speed camera zones, when I have cruise control set to the limit, and they’re speeding on past.  Probably not a great side of me to admit, but I often hope to myself that they will get a letter through the post in subsequent days – frustratingly, I will never find out if they do…

Furthermore, if you have an automatic gearbox, or an electric car, using the driving aids means you really have little else to do, making long journeys much more comfortable.

The thing I find most incredibly frustrating with people not using cruise control is that, when you are approaching them to overtake, sat at your constant speed, they then seem to speed up meaning you cannot overtake without speeding up yourself, and then for several miles along the motorway, you seem to have this strange tit for tat overtaking episode where you keep passing each other.

I think in most cases, they’re not aware they are speeding up, and often think that if you plotted their accelerator pedal movement on a graph, it would probably look very much like a sine wave…

However, in some cases, they probably are speeding up, just to be deliberately annoying!!

Just to finish up on cruise control and potentially slightly contradict myself, I have to say I’m not a fan of the variation that is adaptive cruise control. Whilst I am a bit of a geek and lover of technological advances, this one I feel is slightly more frustrating than useful. Of course, it is more safe which is great, but due to the more selfish or inconsiderate nature of many drivers now (strong words I know), adaptive cruise control can end up being more of a hinderance.

Adaptive cruise control works by maintaining a gap between you and the car in front so that if the car in front slows down, so do you. That is a nice feature theoretically and it does work well in practice, but what also happens in practice is that people keep pulling out into the gap left between you and the car in front and the adaptive cruise control keeps slowing you down, so you end up going backwards relative to the traffic around you, or at least that’s the way it feels…

You could say that you should ignore that in favour of the safety benefits and I probably should, but on long journeys, I find it quite frustrating, especially when, as I mentioned above, people don’t plan their pulling out and often squeeze into gaps which aren’t big enough, certainly based on the speeds and associated stopping distances.

Anyway, now lets talk about motorway speeds…

Ok, so I’m obviously not going to suggest or promote that you should be driving in excess of the speed limit for the road, including for your vehicle on that road (and in the prevailing weather conditions), noting that some vehicles are not able to drive at the speed limit of a car on a motorway for example.

However, I do expect you to be driving at the speed limit for your vehicle on that road and relative to the conditions.  If you’re not confident to drive at that speed, you shouldn’t be using the motorway – stick to the A roads.

In my opinion, people driving overly slowly on a motorway or dual carriage way, where the speed limit is 70mph is very dangerous, and serves to cause significant holds up due to obstruction it causes.

Within reason, every vehicle capable of driving on a motorway is permitted to drive at 60mph or more (Speed limits – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)), so I would propose that a minimum speed for all vehicles on a motorway, especially cars should be 60mph.

If driving at 60mph, the vehicles should be confined to the inner/slow lane, with my view that if you are entering into outside/fast lane, you should be travelling at a minimum of 70mph, so as not to cause hazards to faster travelling vehicles or unnecessary hold ups and frustration.

Again, I am not condoning people travelling faster than the speed limit, but we should all recognise that it happens, so we need to be aware of it and avoid causing collisions, by pulling out without looking and driving slowly…

Another factor which really makes me turn red with frustration is the speed of some vehicles (especially cars) entering the motorway or dual carriage way from a slip road.  In a similar manner to motorway speeds, the mentality of driving to the speed limit should start before you properly join the road – ie. the slip road.

Dawdling onto the motorway at 40mph is again, a very dangerous situation.  Vehicles already on the motorway are or should be travelling at the speed limit, and if you’re joining at a much slower speed, it doesn’t take a Rocket Scientist to work out what might happen.

When joining a motorway, I all too often find myself behind someone who appears to be in a world of their own dawdling along at ~40mph.  It’s so frustrating and dangerous!

To combat this situation, which is usually obvious pretty quickly (ie. at the top of the slip road), I slow down considerably (but don’t stop), in a similar manner to an F1 driver who is leaving a gap between him/herself and the driver in front when starting a qualifying lap.

Once, I feel like they are sufficiently far ahead so as not to impact my joining speed, I accelerate sufficiently to ensure I am joining the motorway at a safe speed (typically the speed limit).  This also allows any cars behind me to accelerate in a similar manner, also joining the motorway at a safe speed.

If you’re already on the motorway and approaching a junction where vehicles are joining, look and plan ahead, and consider moving out to make it easier for the joining vehicle.  I recognise you don’t technically need to do this, by the rules of the road, but if you can, I often think it is courteous to move over and let drivers on the slip road join in a stress free and safe manner.

By doing so, it also means I have taken a positive action to avoid any potential collisions, and I am consciously monitoring the situation.  Maybe it’s the boring safety engineer in me…?

Merge in turn – ooh, where do I start with this one!

So this one is equally applicable on and off motorways, but people don’t seem to be able to do this??  I was going to say this issue was especially prevalent down in Devon & Cornwall, but my recent experience would indicate it is throughout much of the UK.

Merge in turn is usually where two lanes become one, and traffic is required to filter or merge from both lanes into one.  You find this on motorways where there are roadworks and around towns where the layout/space restrictions constrain particular sections of road to less lanes.

The key issue I find with merge in turn is that people do not use both lanes right up to the merge – the majority desperately strive to get into the lane that will remain as soon as it is indicated that traffic will need to merge ahead.  This then serves to cause a massive tail back because the act of moving across slows all the traffic down and the tail back effectively doubles in length.

You could say, well that’s fine, I’ll just “charge” (not that I advocate charging) down the vacated lane and merge/sneak in at the actual point of merge, which is exactly what you should do, but the trouble is, the people who have panicked and frantically merged miles in advance, will now do whatever they can to make sure you do not get in ahead of them, and this only serves to make the tailback much worse and slow everyone, including those who are causing it, down more.

There will always be a delay associated with a merge, and heavy traffic, as you’re squeezing two or more lanes into one, but the behaviours that are often exhibited only serve to make it much worse for everyone.

If only people could seek to understand the intent of the “merge in turn” function and apply it in a universally collaborative manner, traffic congestion would be greatly reduced (in my humble opinion).

Let’s talk about our UK motorway infrastructure and the issues I’ve observed or experienced.

So, as I’ve already said, the motorway infrastructure in the UK, is generally not sized to cope with all of the traffic.  I cannot say I have driven on every motorway in the UK, so some might be fine, but certainly from considerable recent experience of the M5, M6 and some surrounding motorways, they are inadequate.

The M5 around Bristol and down to Weston Super Mare and even Taunton is majorly congested. 

The M6 in a number of places is extremely congested, especially around Manchester and Liverpool areas and Preston/Blackpool.

Additionally, the M5/M6 interchange around Birmingham has been bad for as long as I can remember.

Many of these areas include the newly introduced “SMART Motorways”.  Personally, I think the introduction of “SMART Motorways” is both a cop out and they’ve missed a trick in doing so.

I think they’re a cop out, as they’ve effectively just recognised we don’t have a enough lanes to cope with the vehicles, so their solution is to use the hard shoulders at peak/busiest times.  The hard shoulder is a safety mechanism for the motorway, both from a perspective of accommodating broken down vehicles or vehicles that need to stop for emergency reasons, and also to allow emergency vehicles through tailbacks in a timely fashion, in order to get to an incident.

This is now effectively null and void, meaning emergency services cannot get through easily or at all, but perhaps more concerningly, the risk of (more) accidents has increased, due to the risk of not being able to close a lane quickly enough, or the issue of people ignoring lane closures (red crosses), which for some reason they apparently do…

I also think they’ve missed a trick with the “SMART Motorways”.  The work to create the “SMART Motorways” is extensive and literally takes multiple years to complete – years where people using the roads have to tolerate what seems like never ending roadworks, whilst they set their cruise control to 50mph… 😉 or in some cases less… for miles and miles and miles, for very little benefit in the long run.

We as a civilisation, are moving in the direction of fewer vehicles using internal combustion engines (ie. Petrol or diesel).  Several fuels are being explored/trialled, but electric is the clear front runner at present.  Noting the significant work and disruption involved in creating the “SMART Motorways” as they are, I would suggest that it wouldn’t have been too much extra work/pain to have installed the infrastructure necessary to enable online charging of vehicles whilst travelling along the motorway, such as induction loops, or other such technology (In-road inductive charging tests demonstrate unlimited EV range (newatlas.com))

Vehicles might not yet be equipped with such technology, and I appreciate, more planning and consideration than I am alluding to would be necessary, but I think it is another example of the government not applying the necessary foresight, in a similar manner to the debacle involving first generation SMART Meter for domestic utilities, but lets not go there in this blog!

Furthermore, in my opinion, for the major motorways and based on current traffic levels, I think you need a minimum of four lanes at all times, with the hard shoulder and exit lanes for junctions being additional to that.

My thinking behind this is:

• The inside lane (far left) for HGV’s and other slow moving traffic, which lets remember, should be travelling as fast as the rules, vehicle and road/weather conditions allow.  Lets call this lane number 1.  Remember, you should also have the hard shoulder to the left of lane 1.
• The next lane (right of the far left) or lane number 2, would again mostly be for vehicles travelling slower than 70mph, but allow for these slower vehicles to overtake each other eg. the frustrating view of HGV’s overtaking HGV’s and the even worse feeling when you see them pull out to do this, as you start going up a hill… ;-(
• Lane three (to the right of lane two), would mainly be for cars going faster than the overtaking HGV’s, but these cars could also use Lane two if they are a slightly slower variety of driver eg. Not on 70mph, but above 60mph as we mentioned earlier of course… 🙂
• Finally, lane 4 (to the right of lane three as you’ve probably guessed by now), would be for the faster vehicles, travelling at the speed limit and not wanting to be held up by those drivers who have less urgency to be anywhere.

Again, whilst I do not condone drivers travelling above the speed limit, for safety reasons we should recognise it happens, and so by moving more of the slower drivers into the inner lanes, there is a reduced chance of an incident, whereby for example, a much slower driver pulls out into the fast lane in the path of a vehicle travelling much faster.

From my work in the nuclear safety environment, I certainly recognise the issue presented by designing infrastructure which effectively supports “rule breakers”, but what we should be doing is recognising how humans behave and designing a multi-faceted approach to address it.  Such an approach could include:

• The engineering to minimise the hazard, which is separating faster and slower drivers.
  • The engineering to police the rule breakers – variable, average and normal speed cameras
    • The administrative safeguards, which are more the actual policing of the roads, whether that be via marked or unmarked police cars.
      • One for the future – autonomous cars.  These will just drive themselves, working collaboratively with the traffic around them, maintaining safe distances and speeds and thereby avoiding any accidents because the whole environment is completely autonomously controlled.  Again, we could of thought about this with our “SMART Motorways” and designed it to be ready for this… oh well…

I understand the significant amount of work and cost this would be, not to mention the disruption (again), so I guess you could say I’m being deliberately naïve, but as I say, we missed a trick when the not so “SMART Motorways” were built.

There is also the issue of roads which should be motorways but are not.

I frequently travel on the A38 from Exeter to Plymouth, which actually carries on further than Exeter (and Plymouth), but the M5 starts at Exeter.  The A38 is a prime example of a road which should really be turned into a motorway. 

I’m not sure of all the criteria for building a motorway, but I imagine the road as it is, is way too twisty and probably too up and down to be turned into a motorway.  However, it serves as the main road into the South West of England (if you ignore the A30 (which goes from Exeter into Cornwall, and is currently being improved), and is completely inadequate for the volume and type of traffic it carries.

There are weekly if not daily incidents on the road, many of which cause injuries and all too often deaths.  Clearly not as relevant or important as injuries and deaths, but the road is frequently blocked/shut due to incidents, whether they be said significant incidents, or more frustratingly broken down vehicles.

It is broadly a dual carriage way all the way from Exeter until a short stretch of three lanes before Plymouth, before becoming a dual carriage way again at Plymouth.

Just the twisty, turny, up and down nature of the road can result in accidents on its own, but to make it more challenging, during bad weather eg rain (which we seem to get a lot of), there are many rivers which end up forming across the road and frequent patches of standing water to catch you out.

At the risk of going slightly off topic, it has been said many times that the South West is suffering significantly due to its very poor transport links.  The A38 has the issues I’ve just mentioned.  It’s not unusual for the rail service to be suspended due to bad weather as a result of the route the track takes right next to the sea.

In February 2014, the railway line was washed away in the freak storms (Dawlish sea wall on storm-hit track is ‘success’ – BBC News), which now appear to becoming less freak – that’s a different topic altogether though.

Plymouth Airport was shut in December 2011 and despite campaigns to try and get it re-opened, it doesn’t look likely.

As such, improving the quality of the roads into the South West is essential, and I expect this is probably the case for other areas, and other A roads, which should probably be motorways.

On top of all of this, is the condition of many of the roads.  I certainly feel like the road surfaces eg. pot holes have become significantly worse, perhaps not so much on the motorways, but certainly on other main roads and within towns/cities.  Obviously its due to a lack of investment like every other area of poor-quality public service!!

 What do you think?

• Am I wrong with anything I’ve said?
• Are there any other bad habits, you’d like to add?
• I’d love to hear your views…