Blogging has been light of late. This is because work has kept me so busy, I’ve had neither time nor inclination. After spending seven hours dragging up the M1, even the Snake Pass wasn’t an enjoyable drive, so sitting at the computer was definitely not going to happen. But then, that’s really a bike road anyway. One day, I’ll go up there on the RT.
Talking of the M1, I am reminded of the twat who got himself booked for lane hogging and then complained that he was being victimised. I’m not convinced it should be an offence, but it is piss-poor driving, despite what morons in the press might say.
On the subject of the booking, this guy got what he deserved, frankly. I spend enough time on motorways to have zero tolerance for these road hogs. If you are not overtaking, pull over into the left-hand lane. The outer two lanes are for overtaking, not sitting there at 60mph, creating a tailback that will cause a Mexican wave several miles behind you.
On the subject of the Telegraph article… Jeebus! Allison Pearson’s diatribe is essentially a tu quoque. It is also displays staggering ignorance of what constitutes good driving.
What’s wrong with being middle of the road? The middle of the road is an excellent place. It’s the Goldilocks Lane, neither too fast nor too slow. We Claras and Clods sit in the middle lane not because we are hogs, I can assure you, but because it’s the place where you are safest from maniacs.
Get your Highway Code out and look it up, you stupid woman. The middle lane is an overtaking lane. It is not there to cruise in. If you are not overtaking, move left and leave it clear for those who want to overtake you.
Venture into the outside lane and it won’t be long before some black Terminator cruiser with a bull nose and quiet, understated Third Reich radiator grille is on your tail. At such moments, I long to have a sign light up in my rear window which reads: “I am doing the national speed limit and would prefer to stay alive. So back off!”
No. You move over and let them pass. If they are exceeding the speed limit, that is up to them. You are not a traffic officer and it is not your place to police the speed limit you sanctimonious twat.
Will Terminator Cruiser brake? Like hell he will. Terminator will carry on doing 98mph, as is the right of men driving expensive penis extensions, and force you out of the way, except – oh, God – now there’s no room in the middle lane, where everyone is doing 70mph. So you have no alternative except to put your foot on the floor and break the speed limit, to avoid being mown down.
Well, if you weren’t passing those 70mph drivers, you shouldn’t be out there. And, yes, sometimes I gun it to get past a clog to clearer road. So be it.
Safely back in the packed middle lane, you decide to do as the law instructs and get into the inside lane. Indicating, you move to the left and find your car is now the ham in the sandwich of two German juggernauts. Strangely, the driver behind appears not to have read the section of the Highway Code about typical stopping distances.
Yup. They also move out into the middle lane despite there being traffic passing them. Again, I frequently find myself taking avoiding action. On the bike, this is usually the throttle to get past the clog. In the car, I will sometimes change lane or even brake to avoid a collision caused by careless truckers who bully their way across occupied lanes. This is not, nor ever will be an excuse to sit in the middle lane.
Fritz now decides to overtake you, causing pandemonium in the middle lane because his truck has a fixed-speed mechanism and it takes forever for him to pass any but the slowest-moving vehicles. To add to the fun, Fritz’s giant wheels send a tsunami of rainwater over your windscreen, obscuring your view of Reg and Edna, who are just joining the motorway having decided to go “out for a spin” in their café au lait Austin Maxi.
In which case, you were dawdling. These vehicles are restricted to 56mph. If they felt the need to pass you, you were doing significantly less than this. Get off the fucking motorway, you dangerous idiot.
With nerves like shredded cabbage, you retreat to the middle lane where, at least, you can see cars up ahead joining the motorway and keep out of the way of nonagenarian daytrippers and evil Terminators.
Oh, great. So, having impeded vehicles travelling at 56mph, you now sit in the middle lane impeding everyone else. Frankly, if this is an accurate reflection of your driving, you have no place on our roads, for you are a dangerous menace.
As 80mph is now the default speed limit (nearly half of cars and vans broke the 70mph UK limit in 2013), you are now effectively in the “fast” lane, leaving the loonies and the Clarksons to streak past you in the outside lane. Except for the random psychopaths, who swerve in and overtake you on theinside…
There is no such thing as the fast lane. And if people are passing you on the inside (which they shouldn’t) then it is because they have become frustrated with the fucking idiot hogging the middle lane with an empty lane to their left. Fuck me, what a fucking idiot.
And they have the cheek to prosecute a driver for “hogging” the middle lane! How is that fair?
Yes. Because the roads are shared space with rules designed to make them work and idiots like you are making everyone else’s lives a misery every time you treat it as if you own it.
In 25 years of motorway driving, I have never seen the police arrest a Terminator for forcing drivers like me to break the speed limit in the outside lane or stop Reg and Edna for failing to make due progress in the slow lane.
So what. Doesn’t mean that they don’t. I’ve seen people pulled over by Plod. But then, I cover hundreds of thousands of miles, mostly on motorways. And, even if they don’t, it isn’t carte blanche for you to drive like a fuckwit.
Don’t blame us Claras and Clods; we make what sense we can of motorway madness. In the unimprovable words of Stealers Wheel: “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you.”
No, you are the clown. If you cannot or will not use the motorway system as it is designed to be used, get off it and stay off it.
I’ve always been relaxed about lunatics driving fast since it gets them out of my way to drive at the limit (in the nearside lane) and if Plod is alert and ahead he’ll pull them over.
“Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you.” might, perhaps, be paraphrased to “Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle behind you, you sanctimonious fuckwit.”
Indeed.
I understand exactly the problem of idiots wandering down the middle of the motorway like a mobile road block. No argument or confusion about that! Speed goverened lorries should be included, indeed should be targetted, in my opinion.
Even so I do wish they would clarify exactly what they mean by lane hogging in the legal sense. We often use a motor caravan which (like many vans) has restricted left vision and a potential blind spot, especially where slip roads merge in, it makes no sense to dodge left when nobody is behind us in ‘our’ lane and (unseen) vehicles may be approaching and wanting to merge. There are also confusions where a 4th inner lane appears at one junction and goes away again a mile or so later. One near us carries large numbers of local vehicles that go on then off again, using that lane virtually as a local separate road. It would obviously be daft for through traffic to try and merge left then have to pull out again soon after even though the dashed lane marking suggesst it becomes part of the road for a while.
I learned to drive in south London, but relocated to Italy a few years later. Living in Italy really teaches you to appreciate how well designed the UK’s road infrastructure is compared to some of the older motorways and autoroutes in continental Europe.
Italy still has some old, 1960s-era stretches of motorway that wouldn’t even meet British standards for dual-carriageways, and their dual carriageway roads are even worse. Most dual carriageway roads here lack hard shoulders—just parking bays every 15 km. or so—and junctions that are barely more than glorified ‘T’ junctions, with very short / non-existent slip roads that force traffic to join the main road at very low speeds.
Junctions can also be far too frequent: Rome’s orbital motorway (the ‘GRA’) is less than 70 km. long, yet has a whopping 42 junctions, many within sight of each other.
I think it’s fair to say that Italians really do see multi-carriageway roads as having ‘slow’, ‘fast’, and ‘really fast’ lanes. Trying to use them the way British drivers do is genuinely dangerous as you could easily T-bone a car joining the road from a crap, poorly maintained junction. I suspect this is also true of many other countries that have lower road design standards than the UK, which really is an exception, not the rule.
Also worth noting: speedometers, even in the UK, can be as much as 12 mph out. The only legal requirement is that they don’t show a speed below your actual speed, but they’re allowed to err very much on the side of caution. (The MOT test doesn’t check the speedometer’s accuracy either, which has always struck me as bizarre.) This is why you’ll sometimes see drivers trundling along at what *they* think is the speed limit, but which *your* speedo says is 10 mph slower. It’s not the other driver’s fault: they’re literally being fed inaccurate information.
That speedo error comment is interesting as I always find myself passing traffic in 50mph sections. This is probably because my car does not have cruise control and for roadworks limits and so on I use my satnav’s speedo readout.
Strangely enough I passed the Advanced Driving Test – a good few years ago I will admit. The IAM instructor told me that on a three lane road or motorway I should always drive in the middle lane because it was the safest place to be and in the event of something happening, it allowed the maximum room for manoeuvre.
A few years later, I was driving down the M42 late at night. It was deserted. I was in the middle lane. A car cam up behind me so I pulled over to let him go and then pulled out again. It was a police car. He pulled me over and asked me why I was driving inthe middle lane and I told him waht the IAM had told me to do. “That’s not right” he said and took my details. A couple of weeks later, I received a note from the police saying no further action would be taken and that they had discussed the matter with the IAM who had agreed to revise their training.
Never mind. Have some music on the subject to cheer you up :
https://chascmusic.wordpress.com/2013/11/25/one-for-the-road/
Indeed.
http://www.iam.org.uk/motorwaymonth
As the IAM clearly says, you should use the left-hand lane as your base. The other two are for overtaking only. Also, the safest place to be is the left-hand lane. You have two escape routes in the event of things going wrong. I passed my IAM motorcycle test in 1980 and they were teaching it correctly then. You were given duff info.
A deserted motorway at night, I’d ride in the middle lane too – it’s further away from crossing badgers, boars(!) and deer. But I would move over as a vehicle approached from the rear. Perhaps you didn’t move over soon enough for the plod and that is why they stopped you?
I still ride in the left-hand lane. The one time I hit an animal, it was coming from the central reservation…
Middle lane hoggers. Without exception the most hated people on the roads.
I wonder if the real problem is fear of the right-hand lane? Lane-changing has also got to be the most dangerous move on the motorway so unnecessarily changing lane should be avoided but ‘unnecessary’ is hard to define.
Consider a typical situation on a motorway working within its designed capacity. There are several well-spaced out trucks in the left hand lane and a group of cars running at 70 mph-ish in the middle lane. The right hand lane is clear. Then along comes a car doing 80++ mph in the right-hand lane. The middle group present no real obstruction, the car passes, then, to prove a point(?) it moves into the middle lane, leaving minimum distance behind (despite the two miles clear lane ahead) then ‘bounces’ into the left-hand lane under the nose of a truck only to almost immediately move back out again before resuming its ‘rightful’ place in the right hand lane.
Our ‘shamed’ lead driver in the middle group moves into the vacated gap between the trucks. The driver that was behind remains in-lane but accelerates until he is going 2 mph faster than he has been doing for the last five miles. The rest of the group join in. The driver of the shamed car meanwhile finds that he is closing in on the truck in front at 20 mph and now has nowhere to move out to as his erstwhile companions have filled the space. In fact the only way he could have ‘safely’ made the lane changing move would have been to emulate his ‘teacher’ by suddenly putting on an extra 10 mph (how?) and doing the ‘bounce’!
So how ‘should’ this work? The ‘teacher’ is clearly wrong by grossly exceeding the speed limit and the ‘bounce’ is stupid and dangerous. Should the ‘group’ operate like a flight, the leader pulling into the truck gap then out again as he closes on the truck ahead and the rest of the group doing the same? Or should number two in the group have the courage to use right-hand lane by accelerating smartly to 75 mph (!!)
Sadly it is the nature of all ‘bunches’ that the one at the back wants to go faster than the one at the front. What isn’t so commonly recognised is that the vehicles between the front and rear ones aren’t necessarily arranged in order of slower to faster, they might just be smarter or more patient.
Best advice is always to drive for yourself not for other people – you never know what they are thinking.
Okay, in the situation you describe, cruising in the middle lane makes sense. Bouncing in and out is simply too much. You make a judgement about whether it makes sense to move back into the left or not based upon the gap and the speed of traffic. Remaining in the middle lane when passing a stream of slow moving trucks isn’t lane hogging. It is if there is space to move left and you can remain there for a reasonable period of time. If you are going to have to move out almost immediately, then it would be silly to move left.