The day the blog died (well, nearly)
The icy cold air bit harshly at the distinctive features of my face as I stood tentatively on the kerb, waiting for the road to be clear. I looked down at the white wall of fog; nothing. I looked up at the other white wall of fog; again, nothing. I looked down again; still nothing. With no cars on the road, I started to cross.
Suddenly, the silhouette of a large van emerged from the fog with no lights on and showing little regard for the speed limit. It came at me too quickly for me to be able to react effectively. Seconds later I lay lifeless on the floor, yards from the motionless Royal Mail van, blood red, complete with an Alan-shaped dent.
No it’s not an elaborate excuse for not posting anything yesterday – it is a half-true story of what very nearly happened whilst crossing Pump Lane on Monday morning, in thick fog, because the utterly vacuous imbecile driving the Royal Mail van, in his idiocy, refused to put any lights on, despite the blindingly obvious fact that visibility was well below 100m.
Had I have stepped onto the road just five seconds earlier, or had the driver been breaking the speed limit (although he was doing about 30mph at a guess, anyway) then perhaps this could have been a valid reason for not posting anything yesterday, Tuesday, Monday or ever again!
My question, and the point to my post, is simple: why are there so many idiot drivers on the road? What is it that makes them hell-bent on murdering cyclists, pedestrians and other road users? Why do I fail my driving tests when I am driving much more safely than some of the other idiots on the road? Why can’t they just drive, well, safely?
More to the point, why does the government think that the solution to this problem is to target younger people (again) whilst letting older, supposedly “better” drivers get away with much more dangerous driving? Somewhere along the line the logic got a tad screwed up, methinks!
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7 Comments
I hate roads and vehicles. The roads have terrified me for many years, and it is my strongly-held belief that they should all be underground anyway, leaving the surface of this world for the people and animals to enjoy unhindered.
As far as I am concerned, all drivers are at best unsane, as no-one fully sane would ever go out on the roads.
Your Royal Mail driver, along with a railway driver whose bad driving created an incident that involved a friend of mine (but luckily was caught on CCTV!),
reminds us that anyone, including those working for national bodies such as the postal and public transport services, can be part of this problem. There is a real attitude problem.
What’s the mad panic? Are these people so incapable of planning their lives that for them panic-mode is the norm? There’s definitely something drastically wrong with anyone who behaves like that, and I am sure it is a permanent psycholgical flaw.
Perhaps I’m a coward; but if I don’t need to go out of the house on a foggy day, I don’t. Others will not have that choice.
The Government’s approach will, as ever, be consistent with their overriding policy drivers, which are (a) always use a stick rather than a carrot, and (b) try to gain additional tax revenue in the process. Those tenets are what have driven just about everything they have done over the past ten years and more. There are very few exceptions.
On top of moving all roads underground, I’d have them running automatically, with no driver input apart from keying-in the destination. It has worked perfectly well on the Victoria Line for forty years, using the then-current technology.
We have certainly moved on far enough now to have all road vehicles under intelligent control — and that discounts humans, as their behaviour is consistently far from being intelligent.
Driving is largely an ego-driven fad, and that needs to be given appropriate weighting, which is much lower than safety.
I’d scrap the human driver idea completely.
Very similar story to yours, except I was driving and trying to pull out, when a car drove past with no lights on. I pulled out behind him, gave him a few mouthfulss of choice words and flashed my headlights (we were stationary at the time). He then switched them on. Some people are just morons really.
John, you say about moving roads underground. Well, they actually thought about it! See here!
Aha! That’s the idea — think three-dimensionally for a change, and clear the surface of traffic, or at least a great deal of it.
Still vastly inferior to teleports, of course, but it would do as a stopgap.
Yeah, shame it would have cost £2.4bn at 1966 prices!!
Again, teleports haven’t been invented. If they were it would probably be by a non British version, so you couldn’t use them anyway!!
We British have long been good at invention and innovation in general. We could certainly invent a working teleport (firstly for goods only, as it will no doubt need refinement to be able to transport anything alive safely) but then the Chinese and Indians would end up manufacturing them in bulk.
One of the most successful British IT companies in the last decade and more is ARM Ltd (Advanced RISC Machines) who were spun-off from Acorn some years ago to market the Acorn-invnted ARM processors (CPUs and other chips) to — mainly — the embedded market.
By licensing their designs to companies with state-of-the-art chip fabrication facilities, ARM Ltd have not maintained control of the range, but have a wide range of chip producers (e.g. Intel and Samsung) tied-in to ARM technology for a large part of their business.
There are now far more ARM processors in the world than Intel’s own designs (including emulations such as those by AMD). No wonder ARM got the Queen’s Award to Industry some years ago.
We’d have to tackle any new British innovation in the same way in order to ensure we retained a decent chunk of the benefits, and control over standards.
In the case of teleports, it’s such an easy idea to sell that companies would be falling over each other to get in at the start of a hugely profitable venture, including running the national networks.
Oh dear.. I think I’ve started you on something…
Yes, you have! I’m proud to be British, and am perhaps more aware of at least some of our British achievements than most.
This year sees the 30th anniversary celebrations of Acorn Computers, in the year that their Professor Steve Furber (a.k.a. “Furbie”) received two prestigious awards including the CBE, for a start. The ubiquitous ARM processor was partly his creation, as was Amulet, and now Spinnaker (watch out for Silistix, a major USA-based partner in the Spinnaker project). Spinnaker is a code-name for “Spiking Neural Network”, and emulates the human brain much more closely than anything else on the planet, using up to a million ARM CPU cores.
This is the future that your generation will inherit and take further forward, as we hand on the baton to you. The future is far more exciting than the humdrum and boring world of Microsoft!