Here it is permissable, but only during daylight hours.
Our national roads have a hard shoulder, and when you approach another motorist from behind, he is sure to pull aside IF he can see ahead of him.
Unfortunately some drivers take the 'you will move aside' as a moral right, and tailgate horribly. If I'm approaching a bend/blind rise, there is NO WAY I'm pulling over!
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Without having read the story (or, indeed, where it came from - some sources have their own exagerrated agenda), it's difficult to pass a definitive judgement on this.
But if it is true, it sounds like another cheap and nasty solution to congestion.
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sounds like a real cheap option this one! Another way to fiddle statistics and make Herr Chancelor Blair look like every motorists angel in grace, which he surely aint.
Hardshoulders should stay where they are, out of use except for emergencies. I can't see the Brit public adapting to their usage in a sensible way, and i live in a place where people follow the ambulances down the road with their hazard lights on - a hanging offence in my opinion.
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The trial will take place next year on a section of the M42 in the Midlands. The AA and RAC have both caned it as unsafe.
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The trial will take place next year on a section of the M42 in the Midlands. The AA and RAC have both caned it as unsafe.
Frankly I'm not surprised. Both organisations lose several people a year due to dozy drivers, this will only increase the danger for them fixing cars at the roadside.
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I think it would be better to find ways to reduce the amount of traffic actually using the motorways in the first place or at least spread it over the day better. Freight and perhaps Sales Reps seem to be the bigger users of motorways. If we could get as much freight as possible using rail over night then that should reduce the need for big trucks to use motorways. Or if we were really mean then trucks over a certain tonnage would only be allowed to use motorways at night, thus freeing up the motorways during the day. To encourage reps to use public transport then it should be possible to have some online booking system that would allow someone to book a taxi to a station, get the right train and get a taxi at the other end and have them all nicely syncronised. If it was door to door then the reasons for not using public transport woud reduce. It would also reduce accidents on the motorway due to tiredness as people wouldn't have to drive for such distances over so many hours. Perhaps the time has come to put tachos in all business vehicles to make sure that company car drivers are limited to so many hours driving and legally have to take breaks in the same way lorry drivers are supposed to.
teabelly
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The way things are at the moment, there is no way reps could do their job by public transport. Even if the city to city times aren't that much different, the main way a car scores is that you can get straight to a business, while if you arrive somewhere by train you have to try and find which bus to get, or spend a lot more on a taxi. I was recently chatting to a rep who visits us, and she drives 700 miles a week at least as part of her job, covering most of the north of England with trips to the company HQ in Colchester. Granted this sort of thing is pushing it a lot, but it's not untypical.
IMO, the best ways to reduce congestion are traffic flow monitoring to either cater for demand or let people know how they can alter their journey times to help the flow, and, very simply, better driver instruction. The vast majority of holdups are caused by poor or inconsiderate driving. Not using all three lanes effectively and not getting up to overtaking speeds in all but lane 1 being the main problems there.
Lorries especially are a problem due to either lack of power to keep to their limited speed, or slightly variations in that limit. A better system would be either to have some sort of network of radio-based limiters so all lorries were limited to the same speed and need not crawl past slightly slower ones, or a 'turbo' button where a driver can momentarily cancel the limiter to speed up an overtake. This of course would have to be carefully monitored to prevent abuse. (I'd best be careful here and say that I'm not accusing lorry drivers of bad driving - they have a hard job and probably make the best of it, but it does cause a lot of problems.)
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