Less Lucky
Posted: Thu 24 September, 2009 Filed under: Driving, Thoughts, Travel 7 Comments »Last night’s drive home was – to be blunt – a fucking nightmare.
From the look of it, someone had fallen under a bus on Mile End Road, which meant that everything going out of London in that direction was moving half a car-length at a time. It took me 90 minutes to get from my office to the A11/A12 roundabout. After that, it took me about 90 minutes to get home.
I don’t know the fate of the person – assuming that was what’d happened – as neither the local radio traffic news nor the BBC have seen fit to say anything about it. What I do know is that a section of the road, on both carriageways, was blocked by emergency services, so I assume it was at least serious, if not fatal.
But it would be nice if traffic reports would be a bit more honest/useful. If I’d heard “Avoid that road like the plague” I would’ve done, and would’ve cut north instead. As it was, the only reports were that “The A11 is slow-moving, because of an accident”. While I guess that was technically true – we were still moving, after all – it would’ve been far more useful to say “It’s blocked, diversions in place, but you’d be far better off avoiding it completely”
It used to be a priority, after an accident, to get traffic moving again quickly, but now it seems to be the last thing anyone’s interested in. And a couple of years ago, when I was stuck on the A47 Southern Bypass, the traffic report finally made it to the BBC just about the time we started moving again.
I suspect it’s good old Health and Safety etc. again – whereas a pile of sand used to be fine for diesel/petrol/blood/whatever absorption, it now has to be dealt with properly in case some cock skids on it, or is traumatised by the site of aforementioned fluids.
Equally, if it’s a fatality then there does need to be more done in the way of site/scene examination etc, and there’s not a lot that can be done ’til everyone’s done their bit.
But yes, the entire thing does seem to be distinctly anti-traffic, almost “Well if you’re going to drive, you should expect these things to screw your journey up” – except of course it also screwed up all the buses, so it wasn’t just us selfish bastard drivers that were getting knackered by it.
But surely that’s when satnav comes into its own? Just hit ‘roadblock’ and it’ll sort you out a way round.
Yeah, I suppose.
On that score I guess I’m a bit to blame, in that a) I never remember, and b) I don’t trust sat-nav to that level – it’s mis-directed me on known routes too many times for me to now have that much confidence in it.
Maybe I should use it like that more often.
But have you got a TomTom (experience of other people’s other brands shows me TomTom is absolutely the best)?
And have you set it up? We’ve had two now in the last 5 years and have only once ever had it misdirect us (and that was our own fault for not taking a second to check through the route first).
Yes, we’ve got a TomTom – it’s about three years old now, so beginning to show its age a bit.
As for mis-directing, it’s tried (repeatedly in London) to take me along roads that don’t exist – and denied the existence of Tower Bridge – along with other occasions of fuck-uppery.
Admittedly, I haven’t forked out for ‘updated maps’ etc., and that might help – but still, the fact it doesn’t believe Tower Bridge exists rather chuffs my trust in the poxy thing.
We don’t buy new maps either.
Because you can get corrections for nowt… Have you connected it to their website and allowed other people’s corrections to your existing maps? Also, you can probably make your own corrections on your own device (our 2nd, a base model nearly 2 now lets you).
As I said, satnavs are only good if one sets them up properly.