Very often, when I am on the motorway, I see those really annoying signs that say reduce your speed to sixty, and it's because of xxxxx. Sometimes it's because of reports of pedestrians on the road, animals loose on the road or other reasons, but more often than not it's a report of debris. The amount of times it happens and then there is literally nothing on the road is a nightmare, partly because I like driving at seventy on the motorway, sixty annoys me, so driving at sixty for no reason is just irritating.
Driving back from work today, there were a number of signs that said slow down, sixty and debris on the road, and whilst most people slowed down (I also slowed down) I was rolling my eyes at the whole thing because I've never known it be anything. Well, except that time my ex and I were driving to Dover and there as a full on tree across one lane, but there weren't any smart signs up then and I wasn't driving so I don't really count that!
In the stretch that was sixty, a lorry had pulled into my lane to get past a slower moving vehicle and then he slammed on his brakes, because everyone was slamming on their brakes and I felt like I pretty much had to do an emergency stop from sixty miles an hour, which was not comfortable at all. My left shoulder and elbow have been twinging since, though not enough to worry about. When the lorry started moving again, there as a huge flexible pipe like thing on the floor and it was so far into the lane that I was driving in that I practically had to swerve into the next lane to avoid it, which I didn't want to do because that lane was still going at sixty (and my car takes six months to go from naught to sixty). I was kind of struck by the fact that, hey, there was actually a reason for the sign this time around! I ended up driving over part of it which probably wasn't advisable and wasn't comfortable and made a noise that didn't sound great and then I looked in my rear view mirror and saw everyone behind was thankfully keeping their hazard lights on (I had hit mine when I was stopping, but then turned it off when I was stopped and the car behind me had managed to stop as well, and not uncomfortably close to me.)
I realise that this isn't the scariest thing anyone has ever been through and honestly, it's not even up there with the worst things that have happened within the last week, but it was the scary sort of thing that made me think, okay, I should really pay a little bit more attention to those signs, and also maybe I should listen to the sat nav when it tells me to take the dual carriage way all the way home instead of going on the motorway, even though I like motorways and I can't stand all of the roundabouts on the dual carriage way because of the aforementioned problems with the car accelerating. Though, even with that said, if the Prime Minister revived Liz Truss's ridiculous idea of making the seventy mile an hour speed limit on motorways advisory (I know it's never going to happen, I know) instead of mandatory, I would definitely be driving faster than seventy on the motorways, even in my ridiculous little car.
No comments:
Post a Comment