Wednesday, October 03, 2007

If you've never been to the UK, you won't be aware that this fine country is on the verge of gridlock because the number of cars far outweigh our road capacity.
You can't get from one end of the counrty to another, or into a major city, without a major congestion headache.

And as if heavy traffic enough, you've got the middle lane cruisers
Middle lane cruisers.

Never has there been anyone so oblivious to their own offending ways.
Able to turn a peaceful three-lane motorway into a busy, crawling bottleneck without a single turn of the wheel. Scourge of the roads, I say.

So here we are, bombing along at 60mph in the 'slow' inside lane and in the distance is nothing but a middle lane cruiser. You have to change lanes twice to overtake them. But before you know it the 80mph Jag and the 98mph Mercedes are coming up fast. Before you know it there's a cue. Everyone slows down. Then more cars arrive.

The middle lane cruiser carries on unaware of the fury pumping behind them.

You get past. You immediately pull back into the slow lane, trying to alert them to their stupidity. They carry on cruising. They carry on infuriating us all.

I know a girl who is a serious middle lane cruiser. She often returns from her motorway travels to tell her husband and friends. 'It was really weird. I kept getting flashed by people on the motorway'. No, you're really stupid. Pack in the cruising.

Motorway driving is bad enough, busy enough, without needles extra traffic which these poor drivers cause.

It's easy to get annoyed driving, Road Rage they used to call it. But middle lane cruising is the one single thing which gets me. You can bet your life that when you hit a four lane motorway the middle lane cruiser slips in to lane three, thus causing exactly the same congestion problem over a wider area.

We need a government advertising campaign to stamp out this nasty little habit. Gordon? Gordon? Are you listening, Gordon?