Angle iron anger

These days, there’s an awful lot which annoys me about motorway driving. I’ve written previously about the Highways Agency Wombles being ineffective at anything other than causing congestion (although I do admire their use of the Mitsubishi Shogun).

Rarely do you see a traffic cop in a marked car on the motorways. Enforcement is either by a yellow camera or a sign threatening your livelihood should you even think of breaking free of the rat pack as it bunches-up dangerously. Actual police cars are of the stealth variety: a Germanic saloon finished in dark metallic, with sinister-looking blokes in polo tops hammering down the outside lane. Are they chasing motorists or terrorists? Who knows.

I feel there’s something fundamentally dishonest about the practice of using unmarked cop cars to catch speeding motorists. Likewise, the people in the control centres giving out false messages on the dot matrix boards which frame our motorways. And who programmed the logarithms in those aforementioned control centres to switch on cameras as they lower the speed limits? How many times have you panicked as the road went from 70 to 50 to 60 to 40 to 3 points? Behind those variable limits lurks a fixed camera. All very shabby.

However, my biggest bugbear is the cavalier way the people who repair our roads break the law.

To leave a road sign on the road after the works are completed is an offence. It is illegal. So why are the motorways of this country littered with angle irons either propped up through the central reservation or by sandbags slung over the legs? Frequently you’ll find them lying flat in the central reservation area or on the hard shoulder, long since blown over by winds and passing traffic. Some still carry a slippery aluminium sign in the frame; most don’t.

Now I don’t know about you, but having loose metal structures either laid flat or standing at head height at the

‘Leaving a road sign on the road after the works are completed is illegal’

extremities of a motorway scares the life out of me. The potential for danger was brought home to me when I had to take evasive action to avoid an accident which had spilled over into the outside lane. Braking hard and steering towards the central reservation – flat, tarmacced, no kerbs, waist-high concrete barrier – I suddenly became aware of a lump of abandoned ironwork.

Given the option, would you rather hit another vehicle, which is at least designed to withstand impacts, or a sharpedged steel structure?

Something needs to be done to stop this illegal, dangerous and environmentally-unfriendly practice, as well as clean up what’s already out there. Never mind penalising a motorist for doing 65 in a 60mph zone, fine the bloody contractors who were too lazy to clear up their signs. Instead of closing two lanes for a truck to have its blownout tyre replaced, cart away the scrap left from years before.

Maybe if I could see a sense of proportion of fair play being doled out on the roads, I wouldn’t be so angry. But I can’t.