Fantastic observations

On Tue, 19 Sep 2006, Nel

I think if it's done intentionally it's a form of greed and indicative of the personality driving the vehicle, although I would guess there are factors which affect it. I've noticed a bit of a trend with the 4x4 drivers to do this more than others - perhaps the psychology of having a vehicle that can barge its way around with brute force.

About three weeks ago I got stuck in Birmingham near the NEC trying to join the M42 northbound. The traffic was backed up all the way onto the A45 and the local roads. At one point I was trying to filter into the traffic turning left ahead, while the traffic turning right had started to move. So I was left high and dry in the right lane with two choices - stay put and wait for someone to let me in and hold up the traffic behind me which had started moving again, or drive to the end of the lane and try and filter in at the end, which left plenty of room for traffic to move past.

That's what I did in the end, as it let the traffic on the right move again. However I was very conscious that it may have seemed that I was doing exactly what you described - trying to get ahead by a few yards with no real be benefit. Someone let me in fairly quickly - probably because traffic was moving at just a couple of feet every few minutes. I'm not sure what one can do in that situation - I tried to move over as soon as it was okay to do so but the traffic behind me put me in a bit of a situation.

There were some interesting manoeuvers in the jam. A lot of cars drove over a wide strip of grbutt to get onto the A45. One car drove onto the pavement and up a footpath just to get to the other side of the roundabout. It saved him a 40 minute wait but what a thing to do.

In the end it was an accident on the M42 southbound that was holding up the traffic - as soon as you could get to the north slip from the main roundabout everything was clear. It took 1hr 45m to drive the 1.5 miles onto the M42.

-- Chris