Wednesday 25 April 2007

Safety concious motorists

Haven't been on here for a while. A month exactly to be precise. Clearly nothing of merit has occurred.

Actually, it probably has but I've been too lazy to find photos or link things up. All far too technical and wasting valuable 'Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em' time on UK Gold.

Anyway, driving back from work today, I happened to meet possibly the most safety concious motorcyclist in existence. To get to and from work, I have to go down a particularly tricky road due to the way its set up.

Now, I've tried to explain this in my head before I type it, but it's confused me so I'm going to go through it step by step:

1) Drive to end of road.
2) Meet junction with traffic coming from the right (obviously).
3) I want to go over the junction, but can't, as the local council have built a barrier preventing this from happening.
4) Don't know why the barrier is there.
5) To get over to the other side of the junction I can either:
5i) Go left and do an illegal u-turn or
5ii) Go left, turn up a side street, do a 3-point turn (legally), rejoin the road on the other side, then turn and continue on the road I want to be on.

I gave one of my colleagues a lift home a few times and the first time I did this, he thought I was going up the side street to take advantage of him or something. I didn't.

Anyway, back to my story, on the way back from work today (just realised I've written the instructions for my drive to work. Hmmm, read the above and reverse it), I'd just done my 3-point turn and was about to turn onto the main road again.

Now, I say I was about to turn back onto the main road but I was approaching it at about 2mph, preparing myself to get to a complete stop in order to check traffic in both directions (look, look and look again) before going over.

As I waited, I saw a motorcycle coming from the left. Although motorcycle may be an overly glamorous word for the contraption. It was one of those hairdryers on wheels that always seem to have a little box at the back for the (invariably elderly) rider's lunch. He saw me and proceeded to beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep and beep again. Then he gave me the evil eye.

I'm in a red car. It's a sunny day. I'm glad he saw me because I'd be worried if he didn't.

I clearly saw him as I heard the faint 'put-putting' sound of his motor from quite a way away before he tootled past.

But the beeping? There was no chance of running him over. I'd have had to have stopped laughing in order to do that.

I'm now interested to know if he approaches each and every junction with his diligent series of beeps to warn other drivers of his position.

I hope to see him again. He's a prime example of road safety in action.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well said.

A Simple Man said...

I haven't seen him again. Shame.