why is the roads full or idiots ........RANT

[topforcein 1764]

my wife recently brought a run around for her to get to and from work.

and over the last week the car park at her work has been target'd by pikey kids mainly throwing bricks at the staff cars and braking into them so she said she wont risk takeing it to work so put me on the insurance so i could drop her off. know i have not drove a car since my car got took of the road nearly 4 years back.

every time i go in the car i get cut up not given way to and so on i did buy the wife a dash cam last year and i will not go anywhere with out it on.

i recon the driving instructors and also the test examiners have a lot to answer for for alowing these idiots on the road

i used to drive for a living and i thought i was bad then but boy that was nothing compared to the clowns on the road these days

Edited September 28, 2021 by acprc
Implied swearing in title...

[Superluminal 3750]

I think because there is no real means of penalising people for a general terrible standard of driving. The whole focus on policing roads in the last twenty years or so has been on making sure people can be easily photographed and fined for marginally breaking the speed limit whether its safe to do so or not than dealing with someones terrible driving standards. I have a 45 mile each way commute to work every day and see some shocking driving. Mainly people being completely oblivious to what is going on around them and lack of observation / mirror checking.

[KEV THE REV 2307]

21 minutes ago, Superluminal said:

Mainly people being completely oblivious to what is going on around them and lack of observation / mirror checking.

Yes . I call it lack of spacial awareness - these drivers / people crop up in supermarkets / shops etc and don't have a clue what is going on , they should not be in charge of a shopping trolley let alone a car !!

[KEV THE REV 2307]

2 hours ago, topforcein said:

my car got took of the road nearly 4 years back.

a LOT has changed in just 4 years and many drivers are complete t**ls as you said  . I've been driving since 1979 and the changes I've seen are ****htening , and driving standards have slipped massively - it's a full metal - war zone out there !!

[KEV THE REV 2307]

4 hours ago, topforcein said:

has been target'd by pikey kids mainly throwing bricks at the staff cars and braking into them

Thank goodness for the local bobbies on the beat eh ? or we might have total chaos !! - -- wait a minute ....oh yes that's right it is total chaos out there

[Jonathon Gillham 4605]

I put much of it down to cars being so easy to drive people don't concentrate like they used to, mostly because they don't need to. My first car was a Mini Clubman 1100 and that actually forced you to focus on the job at hand with no power assistance etc. My current car is a ute (a small pickup for you Americans) so should be pretty utilitarian but has cameras giving an all round view, blindspot monitoring as well as all these other assistance things that get annoying. You could just press the accelerater and steer. Nothing else required, you could easily drift off and not focus on anything.

My previous car (loved it, its a shame it got written off) was a Jaguar XF and that got targeted though,  people would go out of their way to damage it in carparks. I always parked away from others and it got so many little dents etc which were clearly deliberate. So sad, that they would damage stuff like that

[Tbird232ci 333]

I'm glad to see that it's not just over here in the States.

Before the lockdowns, people drove like idiots, but it was the normal idiotic driving. You drove in it every day and knew what to expect. I worked through the lockdowns, and the lack of traffic was beautiful. Now that the majority of people are going back to work, and kids are back in school, it's as if people are driving for the first time. It's miserable.

[Willy iine 18805]

People are stupid here in the USA as well.  I learned early on when I started my car hobby to always have a daily driver.  It's not worth risking my pristine cars I like to drive on the weekends only to get damaged or vandalized while parked at work or during daily tasks.  I've had my cars keyed, dented, glass broken, kicked (with foot prints remaining), bumped by another car, even backed into by a truck while parked causing all sorts of damage. 

I've even got nailed by a blob of yellow aircraft grease that fell from the sky near an airport.    big bird crap..

[topforcein 1764]

around the schools is worse parents are just plain idol they live 2 mins away and drive their kids to school block everywhere up park on the pavement park on junctions on bends and quite often nearly hits kids and parents that do walk there kids whilst trying to squeeze into a spot a micro car would have trouble parking plus in the road i live in their is a school plus also to add a twist to the plot it has a bus route also now the road is only wide enough for 2 cars to drive so when they get going its decends into chaos. i am glad i dont have to do the school run anymore.

everyone used to say the "white"van/truck driver was the worst on the road but from what i have seen in the past few weeks that def is not the case 

to me it just simply biols down to the incompetent driving instructors/examiners that are to blame as they are far worse to start and have no idea on how to learn/train a new driver.

for me women make the best driving instructor's as my wife and me and also my sun have learned with them and i will find another for my other sun when his licence finally turn's up

 

[speedy_w_beans 4272]

What I find kind of funny (and sad at the same time!) is that various countries are now thinking about requiring "driver monitoring systems" in cars to compensate for the complacency that comes with active safety systems like automatic brakes, lane keep assist, blind spot monitoring, etc.

Solve one problem, create another.  Rinse and repeat.  Meanwhile our cars are bloating with so much additional electronic content in them.

[alvinlwh 5891]

I used to ride a motorbike before I drive (even though I got my licences the other way round) and out in Asia, we do not usually have full leather protection, not even a pair of gloves. That was how I learnt to be defensive on the road and my hazard perception is through the roof, as in a crash, my skin got scratched before any metal. Come to think of it, in all the crashes I had, no paint were damaged (though I have plenty of road rashes to show for them). So when I moved onto 4 wheels, I drive the same way I ride, defensively (though lane splitting is kind of impossible in a Mondeo). 

These days, I walk to work. Decided it is cheaper to just buy a place 5 minutes walk to the office than to keep a car. 

[SlideWRX 781]

5 hours ago, topforcein said:

around the schools is worse parents are just plain idol they live 2 mins away and drive their kids to school, block everywhere up, park on the pavement, park on junctions, on bends and quite often nearly hits kids and parents that do walk there kids whilst trying to squeeze into a spot a micro car would have trouble parking.

I have a 7 year old now, and a couple years ago when he started going to school (kindergarten in the US), I was blown away by how many parents dropped their kids off at school and picked them up.  This school went up to grade 5 (kindergarten is'0', so 6 grades/years), so I kinda expect most kids in the 1-3 grade range to start taking the bus, but apparently not!  The school is used to this though; they have a lot of road frontage where they put a lane for parents to park while in line while they wait to pick up their kids...

Once a vaccine for young-uns comes out, and he gets back to in-person, we'll see if the wife lets him take the bus home, or she re-arranges her schedule...

[SlideWRX 781]

11 hours ago, Tbird232ci said:

I'm glad to see that it's not just over here in the States.

Before the lockdowns, people drove like idiots, but it was the normal idiotic driving. You drove in it every day and knew what to expect. I worked through the lockdowns, and the lack of traffic was beautiful. Now that the majority of people are going back to work, and kids are back in school, it's as if people are driving for the first time. It's miserable.

Yeah, it seemed to get noticeably worse after the initial lockdown.  Kinda like when the first big snow of the season comes along - many forget how to drive in bad weather. Now, many just forgot how to drive regularly.

[87lc2 2659]

I agree that driver's are generally awful these days, but where are you guys living that you're having your cars vandalized regularly?  I live just outside of Philadelphia, PA in the US which is a **** city and that stuff rarely, if ever, happens here. I still keep my hobby cars away from the public as much as possible, but my daily driver is 20 years old with almost 300k miles and not a scratch.  I'd be *******ed if someone intentionally scratched, dented, or otherwise for no reason.  Sorry that you guys have to deal with that. 

[87lc2 2659]

I will second that drivers have become waaay more aggressive since the lockdowns early last year here in the US.  I take a mjaor highway 40 miles each way to work and while people have always driven at high speeds, people are now weaving in and out like crazy and just genrally being aggressive or stupid, sometime both.  Absolutle morons if you ask me.  I like driving fast as much as anyone, but there's a time and place.  

[Superluminal 3750]

Theyre all at it tonight its chaos.

Just got back from work and bearing in mind its nearly midnight. Queues for petrol stations backing up out the forecourt and into the carrigeway of the A127 and A12 so its down to a single lane in places.

[topforcein 1764]

yeah the same i drove past 2 stations when takeing the wife to work and both were queueing onto the road and the best was the supermarket that was around a 1/4 mile long

someone working for the petrol stations should walk past the cars and check gauge's if they have more than a 1/4 tank of fuel then send them on there way  these idiots are just dahm well idiots and you can blame the stupid press for putting it out there to start with and then say not to panic buy ....... i mean its like sitting down to a big red button and being told DONT press it its this supidity that sends the country into caos as it has the knock on effect

[Wooders28 4719]

Driving is notably bad after lockdown. For alot of people, it looks like they've just plain forgotten.

In the days of the roads getting busier, I had someone reversing up a duel carriageway ,as I presume they'd missed a junction, a car going the wrong way around a roundabout, and someone looking at me, as they pulled out ,right in front of me at a roundabout, side on, like police stopping a stolen car !! 🤷‍♂️

In general, before lockdown, driving standards had dropped, too much dependence on technology,  I'm getting a bit guilty of that, where I used to have to feather the throttle, now i can just leave it flat, and let the little flashing light do it's thing. 

Also, newer cars seem to be heading down the ,big touch screen route ,which in recent studies, have found them to be more distracting than texting whilst driving, and I can believe it, you now need to search through menus, just to alter the heating settings on some!?!? 

In the UK, you need to pass a 'theory' test first, before taking the Practical, and part of that is 'hazzard perception'. I had a go at this, as its a video, and you click the mouse when you see a hazzard. I got a worryingly very low score, as it turned out I was clicking too early !??! 🤷‍♂️. One was a tractor, in the inside lane on a duel carriageway, I was clicking ,at the point I'd be looking in my mirror, checking for a gap, to safely move into the outside lane....WRONG, you click the mouse as you're about to set the airbags off.....WT!?! 🤦‍♂️

 

And breathe.....🙄

 

On 9/20/2021 at 7:49 AM, Jonathon Gillham said:

My previous car (loved it, its a shame it got written off) was a Jaguar XF and that got targeted though

Didn't know if had been written off! Shame.

We got rid of ours, as apart from it being the most unreliable car I've ever owned, it was a target, and the wife stopped driving it on anything other than main A roads (unclasified roads in Scotland, are often thin enough to need passing places), as I can only presume people thought, there's a nice car, they'll give way. Then there was a spate of similar cars getting stolen from driveways 

(Wasn't sad to see it go, as it was an auto, turns out I don't like autos....🙄) 

 

[Pumesta 407]

Sure if you don't speed, aren't sloshed out of your head, or use the phone you are the best driver in the world.  Because that's the only three thing that the police seem to focus on

[topforcein 1764]

20 hours ago, Pumesta said:

Sure if you don't speed, aren't sloshed out of your head, or use the phone you are the best driver in the world.  Because that's the only three thing that the police seem to focus on

true true even more so this time of year