Author Archives: David

Nominations for the best town for driving award 2014

Our first nomination for this award goes to Stone in Staffordshire

What makes Stone such a great place great to drive?

  • Stone has lots of parking spaces

We visited Stone Staying at the excellent Stone House Hotel 


Note the limited parking space in this old picture. Now the excellent hotel has removed the lawn to make place for many more cars to park

There’s not even one cycle rack.

(This poor cyclists struggled to get his bike through the warren of passages in this quaint hotel to his room

                    

Hehe)

You can park on the pedestrian precinct

You can park behind most shops and banks on the high street.

  • In Stone parking is free or cheap

£3 a day to park in town

Parking is free if you drive to health centre

  • Stone has clear separate space for driving

Barriers help prevent walkers from getting in the way and those pavements make it difficult to walk. Walkers are safely behind barriers decorated with flowers that can best be seen from a car. It maybe hard to cross the road on foot but no-one really needs to walk anywhere. Restaurants and pubs all have good sized car parks.

Most of the space in town is given to people who choose to drive. Locals would rather drive the short distance to work in town rather than walk or cycle since driving is so easy. The town centre is surrounded by a multi-lane gyratory which makes passing through Stone easy for people driving from Stafford to Stoke-On-Trent. Some people would rather drive through Stone than use the motorway (see map below).

There are some problems with this as noted on a local website A Little Bit of Stone. It seems that people who work within the ring road gyratory can’t get their cars out of the centre car parks after work because all the other drivers enjoying the space for driving.

  • Stone has great views for drivers passing through

The pretty town centre looks best through the windscreen of a car. The railing by the road are decorated with flowers as part of Stone on Bloom. So beautiful we’d rather spend the day riding round the ring road than walking round a National Trust garden

  • In Stone you can drive anywhere

Driving along the pedestrian precinct is fine. You can’t cycle there, (note the ‘cyclists dismount’ sign) and no one seems (needs) to walk there.

You can drive on the grass in the recreational spaces around the town

  • Stone people tolerate a little collateral damage

 

A little pollution, noise,occasional congestion, obesity, heart disease and the occasional injury or death are a small price to pay for the freedom to drive

Stone is only 3 miles across


View Larger Map

Which is why we nominate Stone, Staffordshire

for Best Town For Motoring Award 2014

Which town will you nominate?

Great plan from Boris

Not ‘Bonkers’

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Roger Lawson of the Alliance of British Drivers is wrong when he objected to £913m being spent on a scheme that favours cyclists over other road users in London. (As reported by the BBC)

The Mayors vision For Cycling pdf available here

It is self evident from the picture on the front of his cycling plan that London Mayor Boris Johnson, and his sidekick cycling Czar Andrew Gilligan are doing a great service to London’s ‘beleaguered drivers’. By promising to build separated cycle lanes all over London. (And from that artists impression it looks like the cyclers won’t be able to leave their little lane)

 

Drive along the Victoria Embankment today, you’ll encounter cyclists all over the road

Not for long, once that segregated cycle East-West cycle lane gets built they’ll be out of our way. A small tweak in the law could then ban them from riding on our roads.

Another reason Mr. Lawson is wrong is that these lanes may well encourage some ‘drivers’, who would like to cycle but are scared to because of… er, drivers, to give cycling a go which will leave more room on the roads for the rest of us.

As to Boris’ plan to “de-Lycrafy cycling” making it look like a normal activity. That would do everyone a favour.

 

 

New Year Resolution

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We resolve this year to make more trips by car, more often.

 

As well as driving a nice car to feel more attractive we wish to ensure we get our money’s worth by putting in the miles.

We therefore resolve to:

  • Give up walking to the shops for the milk and paper. We’ll drive.
  • Give the kids a lift to their school round the corner
  • Stop the family Sunday cycling in the park. We’ll go for a Sunday drive
  • Stop using the underground for nights on the town. We’ll drive
  • Leave the engine running while parked up as long as possible

We resolve to make this year ‘”The Year of the Car”

Christmas Driving

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What would Jesus drive?

(Post your thoughts on our twitter feed)

There’s no better day to go for a spin than on Christmas day (apart from drive to work day of course). You will own the road, be able to drive faster than usual, can jump a few lights and no one will notice.

Put the roast in the oven, take the car out the garage, deck it out with sprigs of holly and drive to the sound of your favorite carols.

Merry Christmas from all of us at Drive to Work Day

Drive to Work Day -A great success!

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Thanks to all the many thousands of people who turned out en mass to take part in London’s Drive to Work Day. See how we took over the centre of London creating gridlock. (We took an Addison Lee Cab. Great service. Thanks)

Work now begins to make Drive To Work Day 2013 an even greater success. Next years date to be announced early in the New Year.

Post your stories about your drive to work. Tweet using #LDtWD

The Final Insult

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It’s the eve of Drive to Work Day.

While we have already outlined many reasons to drive to work tomorrow we were taken aback when we came across this final insult to car drivers:

It is not enough that we have to pay so much to park our precious cars. To see a fine parking space given over to at least 10 cycle parking spaces so graphically shown with that green car outline is a huge mockery of our simple pastime of driving our cars. As if we needed another reason to protest our plight by taking to 4 wheels tomorrow.

(See our links page for some helpful parking tips for central London tomorrow)

Check back tomorrow for a full report on the day. We are expecting between 100,000 to 200,000 participants who will all be leaving their bikes at home, their walking shoes in the cupboard and their Oyster card in the drawer and taking part in London’s first ever Drive to Work Day

Tweet your experience using #LDtWD @drivetoworkday

Free Driving

1 Day to Go

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U P D A T E

We reported AA President Edmund King’s ambiguous stance towards driving.  He spouts more anti driver drivel following showing of a BBC TV program showing what drivers have to deal with on our roads

Here are 10 more reasons to drive to work on 11th December:

Seeing Red

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Traffic lights are good. Road signs are good. They help drivers by keeping us in order. We don’t need to concentrate too much on what is going on around, just on the little red light waiting for it to go green. They keep people not in cars under control, everyone knows who has right of way. No confusion. So what if we have to wait sometime when it’s clearly safe to go. Better a little unnecessary pollution than anarchy on the roads.

So imagine how dismayed we felt when we saw this:

The idea of encouraging drivers to behave in different ways, becoming caring and sharing the road, empathising with pedestrians is absurd. Getting anywhere would take ages if we had to let anyone who chooses to walk, cross the road whenever they wanted to. Roads are for drivers in cars not for people who probably can’t afford a car (so don’t pay the taxes that we all pay for our roads). The current hierarchy on the road is fine thank you Martin Cassini.

Lets hope your views don’t get taken seriously.

Imagine the chaos on Drive to Work Day if the traffic  lights were turned off. Say no to any change in the hierarchy on the road by driving to work on 11th December!

“I like traffic lights red, amber and green” Monty Python’s Flying Circus

The Great Pollution Myth: Unfair for Drivers

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We recently read that drivers are exposed to more pollution than people on bikes or pedestrians due to the closeness of cars air intake to the exhaust emission of the vehicle in front and the limited exchange of air within cars.

We’ll show you the evidence and suggest 2 solutions.

We were dismayed to read research about this done by University of Roskilde, Department of Environment, Technology and Social Studies, Denmark. They state in their abstract:

It has frequently been claimed that cycling in heavy traffic is unhealthy, more so than driving a car. To test this hypothesis, teams of two cyclists and two car drivers in two cars were equipped with personal air samplers while driving for 4 h on 2 different days in the morning traffic of Copenhagen. The air sample charcoal tubes were analysed for their benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene (BTEX) content and the air filters for particles (total dust). The concentrations of particles and BTEX in the cabin of the cars were 2-4 times greater than in the cyclists’ breathing zone, the greatest difference being for BTEX. Therefore, even after taking the increased respiration rate of cyclists into consideration, car drivers seem to be more exposed to airborne pollution than cyclists.

Not completely trusting research from the bike loving Danes we checked elsewhere. Further research confirmed our concerns. A team in the car loving New Zealand (Canterbury University, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research and Auckland University) came up with similar findings

“The research found carbon monoxide levels in cars were more than 50 per cent higher than those experienced by cyclists, more than 80 per cent higher than bus passengers.”

Some people may conclude that driving less (and cycling/walking more) is a solution to this problem. We beg to differ we have 2 suggestion to equalise the the exposure to pollution between drivers and cyclists.

Solution 1: Driving Masks

It’s not bicyclists who should be expected to enjoy the freedom from pollution with a cycling mask. We drivers should wear one to keep the fumes at bay.

Solution 2: Promote low-down bicyclists

Get bicyclist to get closer to our exhaust emissions so they can help hoover up our noxious fumes

 What mask will you wear on when you drive to work on 11/12?

We’ll be wearing one of these: