Judging by online comments, tweets and positive support, I can’t be the only one who feels that Kent Police deserve a hearty pat on the back for dealing (appropriately) with a menace of modern motorway driving; the middle-lane road hogger.

Of course it’s not really a modern phenomenon, lane discipline has always been a contentious issue, but it does seem that driving standards are getting worse. (Or maybe I’m just getting old?). Having said that, it has become such a widespread problem, that it even has its own acronym now: MLM (Middle-lane Moron).

Furthermore, this action from the Police is a positive boon to proving that actual, real, live Police officers shouldn’t just be replaced by the ‘yellow vultures’.

3 miles of MLM

Earlier this month, Kent Police followed a motorist on a stretch of the M20 motorway between London and Folkestone, who had caught their attention by hogging the middle-lane for over three miles before being stopped, despite the motorway being clear, and relatively empty.

When stopped, he was adamant that he’d done nothing wrong, claiming that the motorway was empty, in fact, according to the tweet released by Kent Police, the driver refused to accept that it was careless driving. They issued the driver with a Traffic Offence Report (TOR) and reported him for Careless Driving, which could see a £100 fine being issued, along with three penalty points.

Admittedly, the driver wasn’t causing a nuisance as such, so perhaps some may view the penalty as a little harsh, but the reality is that this is lazy, inattentive driving, and better driver education can only happen when instances of such, are spotted.

43% of drivers admit to being a lane-hogger

In a survey that was conducted last year, 43% of respondents admitted to hogging lane two, with most of the drivers claiming that it avoids having to move out of lane when confronted with slower vehicles further down the road. That’s not a great reason.

Slightly better reasoning is that it makes them feel safer – 22% used that to justify it, but worryingly, 11% stated that as they’re driving at the maximum permissible speed limit, no one should driving faster than them, therefore, there was no need for them to pull over. Or perhaps to put it another way – they’re lazy, incompetent and likely to cause an accident.

With ever dwindling numbers of Traffic Police, it can be tempting to admonish other drivers, to make your point that they shouldn’t be doing X, Y or Z by causing an obstruction to them, but this is similar to ‘brake testing’ another driver and will likely cause further issues, be they traffic related, or even putting yourself at personal risk.

Poor driving

I loathe the fact that I have to share the roads with poor drivers – the type that thinks nothing of steering with their knees while sipping their takeaway coffee and checking emails, or that can’t understand why road markings separate different lanes, or even, the drivers that cut across a junction into the oncoming lane to save themselves an extra 0.5 seconds of time when turning right.

Our road laws and regulations have been written to accommodate these drivers; swathes of ‘National Speed Limit’ roads have been reduced to 50, or even 40 mph, we now have traffic islands (roundabouts) that include traffic lights as a permanent fixture, and even ridiculous warning such as ‘Bend in Road’ purely so as these motorists don’t do any injury to themselves, or others.

There was a time that people took pride in their driving prowess; similar to flying an aeroplane, there would be a vast knowledge of rules and etiquette, mechanical inspections were carried out when the driver felt there was a need, they understood the ‘two second’ rule (and abides by it), changing weather conditions meant altering the driving style … today though, driving and owning a car has become so easy that any MLM can do it without a second thought, and that’s the problem.

Better education

We always say that we aren’t taught to drive, but to pass our test, and that should change. Better driver educations starts from day one, and learner drivers should be taught road manners, along with roadcraft, and then (and only then) should they be allowed to put in for their test.

This would reduce such instances of lane-hogging, perhaps even increase the flow of traffic, and make driving a better, more pleasurable experience again.

Should the motorist be prosecuted for careless driving? What should happen to drivers that believe they are the law? Should we teach road manners when learning to drive? Let us know in the comments.

Image credit: Screenshot from video by Zanthas

A new study by short-term insurance provider, Veygo, has revealed that if you’re looking to let the train take the strain, you could be charged as much as £40 PER DAY to park your car in the station car park. In a typical working year (less weekends and holiday), that could equate to as much as £9,000.

Of course that’s with a London weighting, surely once you get outside of London, things are much cheaper? Selly Oaks in the West Midlands has free parking, as does Kirkby in Merseyside, and you’ll pay just £2.40 for a whole day of parking in Benfleet, Essex.

However, Reading station charge £25 per day, Glasgow and Edinburgh charge £24 & £22 respectively, and Manchester Piccadilly want £21 for a day’s parking. Cheap at almost half the price of St. Pancras.

Intervention

We’re forever being told that we should use mass transit or public transportation to help the environment, and aside from the argument that in most cases, it really isn’t that great or reliable, we need to factor in costs.

Rail fares are due to be increased again in January, which will push the average price of a season ticket up by a further £100, which also means for the first time ever, average prices will be above £3,000.

Add in a extra few thousand pounds for parking, and you have yourself the potential to buy a cleaner, greener vehicle that’s capable of transporting you and your family, with shopping or luggage to the exact destination you wish to be.

Whether you agree or disagree with the left-leaning politics, there’s an argument to be made regarding nationalising mass transit, just to stamp out the blatant profiteering and extortion from the privately-owned companies behind the networks.

Politicking

It doesn’t matter who is in power, or whether you believe that mass transit will never be the solution that’s required, surely, if the authorities want to promote the use of this kind of transport, they should  do more to subsidise passenger costs, or even implement regulations to prevent the disparity throughout the country.

Charging by popularity rather than actual cost makes a great business case, but effectively, the authorities are promoting the use of these networks, and the network operators are benefitting hand-over-fist thanks to this coercion. Shouldn’t something be done?

Yes, there’s an argument that real estate prices need to be accounted for, you’d expect some discrepancy between the Southern areas and those further North, but £9,000 difference is greed, pure and simple.

Most expensive rail car parks

Of course, we could leave the car at home, walk or cycle to the station if we’re young and fit enough, but that’s a solution for the minority, not the majority. After a quick search, for me to travel to London early morning, and back early evening, I’d be looing at £141 for the rail fare, and a further £12 to park – £153 against a rough cost of £50 (inc ULEZ and Congestion).

Is it really that surprising that passengers are choosing their car over rail travel? A third of the price, with all of the convenience. Add in a family and the differences really stack up.

Despite some protestations in other articles, I’m all for trying to help reduce air pollution, live a cleaner lifestyle and reduce my carbon footprint, but if I had to do that three times a week, it would be cheaper to rent a room than travel, and that just can’t be right.

Top 10 car parks

The top ten most expensive (outside of London) and cheapest rail car parks  are:

In the interest of fairness, it’s worth pointing out that along with travel season tickets, a number of the station car parks also offer parking season tickets, which could reduce the charge significantly – Reading station for example offer a season ticket for ‘just’ £1,850, which could see a saving of around £3,775 over standard rates.

But of course, that begs the question … if they can offer parking for that cheaper price, and still make a profit, why are they blatantly ripping off other motorists?

What are your thoughts? Should the government step in and regulate the prices? Are the station operators just being greedy? Let us know in the comments.

“Grately Railway Station, Hampshire.” by Mike Cattell is licensed under CC BY 2.0. 

Bristol City Council is aiming for the fastest improvement in air quality to meet legal nitrogen dioxide (NO2) targets in a bold plan with more aggressive measures than those used in London. In what would be a landmark ruling, Bristol could be the first UK city to ban all diesel private passenger cars.

The council’s proposals also recommend a charging Clean Air Zone (CAZ) for non-compliant commercial vehicles and if the government approves the plans and changes the law to put a diesel car ban in place, both reforms could come into effect March 2021.

Up in the air

Bristol City Council (who have received £1.65million from the government to fund how they would tackle the city’s air pollution) have spent £1million and missed two earlier deadlines resulting in the government threatening legal action and granting an extension while ordering them to produce a plan.

Earlier in the year, the council proposed two ways to get NO2 levels down to the European Union target. Their first option proposed a ban on all diesel vehicles from the city centre between the hours of 7 am and 3 pm, while the second was to introduce a clean air charging zone akin to the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) in London only for commercial vehicles, with fees of up to £100 a day.

The council left the plans open for the public vote, over six weeks throughout the summer, with the most popular of the two options to go to the Bristol City Council’s Cabinet. They received over 5,000 responses with 3,414 respondents saying they thought a CAZ would be a good way to improve air quality and 66% of people were ‘very concerned’ about the health impacts of air pollution.

In many parts of the city, air pollutants exceed legal and safe European and World Health Organisation limits and need reducing as a matter of urgency to lessen the impact on health, but the council forecast they wouldn’t meet legal limits until 2028 and so are proposing a third, hybrid plan, which combines both options and which they’ve estimated will hit the city’s NO2 legal target by 2025.

A modest proposal?

Marvin Rees, Mayor of Bristol, acknowledging the proposals were ambitious, feels they prove the council’s dedication to tackling air quality so they meet legal limits within the shortest time, without ‘disproportionally affecting citizens on lower incomes’ which he says will happen with a ‘blanket approach’ to charging vehicles.

‘Protecting the most vulnerable people from pollution is central to these plans, and we have ensured that all impacts have been carefully considered.

‘If approved, mitigation measures will support those most affected, especially those living in the most deprived communities’, said the mayor.

Nicholas Lyes, Head of Roads Policy for the RAC, says that while the motoring organisation recognises that Bristol must improve the city’s pollution, the impact of the proposals on diesel owners would be ‘unprecedented’.

‘Major routes into, out of, and even around the city—like Temple Way and Brunel Way—would become out of bounds, with diesel vehicles forced onto other roads, which risks causing congestion problems where they don’t exist at the moment.

‘Bristol has bold plans to improve its public transport system, but major improvements like its mooted rapid transit system or even more park and ride sites are still many years from becoming a reality,’ he added.

Mr Lyes said that many motorists must use their cars for journeys because of a lack of economical and reliable alternatives and that not everybody can afford the penalty of an early exit from their car finance packages.

The council also propose a scrappage scheme, but Mr Lyes said it could be very expensive for owners of older cars to switch to something different and that the RAC worries the scrappage scheme wouldn’t get drivers into cleaner cars because they’re too expensive.

Mixed feelings

Bristol is my closest city. It was my place of work (and partying) for eight wonderful years and I almost moved there. This story is therefore close to my heart, and I wanted to see what the locals had to say on the matter.

Responses from residents online are mixed. Somebody wrote that the latest diesel cars are cleaner than petrol engines and so the council’s plans are ‘complete overkill and wrong’. Another claimed most people rely on their cars because public transport isn’t affordable or reliable and clean cars cost more than most can afford.

Others are happy with the proposals, congratulating Bristol and telling them to ‘ban all cars, get the lazy gits on the buses.’

Somebody else claimed he had reduced his asthma treatment by half and no longer needed to remove ‘black sludge’ from his windscreen each day after moving from Hotwells to Lawrence Weston and the impact on health from poor air quality is something we can’t dispute.

According to a King’s College London and UK100 report, higher pollution days in the city cause four more cardiac arrests and an additional 18 hospital admissions for asthma or strokes amongst children and adults. We know air pollution can cause permanent lung damage in babies and young children and the worsening of lung and heart disease in older people. In fact, it leads to about 300 premature deaths for Bristol residents each year.

Council data shows that 40% of Bristol’s NO2 pollution comes from diesel cars, while diesel buses and coaches produce 23%, and 22% of emissions come from diesel vans. While the mayor is under a legal obligation to produce a clean air plan to protect the people of Bristol, we have to ask—will the proposals just move air pollution to the outer suburbs? And what about the impact on the poorest and most disadvantaged in the city?

One thing on which I think we can agree is that we need the government to change our transport system to one that fulfils the present and future needs of both our society and our planet, or in common parlance, one that is ‘shipshape and Bristol fashion’.

The Outline Business Case (OBC) went to a cabinet meeting yesterday (Tuesday 5th November). If approved, the proposals go to the Joint Air Quality Unit (JAQU) before a final plan submission to government next year. The deadline for implementation is March 2021.

What do you think of Bristol City council’s proposals? How could the council improve upon their plans? Will the proposed ban affect you? Tell us in the comments.

“Cycling Bristol” by Tejvan Pettinger is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

We often hear about ‘range anxiety’ when talking about electric vehicles, of course it refers to the angst you feel when travelling anything further than your regular journey, or pushing the limits of the range; will you make it to your destination?

Charging stations are becoming commonplace, although still not quite as readily available or accessible as traditional garage forecourts, and of course, by their very nature could be occupied for some time, but researchers at Penn State University in the U.S. may have the answer.

80% charge in half an hour

Manufacturers of electric vehicles are constantly developing methods to increase charge rates, or lessen charge time, to make the whole process of driving a BEV (Battery Electric Vehicle) as convenient as possible – it really wasn’t that along ago that running out of charge meant a ten-hour (at least) wait, while the electricity trickled through the cells at a snail’s pace.

Most mainstream manufacturers now offer something like an 80% charge in thirty minutes, but even that figure still lags way behind the traditional internal combustion refuel where the longest wait could be in the queue to pay for it.

This is just one of the reasons that people quote as to why they’d never own a BEV, or why an all-electric vehicle will never have the same dominance as ICE. But what if you could completely recharge in ten minutes?

New process, same tech

Recharging batteries (be that a regular lead-acid, phone, camera … pretty much any battery) faster than recommended has always been able to be done, but invariably it damages the battery and shortens the lifespan; be that the life of the battery itself, or the charge it holds.

And when you hear that replacement batteries can cost thousands of pounds (a Nissan Leaf battery pack for example will cost £4920), it’s the wise choice to do all you can to prevent damaging the batteries, and maximise their life.

Lithium-ion batteries are no different – rapid charging will lead to degradation; at lower temperatures, the ions end up as spikes on the anode electrode rather than having a smooth finish, in a process called ‘lithium plating’. This leads to reduced capacity and potentially premature failure. The way to avoid lithium plating is to charge at higher temperatures.

However, heating the battery is not without problems either; while it avoids the plating issue, it can deteriorate the battery in other ways, so the key is to find the sweet spot.

The Penn State team have found that by heating the batteries to 60C, and then rapidly cooling them to ambient temperatures, lithium plating is avoided, as is heat damage – the best of both worlds.

New battery

To make this technology work, the team have developed a new battery which incorporates a thin nickel foil, which when activated, creates an electrical circuit that heats the internal structure of the battery in less than 30 seconds, the cooling effect comes from the vehicle’s own cooling system.

Professor Chao-Yang Wang at Penn State said: “We demonstrated that we can charge an electrical vehicle in 10 minutes for a 200 to 300-mile range, and we can do this maintaining 2,500 charging cycles, or the equivalent of half a million miles of travel. The 10-minute trend is for the future and is essential for adoption of electric vehicles because it solves the range anxiety problem.”

Essentially, this could be great news for buyers that have, up until now, been putting off a purchase of a BEV due to worries over charging, but as with all things technology related, this will mean a further increase in purchase price until the tech is readily and widely adopted.

It has taken around ten years of constant development for regular electric vehicles to even get close to their ICE counterparts in terms of purchase price, and the majority of that price differential was always accounted for by battery prices, so it’s likely that a return to newer battery technology could once again push those prices upwards.

With that said, the whole BEV market is really still in its infancy, it will take decades of development for the tech to plateau, just the same as the internal combustion engine. No doubt that we’ll see waves of new technology being introduced which will lead to a surge in pricing, before settling back down again – there will be a constant ebb and flow of pricing, right up until the ‘next big thing’.

There was most definitely a time that motorists, journalists, and ‘petrolheads’ laughed at the thought of an electric vehicle becoming mainstream, but that time is almost here, and thanks to technology and processes, these new vehicles will be better than anything that has preceded them.

What do you think … will reduced charge times be enough to turn the tables for you? Should we just embrace BEVs with the same vigour as we do (did?) the petrol engine? Let us know in the comments.

“Electric Car” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine Photostream is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

While I’m sometimes dismissive of a handful of new driving regulations, and feel that the authorities are too reliant on using technology to ‘spy’ on us, without discretion, lenience or the ability to put our case, there does come a time when they seem to get things right.

Until recently, to be prosecuted for using a mobile phone at the wheel, you had to be using the device for communication – text messaging or calls etc, and although there are circumstances that could see you prosecuted for using the phone for other uses, they were in the minority.

In 2018, a member of the public was convicted for using his phone to film the aftermath of a road accident while driving through it, he appealed the conviction in the High Court and was cleared. Lady Justice Thirlwall said: “The legislation does not prohibit all use of a mobile phone held while driving.”

“It prohibits driving while using a phone for calls and other interactive communication – and holding it at some stage during that process.”

Closing the loophole

Research by the RAC has shown that 17% of UK drivers admit to checking their phones for texts, emails and social media while driving, and 35% of the under-25s regularly do so.

In 2017, there were 773 incidents of road traffic collisions where the driver using a mobile phone was to blame, this includes 43 fatalities, and 135 serious injuries. Clearly, the drastic cut in police numbers (just under 30% in a decade) has exacerbated the problem.

But similar to a number of other legal actions and processes, the authorities are now turning to technology to enforce new regulations; new HD cameras that use a combination of ‘sophisticated algorithms’ and artificial intelligence to determine whether a driver is using their phone, and it won’t matter for what reason.

Hi-tech cameras

Highways England are currently trialling hi-tech cameras that attach to the overhead gantries, and are capable of automatically detecting, photographing, and sending to the relevant authorities, hi-def pictures showing the driver using their phone; a Notice of Intended Prosecution (NIP) will shortly follow.

Similar systems trialled in Australia earlier this year, caught more than 100,000 motorists trying to cheat the system (in just six months), and it’s hoped that there will be similar results in the UK. A spokesman for the Department of Transport (DfT) said that “some very early trial work on technology to detect mobile phone usage on the strategic road network is in place” and the results were encouraging.

The end of the Police

While this is yet another nail in the coffin for the police, with the government outsourcing more processes to technology, you’d have to argue that while technology may have many, wonderful uses, policing the roads to this extent shouldn’t really be one of them.

The reliance on tech means that the government (and it really doesn’t matter which one) can almost justify the decrease in numbers, spending and budget; with ‘criminals’ being caught 24/7 through the use of cameras, why should they spend more money on actual human resource to get the job done?

But this is a very short-sighted view (but would we expect anything less?) from the ministers and politicians – there will come a day when cars virtually police themselves; they already have the technology to adjust speeds, and of course when they’re fully autonomous, accidents will be fewer, speeding will be albeit impossible, and it won’t matter whether you’re making calls, sending video messages or updating your social media.

So then we could perhaps turn to other ‘real’ crime, except that the numbers of police will have dwindled so much, and the expertise in catching criminals forgotten, and the ‘thin blue line’ will be so thin, as to be non-existent.

Technology may be great for simple, repetitive and mundane tasks such as catching motorists flouting the law, but not great for chasing down the burglar running from a crime scene, or stopping the drug dealer from handing out parcels of junk on the street corner, for this, we need human resource.

Breaking the law

I’m genuinely pleased that the tech exists to catch drivers using mobile phones (for whatever reason), I think they’re a scourge of our society, and repeat offenders should actually lose their licence, but the politicians, law makers and authorities need to understand that motoring crimes aren’t the be all and end all.

Any monies saved through the use of technology should be fed back into the system to develop further resource, not be seen as a bonus to pay the politicians for sleeping in the Commons.

What do you think to the tech? Should repeat offenders lose their privilege to drive? Are the authorities heading down a slippery slope? Let us know in the comments.

“Using a mobile phone while driving stock photo” by DPP Law is licensed under CC BY 2.0.