UK Winter Driving – Use Snow/Winter Tyres !!

 General  No Responses »
Nov 262010
 

As there are reports of large accumulations of snow, it is worth bringing up a point I have made before – winter tyres.

There are drivers out there who under the mistaken belief that their local council is responsible for gritting and salting the roads and mysteriously making them safe to drive on.

Well it doesn’t quite work like that.

Gritting and salting roads actually doesn’t accomplish much by itself – if it’s too cold it is not effective, and even when it isn’t, it requires the action of tyres grinding it onto the road to produce any effect. Of course the first few cars and trucks are not going to see any effect from the grit and salt – they’re going to get as much grip on the road as they would if it wasn’t gritted.

In most countries where conditions in the winter are conducive to snow and ice on the roads, special winter tyres with far deeper treads than normal tyres are commonly used. Indeed in many places it is illegal to drive without. Drivers are expected to take some of the responsibility for remaining safe on the roads themselves.

Yet in the UK, whenever we have traffic chaos on the roads the councils are blamed for not gritting enough – even when the conditions are too extreme for grit to be effective.

If you want to be safe on the roads this winter, get winter tyres – they will help!

Snow and Pavements in the UK

 General, Media, Politics  1 Response »
Jan 102010
 

I dare say everyone in the UK is familiar with this problem – pavements that after a big snow fall end up coated in a thin (or thick) sheet of white ice. It varies in slipperiness from “quite” to “you’re going down”, and is very tiring to walk on because of the strain of making sure you have a good grip before taking the next step.

Apparently in the dim and distant past – before the winter of 1962/1963 (which was a biggie if anyone is wondering), it was common for everyone to clear the pavement in front of their house. Now there’s still a few who do it today, or at least there are a few who eventually get around to it after a few days – suggestion: if you’re going to clear your pavement, do it early before it ends up as ice, it will be a lot easier!

But the vast majority of pavements do not get any kind of treatment until the council gets around to them. We could be all pathetic and whinge about how the council is not doing its job properly and do nothing else. Or we could do something sensible – like clear our pavements ourselves.

But what about all those dire warnings that clearing your pavement could make you liable for being sued when someone takes a tumble ? It is rumoured that this is why people stopped clearing their pavements after 1962/1963, after someone did sue. Well it’s a load of rancid rhinoceros dung :-

  • BBC News (the journalist says “possibly”; the solicitor says “It would be quite difficult to prove and quite difficult to proceed with a claim.”

There’s plenty of other articles out there saying that you might be sued for clearing the pavement outside your home; but you can be sued for popping out of the house and accidentally knocking over someone in your rush. The fault is not with the law (or with clearing pavements), but with morons who sue at the drop of a hat and at the sniff of a lucrative payout.

We could do with a law saying that those responsible for falls on icy pavements are a) the person who fell (whatever happened to personal responsibility anyway?) and b) the weather (or if you want a person to blame, start believing in one of those god people).

In the absence of such a law it is worth remembering that :-

  1. You are exceptionally unlikely to be sued.
  2. You can always counter-sue the moron for being an anti-social moron (well you can try).
  3. You could always clear half of the pavement so people have a choice of whether to use an untreated surface or a treated surface.
  4. You could always have a lottery for your street so you get to clear the pavement in front of a random house, and destroy the results afterwards. When the householder is sued they can legitimately claim “it wasn’t me wot done it”, and if you destroy the results of the lottery, and carefully forget who did what, the “culprit” won’t be found. Incidentally this also solves the problem of those who can’t or won’t help – those who volunteer get two or three houses to do, and the whole street gets cleared.

Going back a bit, the responsibility for falling rests with the person who slips and falls. It may be harsh, but so is life. It is perfectly possible to arrange for adequate footwear (and straight after this blog is posted, I’ll be buying online something equivalent to crampons). Blaming someone else for your tumble is the sort of behaviour that should bring howls of derision and a few rotten vegetables.

Similarly blaming “the council” for not sorting out the pavements is a little unfair – whilst the council may grit pavements when it is convenient for them to do so, their main responsibility is to ensure that food can get to the shops. In unusually harsh weather (which we have had just now), the council simply isn’t going to be able to get around to the “nice to haves”.

Part of the problem is the possibility of legal liability which the media does it’s unfortunate best to promote – not intentionally perhaps. But by mentioning it whenever the subject of clearing pavements comes up. Usually in a context that on the surface allows for the possibility that liability is ridiculous, but with an undercurrent that re-enforced the myth that clearing pavements could lead to legal trouble.

Is it too much to ask that the media leave this subject alone as much as possible ?

And lastly, lets ignore the possibility of being sued and just clear the pavements.

Inappropriate Gas Supply Whinging

 General  No Responses »
Jan 082010
 

In the recent inclement weather the demand for gas has gone up a trifle (bear in mind I’m English – we call a wild gale “a moderate breeze”). To help balance supply and demand, the National Grid has started started suggesting that certain companies switch to some other energy supply.

Now these companies with very high energy requirements bought into special contracts that basically say that their gas supply is very heavily discounted in exchange for the National Grid being able to cut their supply in certain situations. Like the current weather and associated increased demand for heating.

Now some of these companies on such contracts are now complaining about losing their gas supply and how this will affect their recovery from the recession. Now I’m going to say something the National Grid spokesperson(s) can’t or won’t say.

Shut up and get on with it! You took advantage of the cheap gas whilst times were good, and are now complaining about the reason for the cheap price. If you want reliable supply, you need to pay the full price like the rest of us!

The Big Snow Reaches Portsmouth

 General  No Responses »
Jan 062010
 

So last night we had a huge whoomph, and this big pile of snow landed on Portsmouth (and many other areas of Southern England) last night. With something like 7cm of snow in Portsmouth this is probably the hardest hit Portsmouth has been since before I started living here. In fact I don’t recall many times the snow being this heavy anywhere (except in the US).

Of course other areas were even harder hit with up to 30cm is snow in places around the South. This has caused traffic chaos with people trapped in cars for up to 12 hours not too many miles from here, and at work this morning most drivers did not arrive. As the snow was continuing to fall heavily, work rather quickly decided to shut for the day and send us all home. Some of us continued to work from home 😐

Some of the thoughts that occurred as various reactions to the adverse weather set in …

Northerners keep criticising Southerners for being wimps when it comes to weather. Well this time the reaction was particularly irritating. The previous day the North also caught some heavy snow, but considerably less that the South got (yes some places in the North got more – places that get snow almost every day in the winter). Did Southerners start criticising when the North ground to a halt ? No we didn’t. It’s about time that Northerners stopped talking about soft Southerners when the weather we got yesterday and today was severe enough to cause the North to grind to a halt.

Businesses of course were whinging about all the money they will lose because of the bad weather – the lost production because of workers being unable to turn up, shoppers not diving in to spend money, etc. Well grow up, and live with it. Nature can’t be beaten, and there are more important things than making money – staying safe and avoiding fatal accidents in bad weather for one.

People are complaining about the council gritting operations being unable to keep the roads open and safe. They obviously don’t understand exactly how the “grit” works. In fact the grit is in fact rock salt and the salt helps to melt a limited amount of ice or snow. That is why gritters repeatedly grit roads when things get bad. What with abandoned cars getting in the way of gritters and the need to repeatedly grit roads, the number of roads that get effectively gritted goes down. Gritting cannot keep roads open in these kind of conditions.

I would say that drivers need to be a little more careful and a little more considerate of other road users, except that it is really the idiot car drivers who need to do that. It is just that the idiots are more prominent in these kinds of conditions. Some advice :-

  • If you don’t know how to drive in snow, don’t try.
  • Drive slowly … there is too great a chance of you sliding uncontrollably. I don’t care if you bend your nice shiny car, but I don’t particularly want to be smeared across the pavement at the end of your skid.
  • When clearing the snow off your windscreen, do the same for the rest of the car. All that snow will often leap off the car as you are moving along and the dropped snow will make things tricky for anyone else around. That is if it doesn’t hit anyone!

Lastly, whilst I have every sympathy for anyone who slips and falls in the present conditions there are some who wear entirely inappropriate footwear for the conditions. Wearing flat bottomed shoes with no grip and then complaining about how slippery things are just isn’t right.