Rambling, like a route through the Wellows on a Sunday afternoon
The Southern Daily Echo is the same every day. Delays on the M27. Occasionally, for spice, there are accidents on the M3. These are clearly dangerous roads. I suggest that all car drivers find alternative routes down the back roads and leave the motorways to HGVs, coaches and the like.
In fact, today, in the online version, we have:
- M27 works to hit firms in the pocket
- Long tailbacks after high speed crash on A34
- Man cut free from car after accident
Car drivers are complaining like nobody’s business. Particularly about the M27.
Elsewhere on the interwebs, cyclists are complaining about sedestrians: people travelling at walking pace, but seated. To be honest, in towns with a culture of using your bike for most short journeys, the roads do get clogged with slow cyclists. Zen, zen, zen. It’s like being stuck in queues of bloody cars all over again. The problems of a cycling culture are not yet an issue in Southampton, by the way. Not being able to reach the advance-stop-box because there are a dozen half-awake idiots on bikes scattered in it and up the cycle lane is something confined to my previous university experience.
It’s not really a killer for cycling though, any more than endless queues on the M27 seem to stop the cars pouring onto it.
Bit of a vicious circle really. The perception from non-cyclists is, perhaps, that cycling is dangerous (as a non-driver, moving to here from the West of Scotland or somewhere nice and quiet like that, reading the Daily Echo each day, would you go *near* the M27?). If we built a nice cycle lane infrastructure—I mean, actually, the one we have isn’t bad, it’s got a lot of sense in it, but you have to work out connections down quiet streets and that, you don’t just get cycle lanes whizzing you along your normal routes, if you see what I mean, so you have to *know*, you have to think a little (or maybe have a look at that nice map the council publish)—anyway, if we did build something shiny and *obvious* and publicised and people tried it and suddenly we had droves of cyclists—what, no, I’m not drunk, I’m just dreaming, you know…
… if we did have droves of cyclists, they’d all get in each other’s way and frustrate each other (come on, would you take the cycle path down the Avenue if you were late to catch a train? Chances are taking your chances on the road would buy you a precious minute or two) and the ones in a hurry would avoid the clogged up cycle paths…
… or some of the paths, like the route in from Eastleigh, routes bringing people in from just out of town, would be packed with hurrying cyclists at 9am and the sedestrians and pedestrians would feel terrorized…
Could be worse. At least we aren’t really a tourist town. Doing an emergency stop on your way to lectures because some exclaiming American has stopped dead in the middle of the road to point her husband at an interesting architectural feature isn’t likely to be an issue here.