Motoring
Get off my tail
Alan Judd
No doubt the Road Hauliers Associa- tion could produce figures to show that heavy goods vehicle drivers cause fewer accidents per million motorway cones than car drivers. No doubt, too, the great major- ity of HGV drivers are competent and self- controlled, but not all, or not all the time. Yet the vehicles they drive are now so fast and — thanks to the EU — so big that the drivers ought to be so much better than the rest of us as to be beyond even reasonable provocation.
I was musing thus on a recent journey south from Yorkshire on the Al and M11. When your nose is about level with the hub-caps of huge spinning wheels, seeming- ly about two feet away, you have intima- tions of mortality. At least, you should have, if we didn't get so blasé about it, and you certainly would have if you were driv- ing that close to a line of tracer bullets fired by a machine-gun; the effect of veer- ing off line by a few inches would be about the same.
My musings were sharpened by examples of bad lorry behaviour. There may have been ten times as many badly behaved cars but after the first incident near Doncaster, when a lorry swung out and almost hit the back of our car just after we'd overtaken, I had an eye only for lorries. The offender swung back just as abruptly and later I noticed that he had one hand and probably half his brain occupied by his CB radio.
There were the usual temporary hold- ups caused by slow lorries overtaking slow- er ones on hills where they shouldn't. The next incident was south of Stamford when an articulated leviathan pulled out without signalling as I was overtaking, abruptly changing my perspective from a clear out- side lane to an isosceles triangle that ended a few yards ahead. I suspect it was inatten- tion or miscalculation rather than malice; whichever, the results might have been the same.
On the M11 we were some distance behind another leviathan when it pulled out to the overtaking lane into the path of a white Alfa that had just overtaken us, causing the Alfa to brake hard and flash its lights angrily. It was impossible to judge which was behaving badly but there's no doubt as to which did next. The lorry swerved briefly on to the narrow verge by the central barrier, throwing a cloud of dirt and gravel over the Alfa. He did it three or four times, reverting to a straight course between each swerve. The dirt and dust covered the Alfa and hit us, too. The lorry was probably a 38 tonner and we were all doing 70.
Of course it's irritating when speeding drivers flash their lights at those who deny them further excess and it's tempting to respond by, for instance, discreetly chang- ing down, flicking on your lights to fool them into braking sharply, then accelerat- ing away. I did it once, knowing I shouldn't. The only justifiable and sensible response is to get out of the way because trouble at those speeds and weights of metal is not the kind that anyone, just or unjust, comes out of well, if at all. The Alfa may have been at fault but the lorry driver, being a professional, ought to have had the maturi- ty and good sense not to give a like response to bad behaviour. They were still at it when we overtook them a while later, by then in the slow lane with the Alfa ahead of and deliberately slowing the lorry and the lorry tailgating him.
I counted three more HGV tailgaters which would surely have crushed their vic- tims if there had been any sudden braking. Why do it? Those drivers should be above irritation. Pressure of time, with same-day deliveries and so on, is probably part of it, but such behaviour doesn't always get you anywhere any quicker and may mean you never make it. There is, I stn told, evidence to suggest that if crowded motorways were limited to 50 mph we'd all get there faster anyway.
Finally, we reached the M25 where everybody seemed to be tailgating every- body else at about 80, in all three lanes. It was a relief to leave it for A and B roads until I got stuck behind slow-moving lorries and was tempted to do something very like — well — tailgating. Perhaps I should get a slower car. On motorways in my old Land- Rover I felt somewhat remote and slow to respond, cocooned in travelling rugs, gloves, coats, scarves, hats and ear-defend- er!, but I never got near enough to any- thing to hit it and nothing ever came near me. Probably the ecologically incorrect clouds of diesel smoke trailing behind made them all keep their distance. There are few improvements in motoring that don't carry a penalty.
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