Well ‘Europe’, that club to which we once belonged, but will soon depart, is good for lots of things. They’re very good at speaking foreign languages. French, Spanish, German, all spoken really well over there. The wine’s good in France, olive oil in Italy, sausages in Germany. They’re pretty good at football too. Spain in the lead, probably, Germany, Italy.

But they can’t touch us Brits when it comes to traffic jams. Oh no, matey, when it comes to crawling along pulling out your hair in 6 miles of nose-to-tail snarl-up, we cede our crown to no nation. Well, no European nation. You can’t compete with Bangkok, Sao Paulo (60 mile jam last year) or Mumbai.

London’s the best place for really good jams, as you’d expect. And the M25 by Heathrow is the worst spot of all. The total cost to ‘the economy’ of all London’s jams is £42billion. Wow.

How on earth do you calculate that? I sit in a jam, it costs me a fiver for the wasted petrol, plus a kit-kat and a bottle of water, so add another 2 quid. Or another 5 quid if you got them at a service station. But if you include money spent by motorists, that is arguably a boost to the economy, not a drain. Oh.

The government are looking at ways to keep traffic moving, speed it up, get it out of the way. Let’s see how that works in reality once local councils are involved.

They put up speed bumps. Width restrictions. 20mph speed limits. They organise traffic lights to slow down the cars and give equal time to the pedestrians. Of whom, at some junctions, there are none. Never mind, give it 5 minutes, someone might pitch up looking to cross the road.

Everything the councils do to the roads reduces the speed of traffic. Rather than keep it moving they’ve found a million ways to reduce it to a crawl. Then they put speed cameras there to ensure that on the odd occasion the road might be clear, you still have to drive very slowly, causing more delays.

Here’s what they need to do.
Remove all speed restrictions, all roads, everywhere. Especially near schools. Ban Range Rovers within the greater London area. There’s no point in them. Any driver found on a clear road hogging the fast lane should be fined. If he/she is hogging the fast lane and driving below the speed limit, he should be shot. In the gut. So he dies very painfully whilst all the other drivers can watch him bleed out. Attach guns to the speed cameras and reverse them so that any car driving too slowly gets shot at. First a warning, then, if they don’t speed up, the money shot.

You see, its all really sensible and logical if you look at it in a proper, socially-mindful way.

Happy Wednesday

A xxxx