Consider the plight of the poor beleaguered motorist.
For years they have had to put up with ever bigger roads; dual carriageways, road widening, ring roads, inner relief roads, orbital roads & bypasses. Some motorists have interests such as gardening or archaeology yet found themselves having to drive ever increasing distances to see nice pretty landscapes and places of interest because lots of other people also liked driving and needed to be accommodated on ever bigger roads destroying more and more pretty landscapes and places of interest. How dreadful.
Some motorists occasionally enjoyed nice walks or cycle rides for short journeys to the post office or school but the bigger roads sliced through the bridleway and footpath network so they didn’t link communities anymore. So more people had to drive on the bigger roads and get in each others way. Apparently, people who might have considered a walk or a cycle ride also started driving as they considered the new bigger roads to be more hostile, adding to all that congestion. Well, really!
Many had to drive all the way out to the outskirts of towns to get their shopping (as walking around lots of shops is tiresome when you can’t park outside each and every one of them), ripping up more of that lovely countryside and archaeology beneath. No wonder Time Team only ever had three days!
All have had to endure the fact that motoring in real terms is as inexpensive as its ever been. Apparently, only they pay for the roads and should have exclusive rights to them. Many have had entire seconds added to their journey times due to the intrepid few that venture out on bicycles or on foot, the fools! How dare these peasants get in the way when motorists have spent thousands of pounds on their mode of transport?
They have had to endure speed cameras with their bright yellow paint and repeated warning signs. They have had money ruthlessly taken from them when all they did was break the law. How petty is that?! Why aren’t they catching the real criminals?
We needn’t worry though. Philip Hammond, the new Transport Secretary has recently ended this onslaught on the motorist. Thank God! He’s axed the funding to the speed cameras meaning that local authorities fall like a house of cards in the rush to switch them off despite objections from those little people that don’t know what they’re talking about like local residents, road safety groups and police chiefs. Anyone would have thought that right wing motoring groups lobbied hard and portrayed motorists as the poor victims in all this. Surely not! After all, they only kill and seriously injure a few thousand every year!
It now transpires that some motorists in Oxfordshire are speeding again now the cameras have been switched off. Gee!! What are the odds??!! It’s probably all these ‘expert’ motorists driving at speeds that they consider appropriate as opposed those nasty speed limits imposed to reduce the chance of death and serious injury. It’ll be alright though because those that walked or cycled in these spots will be put off due to the increased danger so there will be even less distraction.
If the ‘War on the Motorist’ has ended, then this must surely mean that they can now stop killing innocent civilians?Hurrah! The war is over! If a War had actually been declared on the motorist than I can only describe the state declared on pedestrians and cyclists as ‘genocide’ or ‘a holocaust’ as they impede the march of progress and are cleared off the streets. Well, if we’re going to wildly exaggerate, we might as well try and take it to a logical conclusion. Wars are things that happen in far away lands. Yet motoring has the higher death and casualty rate. Shouldn’t it be the ‘War from the Motorist’?
The Lo Fidelity Bicycle Club 
You cyclists and your namby-pamby obsession with reducing the chance of serious injury and death. Try living your life to the full instead, like we motorists do!
“Work like you don’t need money,
Love like you’ve never been hurt,
And drive like no one’s watching… because they’re not since we got rid of those damnable speed cameras that forced us to actually obey the speed limit sometimes.”
Woo hoo! It’s like the whole road turned into one big Silverstone!
Thanks for the comment and absolutely!
Cyclists do live their lives to the full. In fact, you could argue that they’re even braver for having to put up with motorists day in day out ‘living their lives to the full’, just like the car adverts told them too (sometimes at the expense of some other poor sod that was just going about their day)! 🙂
Driving at Siverstone, as any Racing driver will tell you, requires skill and finesse. They don’t get distracted by sat-nav, or answer a mobile phone call on a chicane, or fish around for another radio station as Chris Moyles these days is as entertaining as an Insurance seminar. Unfortunately the speeders on our road network are people who think are great drivers but actually just drive like David Blunkett on Ketamine. Very poor standards.
And “Work like you don’t need money, Love like you’ve never been hurt…” is the sort of desperate phrase used by people working in IT or marketing on their facebook status to make them look ‘caring’ and ‘deep’. Please don’t use it again, it’s cringeworthy and you’re better than that!
All the best
Jim (Cyclist, pedestrian, 5 door family saloon driver and occasional escalator and moving walkway user)
I do work in IT! LOL
Goodness! Well, no more of that ‘love life’ rubbish. Working in IT, you already possess the greatest piece of wisdom for the 21st Century
‘Turn it off and turn it on again’.
It’s beautifully simple and works every time! Well, it does for me anyway. 🙂
Wouldn’t a “War on Motorists” have more IEDs? Say something speed sensitive triggered at 5 MPH over the limit? Just sayin’.
Please! They have quite enough to concentrate on such as radio tuning and mobile answering, not to mention the ‘do I go for intermittent or constant wipe’ debate to worry about speed aswell! From the smashed glass I saw on the road on my commute this morning, I note that there are still a few ‘skirmishes’.