I had a journey to go on today: Google Maps reckon the outward leg should have taken 3 hours. The Garmin i3 (aka Psycho SatNav Bitch as ’she’ tends to taunt me with unrealistic targets, even the way I drive) reckoned around 2¼ hours. My Nokia N95-8GB with Nokia Maps, on the other hand, reckoned 4 hours. Something of a disagreement.
In the end, the combination of the time of day, the occasional spray and muck left over from gritting (even though it hadn’t been icy) and the way I drive meant it took 2½ hours.
The routes themselves were almost identical, the only difference being the route in or around Grantham.
And the other differences were:
- the Garmin had the speed camera database to warn me of “accident blackspots”;
- as the Nokia was on the cradle and connected to the car kit, every spoken direction muted the radio which is a tad annoying when the voice prompts get a little frantic; and
- the Nokia’s display also shows the current speed (good) and the time left rather than the ETA (bad).
Looks like there’s still no ideal solution for me, but the Saga-driver Nokia is closest as it’s so nicely contained within the phone.
On the same subject, I was pondering about speeding today: a lovely day, a wide dual-carriageway that had opened up to three lanes, the fairly light traffic moving well, etc.
The traffic was flowing well at speeds of between 50 and 100mph, I’d guess, with no bunching, lots of space being left, etc. Nice and safe.
And then we came across a rare sight on our roads these days: a marked Volvo estate doing slightly under 70mph. All the alert drivers slowed down to 70mph and for the few miles until the police car turned off, it was horrible. The previously free-flowing road was now snarled up with everyone keeping to the limit and thus taking much longer to overake the slower moving commercial vehicles which in turn was causing longer queues of traffic and further bunching. It was clearly a far more dangerous place to be with so many other vehicles in a smaller area than they otherwise would be taking up.
But of course, that wasn’t the point, was it? Forget good driving: everyone was having to simply obey an arbitrary limit set in 1965 when the average family car was hard pressed to hit 70mph and even more hard pressed to slow down from that speed. Ridiculous!
So after people decided that the “scameras” were being located for maximum revenue potential rather than to actually save lives - pouring scorn on the pathetic “safety camera” doublespeak that our illustrious leaders and the NGOs indulge in to restrict us - regulations were introduced to require speed cameras to be brightly painted, be visible from 60m (200ft), and be sited only where there was a history of road accidents. Of course the scamera vans flouted these guidelines no doubt to be seen to be doing something about this scourge (sarcasm intended).
It was only by chance that I happened upon an article in the Motoring section of today’s Daily Telegraph which reveals an about turn by the Department for Transport and that those regulations are now merely guidelines. So we can now expect these little Hitlers to be concealing scameras all over the place to provide as much justification as possible for these useless wankers to keep their overpaid and unnecessary jobs.
Their true intentions are revealed by this telling quote from Lee Murphy, speed camera manager for Cheshire:
“If the rules weren’t compulsory, we could use cameras to tackle emerging trends rather than waiting for the minimum number of collisions.”
In other words, “forget the justification for speed cameras being that they are positioned to assist road safety, it’s all about the money!”
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