what a lovely experience!
I left Heathrow’s car rental pound yesterday in a little seat to get home having been stranded in southall, at about 8:10pm, wellied up the M25 and swung off the M1 at J9 watling street services for 9pm, to find the cafe shuts early on a friday. Quick run to Toddington for a sarnie and get a CD book to listen to (instead of the dancey crap on radio that fridays bring).
Off we go and arounf J16 or 18 or somewhere (some way short of leicester forest anyway) there’s some roadworks that filter from 3 lanes to 1.
Thanks to the genius timing of the planners setting these works up, I was in said tailback from about 9:40 til 01:30. Unbelievable. Not even a staggered filter of 3-2 and run a mile before 2-1, to help the flow of traffic. bang from 3-1 and resulting argy bargy chaos as people refuse to let others in.
Surely just an hour or two’s wait to set these things in motion would have been dozens of times better? Ended up so tired having begun my driving day at 6am friday morning I nodded off a time or two in the jam and once moving I had to stop at Leicester Forest at nearly 2am and slept like a baby under their big spotlamps, in the car seat, til nearly 8am, only awoken by yon mobile phone.
So a potentially massive danger induced by bad timing - cos I wonder how many were micro-sleeping in creeping traffic and nearly had collisions, or drove home in the sleep-danger-zone without stopping.
