I’ve droned on about the daughter’s boyfriend’s Tom Tom before. Retailers expect to sell record numbers of these satellite navigation systems this Christmas and new cars are being offered with (typically) £1,200-worth of Sat-Nav kit thrown in.
Now I could easily rant about the inherent dangers of the things - the daughter’s boyfriend often pays much more attention to the Tom Tom screen than he does to the road when driving, and having a bossy woman telling you which way to go at the next roundabout is liking having an extra person (daughter/wife?) in the car. The state of Britain’s roads however inclines me the other way.
At present my usual route to work is blocked by a bridge closure (8 weeks) on the old A3 south of Liphook. My secondary route (via the outskirts of Petersfield) has now been shut off by road closure (8 weeks), and I’m beginning to wonder where the next set of roadworks is being planned for my pre-Christmas entertainment. In circumstances like this a Sat Nav system might well be useful, or for when you are unexpectedly diverted off your intended course. The daughter’s boyfriend looked positively gleeful the other week when an articulated lorry flipped on the M20 (sideways across three lanes) and it looked as if the motorway would be closed – forcing traffic such as ourselves to be diverted off the motorway and onto the narrow lanes of East Kent. Happily for me we were too far up the queue (the motorway was indeed closed at Ashford) and we were able to squeeze around the stricken lorry on the hard shoulder, and thence home without further ado.
No blog on roadworks and Sat Nav systems would be complete for me without mention of the stupidest piece of road planning management ever known – the A3 at Hindhead. Anyone heading from London in the direction of Portsmouth will know that from Putney the A3 provides a serviceable dual carriageway heading south and connecting with the main coastal arterial (the A27) near Southsea. The problem is (and always has been) the Hindhead bottle-neck – a couple of miles where the dual carriageway stops and normal two-direction traffic winds around one corner of the Devil’s Punch Bowl before grinding to a halt at traffic lights where the A3 crosses the Haslemere-Churt road at Hindhead. Queues several miles long are to be found here on every day of the week. Breakdowns and accidents can paralyse the area completely and it has long been on Mr Darling’s list of priorities to sort out. We have passed the years and years of consultations and public enquiries, contractors have been appointed and all that has to be done is to build a 1.8 kilometre tunnel to sort the matter out. However nothing is to happen until at least 2009. The plans are stuck on the desks of three different ministers (yes, John Prescott is one of them), and the financial go-ahead is unlikely ever to be granted. The South is just not worth the penny to a government that knows that the North is where its votes come from. Bah!
