Wednesday, 30 June 2010
Because I loathe parking at the Oxford Seacourt Park and
Ride (all rubble, broken glass, potholes and no nice waiting room with loos),
coming into Oxford via the A420 used to be a once a month treat only for my
car. The little guy used to love being let off the leash for a good run at the
city. Yesterday however, he was rudely pulled up short when we were faced with
a miserable and static line of tail-lights where once there had been open road.
As it seems we were the last to discover, almost overnight, Oxford County
Council had installed traffic lights on the Botley Roundabout, and now the
tailback was stretching back almost to Farmoor.
When I was learning to drive, half the fun of roundabouts was the crap-yourself, this-could-be-it thrill that ramming your foot on the accelerator at the first viable opening in oncoming traffic presented. Successfully indicating, leaping into the abyss, and taking your exit without mishap or anyone hooting at you bestowed an enormous sense of accomplishment.
Lessons were about learning to judge traffic, developing anticipation skills, sharpening instincts and building road-sense. Having all these things come together into a kind of seamless symbiosis of human and machine for your test was the ultimate goal. However, thanks to Health and Safety, over-anxious local councils, and a sadly often all too well judged lack of confidence in the intelligence of the average human numpty, traffic lights are now being installed at virtually every lamp-post to show people when they can go, and when they must stop or all the other cars will eat them.
What with heated seats, doors that "help" you get your carcass in and out of the cockpit, seatbelts "handed" to you as soon as you sit down by strange sequences of sensors, automatic headlights that spring on to dazzle anyone on the opposite side of the road the moment any cloud crosses the sun, and automatic transmissions doing everything for you but lay the table for supper, the art of driving a motor car seems to have entered the dusty archives along with getting off your bum to change the channels on your telly....
When I was learning to drive, half the fun of roundabouts was the crap-yourself, this-could-be-it thrill that ramming your foot on the accelerator at the first viable opening in oncoming traffic presented. Successfully indicating, leaping into the abyss, and taking your exit without mishap or anyone hooting at you bestowed an enormous sense of accomplishment.
Lessons were about learning to judge traffic, developing anticipation skills, sharpening instincts and building road-sense. Having all these things come together into a kind of seamless symbiosis of human and machine for your test was the ultimate goal. However, thanks to Health and Safety, over-anxious local councils, and a sadly often all too well judged lack of confidence in the intelligence of the average human numpty, traffic lights are now being installed at virtually every lamp-post to show people when they can go, and when they must stop or all the other cars will eat them.
What with heated seats, doors that "help" you get your carcass in and out of the cockpit, seatbelts "handed" to you as soon as you sit down by strange sequences of sensors, automatic headlights that spring on to dazzle anyone on the opposite side of the road the moment any cloud crosses the sun, and automatic transmissions doing everything for you but lay the table for supper, the art of driving a motor car seems to have entered the dusty archives along with getting off your bum to change the channels on your telly....
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