Brighton man arrested over M23 crash (From The Argus)

My only surprise is that there aren't more accidents on these stretches of the A23/M23, especially if the two drivers antics I had the misfortune to witness this morning are anything to go by.
The young blonde lady in a white vauxhall toodling up the middle lane was more interested in using the rear view mirror to fluff up her hair rather than to see what vehicles were actually behind her before braking suddenly and then forcing her way into the inside lane to turn off at junction 11 at the very last second.
Then the old dear in a red peugeot. As I'd moved from the inside lane to the middle lane to overtake a slow moving lorry she undertook me, braked as she saw the lorry and cut in front of me. Then she pulled off at Junction 10 and completely messed up which lane she should be in, effectively cutting me up again as we went round the roundabout!
I really do despair at some of the behaviour of fellow road users.

magic_chimp wrote:
My only surprise is that there aren't more accidents on these stretches of the A23/M23, especially if the two drivers antics I had the misfortune to witness this morning are anything to go by.
The young blonde lady in a white vauxhall toodling up the middle lane was more interested in using the rear view mirror to fluff up her hair rather than to see what vehicles were actually behind her before braking suddenly and then forcing her way into the inside lane to turn off at junction 11 at the very last second.
Then the old dear in a red peugeot. As I'd moved from the inside lane to the middle lane to overtake a slow moving lorry she undertook me, braked as she saw the lorry and cut in front of me. Then she pulled off at Junction 10 and completely messed up which lane she should be in, effectively cutting me up again as we went round the roundabout!
I really do despair at some of the behaviour of fellow road users.

well said, magic-chimp. half of these drivers should be nowhere near a motorway. the ones who annoy me most are the ones who trundle alond at 55, but when you try to pass them they speed up to the same speed as you, or pull out to block you. i drive a coach for a local company here in oxford, and by law we are limited to 62 mph, and not in the outside lane, so people like the above are a real pain. the standard of driving in this country has plummetted recently, as people now have a me,me,me attitude, and sod everyone else. what we need is many more police patrols on the motorways, as high visibility policing works. you will have seen, i have no doubt, the morons who come flying past, only to slam on their brakes when they see a traffic officers' hi-vis Shogun, thinking it to be a police vehicle. the two examples you give of bad driving, I see every day on my travels, and also the mobile phone/laptop users. according to the AA, the number of people using hand-held mobile phones whilst driving has actually DOUBLED since it became illegal, as they have no fear of getting caught. these are the people who are most likely to cause and incident by being completely unaware of what is going on around them.

Last night I had a goodun. Big 4x4 vehicle just decided that they were going to pull out into the oncoming traffic in Lancing. They had only just put their indicators on and I had no time in the wet to stop safely to allow them out. (they were parked on the other side of the road up on the kerb.)

But no, out they pulled, I slammed on the brakes, managed to stop before I hit it by a mere foot or so, only to be beeped by the car behind me for braking so hard. Because they were tailgating.

Oh well, maybe I should have ploughed both into the car pulling out when it shouldn't, and then shunted up the rear-end too.

Lovely.

1) Standard of driving has plummetted in recent years.

2) Number of immigrants has increased in recent years.

I wonder if there is a connection there.