Threads merged due to similar content. ND
The thread about "blind truckers" has just reminded me of an incident I saw the other week.
It's July 7th and for understandable reasons the underground has been brought to a standstill. I find myself walking through Acton, trying to get to work. At one point, on Uxbridge Road, I notice that a lorry and a bus have stopped, one in each direction, holding up all the traffic.
Basically, the bus (one of these articulated jobbies) was passing a line of parked cars and in order to do that it had to straddle the centre lines a bit. The bus met a truck coming in the other direction which refused to pull over and let the bus through. The truck could have just straddled a couple of feet into the bus lane on its left, but it didn't. At first I thought the truck had broken down but it hadn't. The driver was just being stubborn. He had stopped the engine and was sitting there with his feet up on the wheel refusing to go until the bus was out of his way. Of course, the bus had nowhere to go, with a queue of cars behind it and the truck not leaving enough of a gap for it to move forwards.
Now the bus was the obstruction here, spilling out, as it was, into the lane of oncoming traffic. But, the oncoming traffic could have passed by either nudging the bus lane or waiting for the bus to clear. Quite what this truck driver was hoping to achieve I'm not sure. Chaos ensued and eventually after a lot of beeping and a fairly heated exchange of words between the two drivers, the trucker was persuaded to pull over and move on. Idiocy 1. Common sense 0.
So my question is, common sense aside, legally, was the lorry required to stop there or is it allowed to pull into the bus lane to clear the way for the oncoming traffic? Had the bus lane not been there it would have been a stalemate situation, but I'm sure the bus driver assumed that any oncoming traffic would use the bus lane when he started the manouvre.
|
Perhaps the fact that it was a bus causing the 'obstruction' prompted the lorry driver to make a 'point' by not using the bus lane.....
Childish behaviour by the lorry driver, backing up Mark(RLBS)'s point previously raised.
|
Oh gawd, the truckers will be rushing in here in a minute, telling us how they feed and clothe us all and how we should kiss their tyres.
Only a matter of time before the Government wakes up to the fact that local production of consumables where practical might, just might, help the traffic flow in this country just a teensy-weensy bit and may just break the stranglehold that supermarkets have on our lives.
|
|
|
