Really bad accident last night on the M5 - it will be all over the news. Several dead and 43 injured

I can't help but think that this has been coming for a while.

I used to love Motorway driving. Chance to put your foot down. Now it's like a do or die situation. You leave a gap to the car in front...and somebody else pulls into it. You end up in a 6,7,8 nose to tail convoy. Somone brakes and it goodnight vienna.

There's too many cars and everyone seems in a mad rush and you always get the nob that tailgates or pressurises you, especially if you are in the fast lane. Then there are those drivers that just saunter along in the middle lane, oblivious to what is going on a round them.

Even in the bad weather, some people drive exactly the same. A lot of idiots out there. No doubt in the spray and poor visibility something gave last night by Bristol. Juggernauts travelling side by side don't help either.

Rather than try and catch people doing 34 mph in a 30 mph, it would be much better if the police could stamp down on this idiotic behaviour, so a few more Motorway Police would help. Cut out reckless driving rather than slightly faster driving. At the end of the day, a mistake on a motorway is much more likely to end in total carnage.

Horrible crash

Totally agree with the above, I suspect it's very rarely speed that causes an accident but bad/dangerous driving.

You see it all the time on the motorway and it's crazy

+1 to everything said, especially about the mid-lane crawlers and tailgaters. Tragic accident my thoughts go out to loved ones who now have had their lives turned upside down when expecting a normal Friday night.

It should have been the weekend that we take the kids to stay with their (biological) father. He lives in Exeter and we meet up in a car park just off the Taunton junction of the M5. Thankfully they didn't go last night. Otherwise it would have been the virtually the exact time we would have been driving back.

I do agree with Bluenosey's comment about having more motorway police, and maybe just rely on speed cameras for the 30 mph limit placed.

Accidents will always happen, but in a perfect world where everybody drove properly, you would never get these huge pile ups with 27 cars involved.
Leaving the correct gap and driving at the correct speed for the conditions means only the initial couple of cars would ever be involved in an accident.

So many dangerous drivers on the road.
mind you bluenosy, calling lane 3 the "fast lane" doesn't help
The inside lane of a road is "the road". Any other lane is for overtaking
Too many people think of it as slow, med and fast lanes and think they should be in lane 1 if a HGV or caravan, lane 2 for driving at 70 and lane 3 for driving fast.
Until you get rid of this metality nothing will change

Well said. They are overtaking lanes. When you have overtaken move back in, that simple philosophy would rid the world of middle and outside lane hogs and hence virtually eliminate the 'need' some feel to tailgate or take risks to get ahead.

I've never known them as lanes 1,2 and 3. Just slow, middle and fast

A bit of common sense here. Yyou don't want someone jinking from lane to lane everytime they overtake, from 3 to 2 to 1, then overtake, back into 2 then 3, then from 3 back to 2, then 1 and so on and so forth. That would be madness. My comment was aimed at those who trundle along in thhe middle lane unaware of the speed of those around them.

If everybody only used them as overtaking lanes you'd find far less congestion
Most of the middle lane hoggers could easily drive in lane 1, thus freeing up lane 2 for all those fast drivers from lane 3. You now have a free lane
How often do you actually see all 3 lanes busy?
Almost always the first two are virtually empty, with lane 3 nose to tail. So much wasted capacity

Why don't "we" want that?

With mirror, signal, manoeuvre logic, the above should be perfectly safe, in theory (assuming everyone practices it, and properly). If it's safe to do so, signal and then move. When you've overtook, repeat the process to move back into lane one safely.

I see no problem with the above. Saying that, I'm not a car driver.

It could have prevented yesterday's tragedy possibly.

Awful crash.
The worst drivers are those who think that if they drive fast it automatically makes them a good driver.

Always I only tend to use either the M6 or M42 (which actually uses the hard shoulder, at least freeing up the traffic a bit). On the M42 there are traffic enforcemnet cameras overhead so you tend to have four lanes of traffic each driving at 50 mph It's easy to spot the impatient driver and he spends more time undercutting than overtaking.

Also HGV's taking more than 2 mins to overtake should be made illegal. Give them a 'KERS' or 'limiter off switch' they could use a few times a day if they need to get to their destination 5 minutes earlier.

A HGV taking 5 miles to overtake causing a huge bubble behind them compounds the issues mentioned above.

Ok rant over

Really?
I suppose if you only use motoraways in rush hour for commuting?
The M25 is probably the worst for this behaviour. Forgetting the times when it is just a giant car park, it's almost like drivers have a phobia of Lane 1. Even HGV's tend not to use it!
I find the M1, M4, M40, all the same. Unless it is gridlocked at peak times, you find very few cars in lanes 1 and 2. those that are tend to be massively spread out and driving at 70 or less, with everyone else piling along in lane 3

The problem is with the driver of the vehicle being overtaken, unless on an incline where you'll never lift off the accelerator, all he has to do is lift off for a few seconds for the overtaking vehicle to pass. This what I was taught to do and have always done, if the other vehicle had enough speed to catch and get alongside then it'll have enough speed to pull away too.

A couple of issues with this are

1) car drivers that want to drive 50-55mph but won't allow a HGV to pass, they accelerate a little, HGV drops back into the inside lane, the twits then slow down again, HGV tries to overtake again, they accelerate again and think themselves so clever. Quite a few years ago on the A90 (dual carriageway) in Scotland heading from Dundee to Perth a car driver tried the same with me, I was doing somewhere around 50mph, pulled out to pass, he pulled away, I dropped in, he slowed down to 40-45mph, I pulled out, got alongside, he pulled away again. This was back in the days of a fused speed limiter, my fuse was in the ashtray so on the third attempt I just kept my foot down, he gave up at 75mph and finally let me pass.

2) all modern HGVs have cruise control and most firms insist that it is used as often as possible with disciplinary action the threat for not hitting a set percentage of the trip having used it. It really shouldn't be an issue for anyone to either drop it down by 3 or 4mph, or simply switch it off for a few seconds for a vehicle to pass, but so many just won't do it, maybe they're not concentrating properly on what's going on around them and are just steering between the white lines each side of them. My opinion is that cruise control whilst having it's benefits increases risks, especially on long motorway stints, that split second of seeing something and simply reacting by lifting your foot off the accelerator is lost.

Generally, because the larger, slower vehicles tend to use Lane 1, this lane is often damaged before the other lanes. If you drive on an empty motorway, you would probably not use Lane 1 unless it was on an inside bend because of the bumps and holes.

This behaviour is probably instilled in drivers who use motorways a lot, so it becomes a habit to use Lane 2/3.

I've actually never heard that theory before spencer, although logic would dictate it shoudl be true.
I always use lane 1 on an empty motorway, and can't honestly remember thinking it was in poor repair on any occassion.

This thread does show what a variety of opinions motorway driving engenders though.

I don't drive much these days but the section on the M25 between jnct 7 and the M3 I know well and it is definitely worse in Lane 1.

Agreed - on the continent (and you see it with European drivers over here) there is much more of a culture of moving back into the inner lane as soon as the overtake is complete.

Tailgating though is a bloody nightmare . If some idiot starts it in a 30 mph limit outside a school (and they do) - you just have to slow down more.

Too many cars in such a small country.

When I was a lad we used to out for a Sunday drive - just for the pleasure of it

Even with my limited experience, I can certainly confirm that - I've taken to flashing them to move back into lane 1 when I'm overtaking. Why should I risk overtaking in the wrong lane?

To be fair Daglynch you can tell you are not a driver. If I'm travelling at 80 say and I move to the outside lane to overtake, I would stay in that lane if 50 yards up the road there was another car in the middle lane (assuming nothing was travelling at a higher speed behind me. (it's all about that rare commodity - common sense)

The middle lane hoggers are those that travel at 50/60 whatever is around them...idiots

I've removed your conjecture into the terrible accident as we simply do not know what was the cause so best not to even suggest really

great idea for the goverment to consider lets raise the speed limit to 80 so peole can break the limit by a further 10 miles per hour...

and people voted these crack pots in

So we should keep the limit below what is acceptable because some will always go 10mph faster...

You'll find most that go well over the limit ignore the limit anyway and the law is there to get them...if used correctly (mentioned above)

Your arguement is persecuting the masses because of the few

Doesn't make it a poor argument though - isn't there research to suggest many if not most go 80mph anyway?

If we're going to put limits up, we may as well have Authbahns on some specific stretches of road IMO.

Many of the criticisms of motorway driving mentioned above are fully justified, but by far the most dangerous characteristic of many British dirvers is that they don't take full account of driving conditions. I'll always remember when I was back in the UK for a couple of weeks in the early 1970s and drove up the M1. Being young and being used to driving in countries where the speed limit was non existent and/or non enforceable, I tended to drive fast. Initially I was driving at well over 90 mph (not quite as dumb as it would be today with far lower traffic levels) and was obviously passing the majority of the traffic. Within a very short time a thick fog descended on the motorway and I reduced my speed to what was the limit of my safe visibility, around 25 mph from memory, and that was at the absolute limit of safety if a problem had occurred ahead of me.

However a considerable number of vehicles hardly slowed at all. I even saw a few specific vehicles, which I had noticed earlier due to guady markings or other reasons, pass me at the same speed at which they had been travelling when I had passed them earlier. My speed was now 70+ mph slower than it had been. They drove at the same speed in good and hopeless visibility.

One problem with British drivers is that they have very little experience of different driving conditions regarding a whole host of variables, and very little experience of things like high speed tyre blow outs. If you ask them when they are driving inappropriately what they would do at this moment in time if x happened, they simply dismiss it as so unlikely not to be worth considering.

Take firm grip of the steering wheel

Apply brakes slowly

Apply hazard lights

Enter hard shoulder only when at a slow enough speed

You already go too fast on the motorways in England. 70 mph in traffic is insane.

80 would be mental - it's a small country, how fast do you need to go? Leave 5 minutes earlier and drive sensibly.

European speed limits:
http://www.europe.org/speedlimits.html

70mph is 112km/h

Slower than uk:
Cyprus, denmark and sweden

Faster than uk
Everyone else

Hands by head, feet off pedals.

Scream

Wait for Steering wheel balloon thing to inflate.


Apparently they are blaming a Firework Display

I sense the No Win No Fee brigade are sharpening their knives.

1) I don't think HGVs should be allowed to overtake, can't count number of times i have been on motorway and seen 2 HGVs along side eachother for many minutes.
2) Far too many drivers tail gate, or don't leave enough room. Its insane that you see people as close to other cars at 70 mph as they are at 20 mph. its 2 seconds, not 2 meters.!!!!!!!!!!!
3) It would appear from police reports, that there may have been smoke across the motorway from a bonfire. - surprised there aren't laws already in place to stop fireworks/bonfires near motorway anyway even if it was smoke that caused the accident or not.

May be the drivers should have slowed down because of the smoke and concentrated on the road, rather than looking at the fireworks?