- Joined
- Jul 3, 2021
My favourite post yet @Spunt. Your essays have been the best entertainment on this website, for my part at least.
Hope you feel better.
Spunt's helpful guide to Britain for fat Americans - Learn about Anglos so you can hate them better
- Thread starter Spunt
- Start date
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🐕 I am attempting to get the site runnning as fast as possible. If you are experiencing slow page load times, please report it.
Hope you feel better.
- Joined
- Aug 18, 2020
I don't think you can talk about snooker without mentioning the rather excellent theme, at least until the BBC nigged it up:
NerdShamer
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2018
If only this happened in London on a daily basis.
- Joined
- Feb 24, 2019
When it comes to Motorsports in particular, the Germans are very good at it as long as it's in endurance racing or rallying. Porsche in particular is one that everyone knows for always finding a way to break the ruleset of whatever series they join and dominating it until they get bored of their domination or the series goes under because everyone knows the winners already.
- Joined
- May 14, 2021
Can't believe you didn't mention Ronnie O'Sullivan, the badboy of snooker.
Sleazy Car Salesman
Believe me when I say that I will take your money
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 27, 2021
That's hardcore. I wish we could play mob ball in the States without liability suits out the ass.
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2018
Hoping that once you have some time, and are willing to continue this, that you cover the absolute shambolic state of the UK police. That joke of a police force has singlehandedly turned us into a laughingstock on the farms.
- Joined
- Feb 24, 2019
Any idea when we might get the next update on this?
- Joined
- Jan 16, 2017
I'll look into it. A bit occupied with IRL stuff at the moment, but I'll see what I can do.
In other news, Tom Cruise decided to go to Birmingham for some retarded reason, and someone stole his BMW.
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2019
Pretty sure that originated from /pol and it just migrated over here without a loicense
- Joined
- Mar 29, 2018
Looks like Starmer finally got round to "fixing" the fuckup Milliband did regarding Labour membership mentioned in the politics writeup. Need 20% of MP support to stand for leader and 6 month party membership tenure is required to vote for party leader.
- Joined
- Jan 16, 2017
Part Whateverthefuckitisnow: Transport
Good evening all you highly-melanated individuals. Sorry it's been a while but I've been doing things like going outside and talking to people before they make that illegal again. Wouldn't recommend it overall though. The graphics are really high-definition but the gameplay is horribly unbalanced. Every patch seems to make it worse, too.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh yeah, the UK and its fucking transport infrastructure. You might not think that "transport" would be all that interesting or exciting but then again lots of you people liked my boring description of how Britain's legislature works and that's the political equivalent of arranging the lint from your pocket in colour order, so if anything I wonder if actual trainspotting might cause your wranglers to put you in the stimming room to calm down.
Britain's transport infrastructure is, like everything else about Britain:
1 - Something that we used to be really good at
2 - Overwhelmingly shaped by the UK's horrible overcrowding
3 - Shit
As I have discovered of late, doing anything in the UK involves dealing with the British weather and dealing with the sheer aggravation of actually going anywhere. This is why the British took to Lockdown much better than much of the rest of the Western world: staying inside means not getting rained on, not having to meet any British (or "British") people, and not enduring the teeth-pulling nature of going from one place to another.
1 - The Roads
Unlike the US, as I'm sure even the fattest of Americans reading this have grasped by now, everything in the UK is very close to everything else. This is unfortunate, because, as we have seen, the overwhelming majority of places, people and smells in this accursed country are not things that you want anywhere near you. The two furthest-apart points of the UK mainland (Land's End in Cornwall and John O'Groats in Scotland) are only 603 miles (970km) apart geographically, or 874 miles (1,407km) by the shortest road route. That's quite a lot less than the distance from New York to Chicago (714 miles/1,149km geographically and 791 miles/1,272km by road) and remember that most of the Northern third of the UK is pretty much empty. There's a saying that Brits think 100 miles is a long way and Americans think 100 years is a long time.
Britain's roads are all numbered. M for Motorways, A for non-motorway main roads (which confusingly can be motorways sometimes, but can also be single-lane high streets), B for secondary roads all the way to E for farm tracks and glorified alleyways. Only M, A and B roads carry their numbers, everything else is only referred to by name. But sometimes A and B roads have names. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they have several different names along the course of their length. Fuck you.
This numbering system of M, A and B roads is basically a national obsession. Every British driver with any experience knows probably a couple of hundred road numbers and where those roads are, even if they don't realise it. Americans might know their local Interstates and other State Routes but they don't have the encyclopaedic knowledge of the British driver. This isn't because British drivers are smarter (though as anyone who has seen an American try to negotiate a roundabout could tell you, that doesn't mean they *aren't* smarter), but because Britain's roads are so congested and roadwork-riddled you need to have at least 2 diversionary routes in mind every time you plan a journey. You would think that satnavs would have put an end to this, but the British driver and their satnav are often not friends. Americans put too much trust in their satnavs and blindly follow their directions onto railroad tracks, active airport runways and boiling lava pits, but the British will refuse to believe their Satnav knows better than them and refuse to divert from their favourite routes even if said route is currently on fire, being bombed by the Luftwaffe, or filled with protesters gluing themselves to the tarmac in the deranged belief that it will encourage people to insulate their houses (that last one is 100% unexaggeratedly true).
Some of these road numbers are subject to passionate debate amongst millions of people. If I just mention the A303 and the M4/M5, about half the British people reading this will know exactly what I'm talking about and have a VERY STRONG OPINION on what is the best way to get from London to South-West England (A303 gang 4 lyfe, yo. You get a really good view of Stonehenge as you crawl past it at 3mph, whereas the other way you have to look at, and smell, Swindon).
An eroded, mysterious pile of ugly structures with no clear purpose filled with weirdos - Swindon is not like Stonehenge at all.
Whilst the heyday of American Interstate roadbuilding was in the 1950s, the British didn't get around to building their Motorway network until the following decade. But we built some doozies.
Most British motorways have a 70mph speed limit and three lanes of traffic in each direction. These lanes are:
The Inside (slow) lane - This is for sleepy Slavic truckers and the terrified old ladies whose Nissans they have collected as hood ornaments (I'm not joking about this, as we shall see).
The Middle (passing) lane - this is for other truckers who have realised that the truck in front of them in the slow lane was only doing 59.8mph rather than 60mph and decided that this justifies spending five miles overtaking them. Oh and they do this on dual carriageways (divided highways) too, just in case anyone was hoping to get anywhere.
The Outside (overtaking) lane - this is for drivers of German cars and their prey.
So what lane do you drive in if you're not a trucker or an angry bald man in an Audi? The answer, as is so often the case in the UK, is Fuck You.
The M1
This was the first to be built, and snakes from London North to Northampton, Rugby, Leicester, Nottingham, Sheffield and Leeds. Now there used to be a railway that went the exact same way, the Great Central. But Ernest Marples, who was Minister of Transport in the early 60s, owned a large shareholding in a road construction company. He commissioned a consultant called Dr Richard Beeching (more on him later) to recommend what should be done with Britain's railway system. Dr Beeching, the man hired by a roadbuilder to decide what to do with railways, decided, entirely independently, that all the railways should be closed and really big roads be built instead - what a huge coincidence! Another coincidence was that the only main line railway Beeching recommended be closed was the Great Central. And in another, shocking and entirely surprising coincidence, Marples' construction company somehow won, entirely on merit, the contract to build the M1 that just happened to very closely follow the route of the main-line railway the consultant he paid a huge amount of money recommended be closed, thus making Marples, coincidentally, very rich. At least Watergate involved people bugging hotel rooms, our idea of a really big corruption scandal, like so much of British life, mostly involves roadworks.
So, the M1. As the first motorway to be built, it was decided that three lanes each way was enough, a state of affairs that lasted about twelve minutes. So, starting in the mid 1990's, the government started a programme of widening it to four lanes, and they *still* haven't finished. Last I checked, they'd got about as far as Nottingham, but to be fair all the construction vehicles had to use the M1 to get to the work sites, and 25 years to get from London to Nottingham sounds about right for the typical M1 journey. As the main arterial route between North and South, the best way to be entertained during this time is to try to avoid the swinging trailers of foreign semi-trucks in the charge of sleep-deprived Slavic truckers kept awake only by caffeine, amphetamines and the deep-web Ukrainian snuff porn playing on their dash-mounted laptops. Fail to keep up and this happens:
Though I'm still not sure if that's a worse fate than actually arriving in Nottingham.
The M25
The M25 is one of the more recent motorways, built in the late 1980s under Thatcher. Previous administrations had built a sprawl of motorways that went from London to various places, but nothing linking them, causing all the traffic trying to get from one side of London to the other having to go right through the middle of the city, which really delayed Thatcher's friends from getting to their quaalude dealers before peasant-shooting season. So the M25 was built in a wiggly line around the city so all the traffic jams would go there instead. Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman once wrote a book (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12067.Good_Omens) that stated the shape of the M25 was in fact a Satanic rune designed by Beelzebub to slowly turn London into an exclave of Hell itself. For some reason my local library has this book in the "fiction" section.
The M25 was built using a cheap concrete road surface that is constantly crumbling and permanently under repair. Driving on this surface at a speed greater than that of continental drift results in an auditory experience equivalent to sticking your head directly into Niagara falls, but fortunately that's maybe twice the M25's average speed, due to the aforementioned constant roadworks, its inadequate capacity and its bad design. One notorious 5-mile section in the West features junctions to three other motorways AND Heathrow airport, the country's busiest. One time I was stuck on this eldritch stretch of tarmac my satnav worked out that it would actually be faster to come off the motorway at the Heathrow exit, drive right around the airport's gigantic perimeter road (Heathrow is the size of a small city), and get back on it at the exit less than half a mile further down the motorway, and it was STILL faster than staying on it.
The M2
The M25 is often referred to as "the UK's biggest car park" but the M2 is an actual, real, honest-to-god car park (and holds the actual record) for at least part of every year. The M2 is short for a motorway, leading from London to the main Channel port at Dover, where all European traffic crosses to France. As such it carries about 95% of the UK's international road freight traffic, and whenever anything goes wrong at the crossing (sometimes bad weather, Brexit or coof, but usually the French going on strike) there are tens of thousands of lorries (trucks) with nowhere to go. So the Police just pile said lorries onto the motorway, filling both hard shoulders (just "shoulders" in Americanese) and up to four of the six traffic lanes with parked lorries waiting for the French to finish their cigarette break and open the border again. As I have stated elsewhere, England has spent about 500 of the last 1000 years at war with France and the fact that the entire country's international trade is dependent on whether some unshaven, Gitane-smoking French fonctionnaire can be bothered to show up to work in the morning is clear evidence that we still haven't killed enough of them.
The M5
We move away from London now, but things do not get better. The M5 runs from Birmingham, Britain's second-biggest city located pretty much exactly in the middle of England, to Exeter in the South West. With the South West being the only part of the country that has almost acceptable weather and beaches, every summer (especially during the coof) the entire country (except London) piles onto the M5 to go on holiday. (Those from London have to take the single-lane A303, unless they are complete cucks and take the M4 like loser retard niggers - those people then have to join the M5 at Bristol anyway at a junction that I think was designed by M C Escher). So you have ancient caravans towed by Sid from Wolverhampton who hasn't driven with a trailer since WWII and who sideswipes some Turkish lorry while trying to pull in front of it, causing a serious hummus spillage requiring 500 Police officers to close the motorway for a week in order clear it up with half a million slices of toast. And no you can't have any.
As a consequence, the M5 is the second-most dangerous motorway in the country and the worst for overall delays caused by accidents. The road set a new record in August 2017 when two lorries collided, causing a fuel spill so bad that it caused a 36-mile traffic jam. The Highways Agency closed the road, resurfaced it, screwed it up, resurfaced it again, and waited for it to dry before reopening the road. The Police refused to free any of the thousands of trapped drivers who were stuck there for 15 hours in blistering heat (well, blistering heat for Brits) because, you know, British Police.
Such is the M5's reputation for mayhem that the Police will close the M5 for any reason, for hours at a time. Just this week the road was closed for *four hours* because some sped threw an e-scooter onto the road. Maybe one of the coppers had to put his knee on its handlebars until the battery drained.
Oh, and that "dozy Bulgarian trucker doesn't realise he has some old bag's Nissan wedged under his bumper" thing? Happens here too:
The M6
Why is the M5 only the second-most dangerous motorway in the country? Because of the M6. The M6 winds like a pus-choked artery from Birmingham to the Scottish border, past the other massive cities of Liverpool and Manchester, and like the rest of the UK's motorway network it was built with a completely inadequate 3 lanes in each direction. Unlike the M1, however, there was not much room for expansion because much of the road is elevated, notably the long section that runs pretty much through the middle of Birmingham*. Given that the M6 connects 3 of Britain's 6 biggest urban areas together (really 4, as it continues to Glasgow in the guise of the M74), the volume of traffic using it leads to quite apocalyptic congestion. The solution, rather than spend any money, was to open the shoulders of the road as lanes at "peak times" (defined as any day with a vowel in it), using overhead signs to tell people who, this being Birmingham, often don't speak a word of English, when they can use the extra lane.
What happens if you break down and the shoulder is an active lane? Well what happens is that you are forced to pull over into a live traffic lane, at which point you get flattened by two of Britain's ubiquitous Slavic semis and lose the use of your legs. Helpfully, the Ambulance can't even get to you because the shoulder is now full of traffic stopped in the massive traffic jam created by your entrails.
So successful has the "Smart Motorway" concept been that the government have decided to roll it out to other motorways. Already, two people got creamed by a semi on the M1 in very similar circumstances, meeting their deaths, as so many do, under the wheels of a sleepy Polish trucker.
* This section includes the Gravelly Hill Interchange, better known as "Spaghetti Junction", which looks like this:
Veterans of LA Freeways or German Autobahns may not by particularly impressed by it, but I once showed it to a Danish friend of mine and she had to go for a lie down.
The M62
If you are headed from, say, London to visit the human zoos that are Liverpool and Manchester, which way would you go? Well the obvious answer is that you wouldn't, but if you're really determined to you have two choices. You could take the M40 from London to Birmingham, tailgated all the way by some snarling 19-year-old Arab in an Audi his dad bought him, then fight your way around the city on the M6, before becoming a stain on Vladislaw's Pirelli as he mows you down without looking up from his porn somewhere near Stoke-on-Trent, or you could take the M1 to Leeds and try to cut West. Trouble is, this approach then puts you on the M62.
The M62 is the *only* East-West motorway North of London and South of Glasgow, and it is situated in the freezing, windswept Penine Hills. Despite linking Manchester with places like Huddersfield, Bradford, Leeds, Pontefract and Hull, for some reason people actually choose to go from one of these places to one of the others, maybe in the vain hope that it will be less depressing (spoiler: it isn't).
The M62 is a miserable, ice-plagued ribbon of asphalt notable for frequently being shut by freezing fog and blizzards in the winter and flooding the rest of the year. Its steep hills result in crawling lorries for miles, sometimes multiple lanes of them, occasionally stalling out altogether if the weather is bad (which it is, always). The only benefit the M62 really provides is making it really difficult to leave places like Bradford, reducing the time their citizens have to get to other places before their bomb vests explode.
How do the British drive?
Actually, surprisingly well. Yes, there are plenty of dickish drivers in the UK, in fact there are millions of them, but the UK's roads are some of the safest in the world. A large part of this, of course, is attributable to the low average speeds - it's quite difficult to smash your car into shrapnel if you're stuck in a traffic jam, after all*. But we do also drive fairly sensibly - just go to Florida, France, Italy, Greece or (God help you) Belgium to see how bad things could actually be.
*Unless, of course, you drive a British car, which tend to be about 85% rust by weight and are reduced to a cloud of brown dust if they so much as run over a crisp packet, but luckily all Britain's car makers have either gone spectacularly bankrupt or have been taken over by foreign firms who have mastered the dark arts of automotive metallurgy (apart from Vauxhall, who got bought by General "Unsafe at Any Speed" Motors and still assemble horrible, cheap rustboxes for drunk teenagers to wrap around lamp-posts).
Our driver education and testing, fittingly for an authoritarian hellhole, is extremely strict by almost any standards (especially American standards). You can't drive on a public road at all until you are 17 and you are subject to considerable restrictions until you are 21. You are required to take both a theory and practical test and both are actually quite challenging - for British people at least. Whilst I have been assured that it has tightened up since I took it, I remember my theory test being the dumbest thing I have ever sat in front of. It was about 20 multiple-choice questions, and I swear I remember this particular one word-for-word:
Here's some more:
At least a third of my classmates failed this test, some repeatedly.
Another reason our roads are so safe is that we drive on the correct side of the road, unlike everyone else except based Aussies and the Japanese. Humans instinctively veer to the left 90% of the time when taking evasive action - that's why aircraft carriers always have their control towers to the right of the landing deck, because it drastically reduces the chance of Maverick and Goose paying an unscheduled visit to the Captain's Quarters (if that sounds gay, that's because it is). On the road, this means that, faced with an emergency, a panicking left-driving motorist will swerve off the road rather than into oncoming traffic. Japan's roads are also very safe for the same reason. Australia's roads are still dangerous, but that is because it doesn't matter which way you swerve when a rabid Drop Bear comes crashing through your windshield and rips your throat out.
When Britain joined the EU (and even still, after its departure), it agreed that anyone with an EU driving licence could drive in the UK without taking any further kind of test. Whilst this did open up our roads to the likes of the French, most of them had more sense than to come here at all, let alone attempt to drive. It became more of an issue when the EU expanded to include Romania, because Romanians drive like they're playing Rocket League. Presumably because they go giddy with excitement when presented with anything faster than an Ox Cart, every week sees a fresh crop of ill-fated motorists with names ending in escu appearing in the tops of trees or the upper floors of houses in the crushed remains of what used to be Vauxhall Corsas.
Parking
Good luck.
Next up: the railways.
Good evening all you highly-melanated individuals. Sorry it's been a while but I've been doing things like going outside and talking to people before they make that illegal again. Wouldn't recommend it overall though. The graphics are really high-definition but the gameplay is horribly unbalanced. Every patch seems to make it worse, too.
Anyway, where was I?
Oh yeah, the UK and its fucking transport infrastructure. You might not think that "transport" would be all that interesting or exciting but then again lots of you people liked my boring description of how Britain's legislature works and that's the political equivalent of arranging the lint from your pocket in colour order, so if anything I wonder if actual trainspotting might cause your wranglers to put you in the stimming room to calm down.
Britain's transport infrastructure is, like everything else about Britain:
1 - Something that we used to be really good at
2 - Overwhelmingly shaped by the UK's horrible overcrowding
3 - Shit
As I have discovered of late, doing anything in the UK involves dealing with the British weather and dealing with the sheer aggravation of actually going anywhere. This is why the British took to Lockdown much better than much of the rest of the Western world: staying inside means not getting rained on, not having to meet any British (or "British") people, and not enduring the teeth-pulling nature of going from one place to another.
1 - The Roads
Unlike the US, as I'm sure even the fattest of Americans reading this have grasped by now, everything in the UK is very close to everything else. This is unfortunate, because, as we have seen, the overwhelming majority of places, people and smells in this accursed country are not things that you want anywhere near you. The two furthest-apart points of the UK mainland (Land's End in Cornwall and John O'Groats in Scotland) are only 603 miles (970km) apart geographically, or 874 miles (1,407km) by the shortest road route. That's quite a lot less than the distance from New York to Chicago (714 miles/1,149km geographically and 791 miles/1,272km by road) and remember that most of the Northern third of the UK is pretty much empty. There's a saying that Brits think 100 miles is a long way and Americans think 100 years is a long time.
Britain's roads are all numbered. M for Motorways, A for non-motorway main roads (which confusingly can be motorways sometimes, but can also be single-lane high streets), B for secondary roads all the way to E for farm tracks and glorified alleyways. Only M, A and B roads carry their numbers, everything else is only referred to by name. But sometimes A and B roads have names. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they have several different names along the course of their length. Fuck you.
This numbering system of M, A and B roads is basically a national obsession. Every British driver with any experience knows probably a couple of hundred road numbers and where those roads are, even if they don't realise it. Americans might know their local Interstates and other State Routes but they don't have the encyclopaedic knowledge of the British driver. This isn't because British drivers are smarter (though as anyone who has seen an American try to negotiate a roundabout could tell you, that doesn't mean they *aren't* smarter), but because Britain's roads are so congested and roadwork-riddled you need to have at least 2 diversionary routes in mind every time you plan a journey. You would think that satnavs would have put an end to this, but the British driver and their satnav are often not friends. Americans put too much trust in their satnavs and blindly follow their directions onto railroad tracks, active airport runways and boiling lava pits, but the British will refuse to believe their Satnav knows better than them and refuse to divert from their favourite routes even if said route is currently on fire, being bombed by the Luftwaffe, or filled with protesters gluing themselves to the tarmac in the deranged belief that it will encourage people to insulate their houses (that last one is 100% unexaggeratedly true).
Some of these road numbers are subject to passionate debate amongst millions of people. If I just mention the A303 and the M4/M5, about half the British people reading this will know exactly what I'm talking about and have a VERY STRONG OPINION on what is the best way to get from London to South-West England (A303 gang 4 lyfe, yo. You get a really good view of Stonehenge as you crawl past it at 3mph, whereas the other way you have to look at, and smell, Swindon).
An eroded, mysterious pile of ugly structures with no clear purpose filled with weirdos - Swindon is not like Stonehenge at all.
Whilst the heyday of American Interstate roadbuilding was in the 1950s, the British didn't get around to building their Motorway network until the following decade. But we built some doozies.
Most British motorways have a 70mph speed limit and three lanes of traffic in each direction. These lanes are:
The Inside (slow) lane - This is for sleepy Slavic truckers and the terrified old ladies whose Nissans they have collected as hood ornaments (I'm not joking about this, as we shall see).
The Middle (passing) lane - this is for other truckers who have realised that the truck in front of them in the slow lane was only doing 59.8mph rather than 60mph and decided that this justifies spending five miles overtaking them. Oh and they do this on dual carriageways (divided highways) too, just in case anyone was hoping to get anywhere.
The Outside (overtaking) lane - this is for drivers of German cars and their prey.
So what lane do you drive in if you're not a trucker or an angry bald man in an Audi? The answer, as is so often the case in the UK, is Fuck You.
The M1
This was the first to be built, and snakes from London North to Northampton, Rugby, Leicester, Nottingham, Sheffield and Leeds. Now there used to be a railway that went the exact same way, the Great Central. But Ernest Marples, who was Minister of Transport in the early 60s, owned a large shareholding in a road construction company. He commissioned a consultant called Dr Richard Beeching (more on him later) to recommend what should be done with Britain's railway system. Dr Beeching, the man hired by a roadbuilder to decide what to do with railways, decided, entirely independently, that all the railways should be closed and really big roads be built instead - what a huge coincidence! Another coincidence was that the only main line railway Beeching recommended be closed was the Great Central. And in another, shocking and entirely surprising coincidence, Marples' construction company somehow won, entirely on merit, the contract to build the M1 that just happened to very closely follow the route of the main-line railway the consultant he paid a huge amount of money recommended be closed, thus making Marples, coincidentally, very rich. At least Watergate involved people bugging hotel rooms, our idea of a really big corruption scandal, like so much of British life, mostly involves roadworks.
So, the M1. As the first motorway to be built, it was decided that three lanes each way was enough, a state of affairs that lasted about twelve minutes. So, starting in the mid 1990's, the government started a programme of widening it to four lanes, and they *still* haven't finished. Last I checked, they'd got about as far as Nottingham, but to be fair all the construction vehicles had to use the M1 to get to the work sites, and 25 years to get from London to Nottingham sounds about right for the typical M1 journey. As the main arterial route between North and South, the best way to be entertained during this time is to try to avoid the swinging trailers of foreign semi-trucks in the charge of sleep-deprived Slavic truckers kept awake only by caffeine, amphetamines and the deep-web Ukrainian snuff porn playing on their dash-mounted laptops. Fail to keep up and this happens:
Though I'm still not sure if that's a worse fate than actually arriving in Nottingham.
The M25
The M25 is one of the more recent motorways, built in the late 1980s under Thatcher. Previous administrations had built a sprawl of motorways that went from London to various places, but nothing linking them, causing all the traffic trying to get from one side of London to the other having to go right through the middle of the city, which really delayed Thatcher's friends from getting to their quaalude dealers before peasant-shooting season. So the M25 was built in a wiggly line around the city so all the traffic jams would go there instead. Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman once wrote a book (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12067.Good_Omens) that stated the shape of the M25 was in fact a Satanic rune designed by Beelzebub to slowly turn London into an exclave of Hell itself. For some reason my local library has this book in the "fiction" section.
The M25 was built using a cheap concrete road surface that is constantly crumbling and permanently under repair. Driving on this surface at a speed greater than that of continental drift results in an auditory experience equivalent to sticking your head directly into Niagara falls, but fortunately that's maybe twice the M25's average speed, due to the aforementioned constant roadworks, its inadequate capacity and its bad design. One notorious 5-mile section in the West features junctions to three other motorways AND Heathrow airport, the country's busiest. One time I was stuck on this eldritch stretch of tarmac my satnav worked out that it would actually be faster to come off the motorway at the Heathrow exit, drive right around the airport's gigantic perimeter road (Heathrow is the size of a small city), and get back on it at the exit less than half a mile further down the motorway, and it was STILL faster than staying on it.
The M2
The M25 is often referred to as "the UK's biggest car park" but the M2 is an actual, real, honest-to-god car park (and holds the actual record) for at least part of every year. The M2 is short for a motorway, leading from London to the main Channel port at Dover, where all European traffic crosses to France. As such it carries about 95% of the UK's international road freight traffic, and whenever anything goes wrong at the crossing (sometimes bad weather, Brexit or coof, but usually the French going on strike) there are tens of thousands of lorries (trucks) with nowhere to go. So the Police just pile said lorries onto the motorway, filling both hard shoulders (just "shoulders" in Americanese) and up to four of the six traffic lanes with parked lorries waiting for the French to finish their cigarette break and open the border again. As I have stated elsewhere, England has spent about 500 of the last 1000 years at war with France and the fact that the entire country's international trade is dependent on whether some unshaven, Gitane-smoking French fonctionnaire can be bothered to show up to work in the morning is clear evidence that we still haven't killed enough of them.
The M5
We move away from London now, but things do not get better. The M5 runs from Birmingham, Britain's second-biggest city located pretty much exactly in the middle of England, to Exeter in the South West. With the South West being the only part of the country that has almost acceptable weather and beaches, every summer (especially during the coof) the entire country (except London) piles onto the M5 to go on holiday. (Those from London have to take the single-lane A303, unless they are complete cucks and take the M4 like loser retard niggers - those people then have to join the M5 at Bristol anyway at a junction that I think was designed by M C Escher). So you have ancient caravans towed by Sid from Wolverhampton who hasn't driven with a trailer since WWII and who sideswipes some Turkish lorry while trying to pull in front of it, causing a serious hummus spillage requiring 500 Police officers to close the motorway for a week in order clear it up with half a million slices of toast. And no you can't have any.
As a consequence, the M5 is the second-most dangerous motorway in the country and the worst for overall delays caused by accidents. The road set a new record in August 2017 when two lorries collided, causing a fuel spill so bad that it caused a 36-mile traffic jam. The Highways Agency closed the road, resurfaced it, screwed it up, resurfaced it again, and waited for it to dry before reopening the road. The Police refused to free any of the thousands of trapped drivers who were stuck there for 15 hours in blistering heat (well, blistering heat for Brits) because, you know, British Police.
Such is the M5's reputation for mayhem that the Police will close the M5 for any reason, for hours at a time. Just this week the road was closed for *four hours* because some sped threw an e-scooter onto the road. Maybe one of the coppers had to put his knee on its handlebars until the battery drained.
Oh, and that "dozy Bulgarian trucker doesn't realise he has some old bag's Nissan wedged under his bumper" thing? Happens here too:
The M6
Why is the M5 only the second-most dangerous motorway in the country? Because of the M6. The M6 winds like a pus-choked artery from Birmingham to the Scottish border, past the other massive cities of Liverpool and Manchester, and like the rest of the UK's motorway network it was built with a completely inadequate 3 lanes in each direction. Unlike the M1, however, there was not much room for expansion because much of the road is elevated, notably the long section that runs pretty much through the middle of Birmingham*. Given that the M6 connects 3 of Britain's 6 biggest urban areas together (really 4, as it continues to Glasgow in the guise of the M74), the volume of traffic using it leads to quite apocalyptic congestion. The solution, rather than spend any money, was to open the shoulders of the road as lanes at "peak times" (defined as any day with a vowel in it), using overhead signs to tell people who, this being Birmingham, often don't speak a word of English, when they can use the extra lane.
What happens if you break down and the shoulder is an active lane? Well what happens is that you are forced to pull over into a live traffic lane, at which point you get flattened by two of Britain's ubiquitous Slavic semis and lose the use of your legs. Helpfully, the Ambulance can't even get to you because the shoulder is now full of traffic stopped in the massive traffic jam created by your entrails.
So successful has the "Smart Motorway" concept been that the government have decided to roll it out to other motorways. Already, two people got creamed by a semi on the M1 in very similar circumstances, meeting their deaths, as so many do, under the wheels of a sleepy Polish trucker.
* This section includes the Gravelly Hill Interchange, better known as "Spaghetti Junction", which looks like this:
Veterans of LA Freeways or German Autobahns may not by particularly impressed by it, but I once showed it to a Danish friend of mine and she had to go for a lie down.
The M62
If you are headed from, say, London to visit the human zoos that are Liverpool and Manchester, which way would you go? Well the obvious answer is that you wouldn't, but if you're really determined to you have two choices. You could take the M40 from London to Birmingham, tailgated all the way by some snarling 19-year-old Arab in an Audi his dad bought him, then fight your way around the city on the M6, before becoming a stain on Vladislaw's Pirelli as he mows you down without looking up from his porn somewhere near Stoke-on-Trent, or you could take the M1 to Leeds and try to cut West. Trouble is, this approach then puts you on the M62.
The M62 is the *only* East-West motorway North of London and South of Glasgow, and it is situated in the freezing, windswept Penine Hills. Despite linking Manchester with places like Huddersfield, Bradford, Leeds, Pontefract and Hull, for some reason people actually choose to go from one of these places to one of the others, maybe in the vain hope that it will be less depressing (spoiler: it isn't).
The M62 is a miserable, ice-plagued ribbon of asphalt notable for frequently being shut by freezing fog and blizzards in the winter and flooding the rest of the year. Its steep hills result in crawling lorries for miles, sometimes multiple lanes of them, occasionally stalling out altogether if the weather is bad (which it is, always). The only benefit the M62 really provides is making it really difficult to leave places like Bradford, reducing the time their citizens have to get to other places before their bomb vests explode.
How do the British drive?
Actually, surprisingly well. Yes, there are plenty of dickish drivers in the UK, in fact there are millions of them, but the UK's roads are some of the safest in the world. A large part of this, of course, is attributable to the low average speeds - it's quite difficult to smash your car into shrapnel if you're stuck in a traffic jam, after all*. But we do also drive fairly sensibly - just go to Florida, France, Italy, Greece or (God help you) Belgium to see how bad things could actually be.
*Unless, of course, you drive a British car, which tend to be about 85% rust by weight and are reduced to a cloud of brown dust if they so much as run over a crisp packet, but luckily all Britain's car makers have either gone spectacularly bankrupt or have been taken over by foreign firms who have mastered the dark arts of automotive metallurgy (apart from Vauxhall, who got bought by General "Unsafe at Any Speed" Motors and still assemble horrible, cheap rustboxes for drunk teenagers to wrap around lamp-posts).
Our driver education and testing, fittingly for an authoritarian hellhole, is extremely strict by almost any standards (especially American standards). You can't drive on a public road at all until you are 17 and you are subject to considerable restrictions until you are 21. You are required to take both a theory and practical test and both are actually quite challenging - for British people at least. Whilst I have been assured that it has tightened up since I took it, I remember my theory test being the dumbest thing I have ever sat in front of. It was about 20 multiple-choice questions, and I swear I remember this particular one word-for-word:
Here's some more:
At least a third of my classmates failed this test, some repeatedly.
Another reason our roads are so safe is that we drive on the correct side of the road, unlike everyone else except based Aussies and the Japanese. Humans instinctively veer to the left 90% of the time when taking evasive action - that's why aircraft carriers always have their control towers to the right of the landing deck, because it drastically reduces the chance of Maverick and Goose paying an unscheduled visit to the Captain's Quarters (if that sounds gay, that's because it is). On the road, this means that, faced with an emergency, a panicking left-driving motorist will swerve off the road rather than into oncoming traffic. Japan's roads are also very safe for the same reason. Australia's roads are still dangerous, but that is because it doesn't matter which way you swerve when a rabid Drop Bear comes crashing through your windshield and rips your throat out.
When Britain joined the EU (and even still, after its departure), it agreed that anyone with an EU driving licence could drive in the UK without taking any further kind of test. Whilst this did open up our roads to the likes of the French, most of them had more sense than to come here at all, let alone attempt to drive. It became more of an issue when the EU expanded to include Romania, because Romanians drive like they're playing Rocket League. Presumably because they go giddy with excitement when presented with anything faster than an Ox Cart, every week sees a fresh crop of ill-fated motorists with names ending in escu appearing in the tops of trees or the upper floors of houses in the crushed remains of what used to be Vauxhall Corsas.
Parking
Good luck.
Next up: the railways.
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- Joined
- Mar 29, 2018
Somehow you have made reading about roads more entertaining than the political section. Well played.
- Joined
- Feb 25, 2013
You forgot to mention the 60. Manchester's answer to the M25. Idiots bombing round just to get to the next chokepoint. Either the airport, the roundabout where the 60, the 62, and the 66 join, the Trafford Centre (which although has potentially 3 junctions you can use, everyone only uses 1 in both directions) or the colourfully named 'Death Valley' a stretch of road so called because it turns into Destruction Derby every morning.
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NerdShamer
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2018
Sleazy Car Salesman
Believe me when I say that I will take your money
True & Honest Fan
kiwifarms.net
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- May 27, 2021
And Chicago is even worse than that.
NerdShamer
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2018
You know, that sign is about twice as large than it needed to be, when you look at it long enough.
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2018
Please never stop shit-talking us, because this part genuinely made me wheeze.
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2019
I'm staring at that sign trying to figure out what I'm allowed to do between 3-4pm, Mon-Sat.
You know, that sign is about twice as large than it needed to be, when you look at it long enough.
NerdShamer
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 21, 2018
If I'm right, you're paying for an hour's worth of parking and the extra hour is for people who arrived just before 3pm...But I won't be surprised if someone got a ticket over this.I'm staring at that sign trying to figure out what I'm allowed to do between 3-4pm, Mon-Sat.