I see a large number more lives and families will have been ruined or at best badly damaged by a major road traffic incident on the M7 today involving a pile up involving at least 20 vehicles.

Just yesterday morning I had the distinct displeasure of having to negotiate the entire M4 extension from where the dual-carriageway starts at Mullingar changing to motorway specification at Kinnegad and on past the toll and onto the old part of the M4 motorway outside Maynooth.

I can't really remember ever being so seething behind the wheel at the blatant stupidity I saw yesterday morning. I've seen some stupid things in my time, including being directly adjacent in the line of traffic to a head on-collision caused by someone nodding off at the wheel at 50 mph, plus all the usual little things you see that annoy you on the road day to day.

Yesterday morning, I'm sure almost identically to this morning, was foggy as hell. Visibility was down to 5-10 meters in places on the motorway. Now, a real bug-bear of mine is people not lighting up their full dipped headlights early at dusk, or leaving them on long enough at dawn. It certainly makes a vast difference to your ability to read the road, even if you're not very concious of it because there's half-light or more from the sky. Another more minor bug-bear of mine would be people not turning off fog lights when they've exited out of foggy conditions at night. Those things really blind you.

Yesterday, I saw something which goes way, way beyond this. I saw car, after car, after car, doing on anywhere from 40 - 80mph on the M4 in 5-10 meter visibility with no lights on whatsoever in the early morning half-lit extreme fog. Ah sure it's half light already this dawn, my lights won't aid me any more with seeing the road in front of me!

Yes, not drivers who forgot to turn on their fog lights in the conditions but 10s of drivers with no lights on at all!. I was thinking to myself how dangerous a position I was in on the motorway and how I could so easily come to harm through no fault of my own in the event of a pile up. As I'm sure some of those involved in today's accident probably were. Some responsible people who thought that this morning on the N7 ended up tangled in a metal heap (maybe dead, maimed) with fucking morons who didn't even bother to have any lights on, never mind their fog lights on.

My blood boils too much to be rational about this.

[End Rant]

EDIT: Some selected quotes have emerged from people involved in today's major traffic pile-up, which confirm what I suspected about the lights issue. It's hard to imagine anyone doing something so astoundingly wreckless in any other facet of everyday life with other innocent people's lives than driving along a motorway in fog with no lights on. You wonder with common sense this bad, is driver education ever going to get anywhere?:

Tow truck operator Tony Hennessy who was removing smashed vehicles from the road today - “It’s absolutely crazy – There’s about 50 cars, and they’re all written off, every last one of them. Never in my life have I seen such a thing and it’s purely bad drivers in fog not slowing down,”.

“They were driving along with no lights on – I met loads of them. They were driving too fast, flying along in thick fog and they couldn’t see their hands in front of them.”

A woman on her way to work told RTÉ Radio: “Traffic was really heavy and there were motorists with no lights on and doing big speed... I suppose cars were doing 120 in the fast lane, but they weren’t allowing for the weather conditions and there was a lot of motorists with no lights on.”


tags: driving

Published by Paul.