h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Good article (although with a distinct socialist slant, no bad thing if you ask me)

To my point, I loved the fuel protest, although a little busier than normal my bus whisked me to work, crossing near empty roads was a joy and I thought to my self wouldnt it be great if it was like this all the time.

As a public transport user, I did indeed get a good belly laugh at the lemmings.
And this article...

As someone who used a car for work at the time, and no, I couldn't do my job without a car, I'm glad you had a good laugh at my son going barefoot and starving.

Oh all right, it was pretty funny. The roads were nice and quiet, and as a cabbie I was allowed fuel as part of the 'emergency services'.

...as an observation I've always noticed that the early morning traffic jams disappear during school holidays...
possibly nothing to do with those going to work *or* lorries and vans...

I got my bike out of the shed and rode to work along roads which I am usually bothered by cars whizzing past me
Despite having half a tank left..
What I thought funniest was when people realized that the supermarket delivery fleets were running out.
Our supermarket was suddenly full of people with trolleys full of bread, long life milk and baked beans as if preparing for the siege of leningrad
Then it happened again a week later after a radio announcer made a joke about it
One man was found to have filled his lounge up with open oil drums brimming with petrol...

Makes you realize that we are only a week away from anarchy though..

Yup thats true to cut costs business work on very short turn around, a couple of things go wrong and the S*** hits the fan and society goes with it.

The school holidays thing is so true, its most apparent in London and there is little excuse when living in a city to drive your kids to school.

True story: Peter Williams, a 22-year-old cyclist, was killed in January 2000 after a driver hit him with her car’s wing mirror, knocking him off and under the wheels of another car.

The driver admitted driving without due care and attention but was fined just £200. She was not banned from driving despite reaching the 12 point limit (note that this indicates a history of convictions for motoring offences). Phillip Judge, Chairman of the Bench in Cheltenham, said a driving ban would prevent her from taking her children the two miles to school and therefore cause too much hardship.

*Two miles* - my wife cycles three and a half to school with our children.

that is truely shocking, what a lazy bunch we have become

I wonder how many children get knocked over by the mums in their Land Rovers which they need to drive around the corner...

In europe they stagger it so kids start at 8 and adults at 9, means that they can drop off their kids and still get to work, and not everybody needs to be somewhere at the same time - A common sense way to sort out the rush hour which would cost nothing.

Unfortunately the older I get the more I think that the place is run by idiots

The funny thing is some parents drive their kids to school because the traffic is too busy .

Oh yes, I'd forgotten about all the morons stocking up for a protracted siege. I wanted to know how all that milk they bought was going to avoid going off anyhow. Did not one person stock up with petrol in his garage and kill himself when he turned the light on or something?

Answer: in the average class of thirty, six children will have been killed or injured on the roads by the time they are 16. Over 300,000 (all ages) killed and injured every year - 3,600 killed last year I saw figures for.

The answer is obviously for even more mums to take to their Range-Rovers, as one more car journey can't possibly contribute to the problem.

On those stats I can only say there must be some areas of the country where there's a nearly one hundred per cent caualty rate, because my experience suggests that only 2 out of 360 of my year were involved in traffic accidents at secondary school, and only one (me) in my junior school.

I thought the stats incredible as well, but the DfT published them in some leaflet.

I suspect the 'injured' word will encompass a wide range of ailments in that set of figures...

Yup I was going to say, depends on your definition of accident, that could be as simple as falling off your bike, I think ost kids will do this at some point.

Doesn't count as an RTA, though.