Today i woke up to windows vibrating and rain pouring down… i then drove through semi flooded roads whilst conscious of the fact there were gusty winds waiting to sweep me aside should i want to speed up. Whilst tucked up in my cosy car i was dreading the inevitable… having to get out of it and walk through the rain to my destination…
Drainage & Spray
For a country that gets so much rain, it’s incredible to think we haven’t mastered a way of disposing it from our roads effortlessly. Whatever about rural roads, when there’s puddles of water lying on national roads & motorways, it makes maintaining speed difficult & obviously dangerous.
You’re glad to see a lorry up ahead because it acts as a shield in the rain. If someone decides to foolishly overtake or happens to lose control coming in the opposite direction, you don’t have to break sweat. Speaking of foolishly overtaking…
You can outbreak a lorry, outrun it.. so in difficult conditions, i’m happy to let big brutes of machines lead the way (tractors excluded, they’re evil). I see them all as a big metal airbag.
The one massive negative is the fact that they spray up more mist and crap from the road than any other vehicle. Being stuck behind one at 80km/hr+ is like being stuck in a shower with your head held in place whilst the shower head is pointed at you and turned on full blast. Overtake you say? Well you can’t, for two reasons. Firstly, this is Ireland… getting a straight stretch of road with good visibility is rare, secondly you can’t see a thing because your head is in the shower… you have to drop back a great distance to see the road ahead and by the time you do that the distance needed to overtake increases… the loop continues.
Solutions
Ideally, we’d have some smart drainage system in place on all roads which wouldn’t leave water lying there, plus lorries would have some sort of anti spray device fitted to them. Can’t think of solutions right now but there must be a way…
Perhaps more important is combating snow & ice. The solution to that? Heated roads. Or some way of introducing chemicals in to tar that generate enough heat at all times to not freeze but not make tires explode. It’s an age old problem… well age old from the time when roads when first created… about time we figured out a way of melting ice & snow on roads. Ideas?