Oxford City Council has announced plans to install CCTV with sound recording capabilities in all licensed cabs by April 2015. The council has said that the cameras will record everything from once the engine is running until 30 minutes after it is switched off, but footage will only be kept for 28 days and will only be reviewed if it relates to a police enquiry. 

Big Brother Watch director Nick Pickles said: ‘This is a staggering invasion of privacy, being done with no evidence, no consultation and a total disregard for civil liberties. Big Brother now has big ears and they are eavesdropping on your conversations with absolutely no justification.’ But cabbies’ representative Alan Woodward said: ‘Cab drivers have been beaten unconscious, we had cabs smashed up, we have had complaints against drivers.’

Washington State has launched trials of a new system to test for drowsiness among road users. Fatigue is a bigger contributor to road accidents than drink driving. There is no real test that can determine if a driver is too tired to drive, but the system developed by Washington State Patrol considers a number of factors that may help to identify fatigue sufferers. Patrol officers will electronically scan commercial vehicles for their weight, size, registration and safety record, which allows them to see how long the vehicle has been on the road that day. When drivers are found to have been on the road too long they are placed out of service for 10 hours.

In August, the new system helped officers identify 98 drivers who had been driving for 11 hours after taking just a 10-hour break. A number of crashes caused by fatigue involved  drivers who had falsified their logbooks so they could keep driving. The new scanners will eliminate this threat as there is no way to lie to them. If the trial is successful then it could be implemented across America and possibly in the UK and Europe. It could even be implemented for non commercial vehicles, helping to further improve road safety.

According to recent reports more than one in four UK haulage firms are still unprepared for the expected disruption set to be caused by the 2012 London Olympics. The head of policy for London at the Freight Transport Association (FTA) Natalie Chapman said that the figures were worrying. “Although for some forward-thinking companies the race to prepare for this enormous global event has already begun, many businesses haven’t even started warming up yet,” she warned.

With demand for deliveries set to rise sharply during the build up to the London Olympics, the FTA has urged haulage companies to treat this as a three month Christmas period. As well as increased demand there will also be increased restrictions imposed such as tougher lower emissions standards in London and £200 parking charges for motorists who park in areas outside of the Olympic Route Network.

This would be useful in a traffic jam.

Have a great weekend everyone!

The German transport minister, Peter Ramsauer, has recorded a CD of himself playing Mozart on the piano, hoping that it will calm drivers suffering from road rage. The CD entitled ‘Adagio in the Car’ features the minister playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto Nr. 21 accompanied by the orchestra of Berlin’s Deutsche Oper. Ramsauer is hoping to reduce the number of road accidents caused by aggressive drivers. In 2010 more than 2.4 million road accidents were reported on German roads.

At the launch of the CD in Berlin he told reporters “There are more secrets in one slow movement by Mozart than in the entirety of federal transportation policy.” Ramsauer originally wanted to be a concert pianist, but instead chose to enter politics. He hopes that the music will have a calming effect on people and reduce road rage accidents.

Residents in a small corner of Benfleet, Essex have been told they will no longer be able to receive deliveries because they live on roads with uneven surfaces making it too perilous for the postal workers to venture down. Many residents such as Doreen and Meredith Chatterton, both in their late 80s, now face a round trip of up to hour in order to collect their mail from their nearest sorting office after receiving a letter informing them of the decision. The letter stated there had been ‘on several occasions a number of near miss accidents’ which prompted a health and safety review that found an ‘unacceptable risk’ for delivery to homes on unmade roads. Spokeswoman Sally Hopkins said: “We are keen to resume deliveries. We will review doing so when road repairs are made.”

But it is not the first time the Royal Mail has provided a bizarre reason for disrupting deliveries. In November last year a postman refused to deliver to one address in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk after complaining that the resident’s garden was too overgrown. In another case in Portsmouth, a resident was warned he would his service suspended unless he took steps to keep his “aggressive cat” under control.

Another week, another sat nav related incident. Once again we find that the trusty sat nav is perhaps not so trusty after all. A couple in Romsey have seen their garden wall flattened by a lorry for the second time in as many years. Susan and Roy Wood have blamed sat navs for the increase in lorries through their narrow estate. “We’ve lived here 19 years and didn’t have any problems until the invention of sat navs,” said Roy.
The Woods have now called upon highway chiefs to introduce signs warning drivers some of the local roads are unsuitable for heavy goods vehicles. Although this is a local incident of little national significance, the issue of heavy goods vehicles finding themselves on unsuitable roads is an increasing problem in the UK. Perhaps more small villages should adopt an ‘Ignore your sat nav’ sign similar to the one in Exton, Leicestershire.

At least the left indicator is still working.

Have a great weekend everyone!