VPA CMS News Blog

Long travel time with no drink

This winter has seen the worst weather in Britain for 30 years; it seems to have caused more lost work days than seasonal flu. Many people did endeavour to get into work but the snowy weather reaped havoc with the roads. We are just not geared up to deal with these extremes in Britain. I watched a TV program about Norway, they have more extreme weather than the UK yet all of the airports, motorways and infrastructure kept working, not one working day was lost due to severe weather. They have invested heavily in the infrastructure to allow all services to keep running; they do this because it is an annual event to them unlike the once in 30 years we get in the UK. With the so called global warming of the earth, it may pay the UK to invest a little more in our infrastructure so that the interruption is kept to a minimum. It was said that it would only take 2 consecutive years of bad weather to pay for all the changes that we would need to make in order to almost eliminate lost staff days. One day last month I was travelling back from Bristol and it took me almost 6 hours to travel 50 miles, without even having a drink from the water coolers or drinking fountain before i left, the motorway was gridlocked, it doesn’t help that with all the heavy goods vehicles on the on the motorway create that much spray that it delays the entire network. Most of the stoppages came from basically bad driving, someone would try and get up the hilly section and would stop and then this would cause a tailback so the traffic would go from bad to worse. With the blockage of one lane then another lane it soon became to a total stop, even the emergency service vehicles were getting stuck as they tried to pass on the hard shoulder.