Don't tailgate! If you're riding a bike, don't let people ride your tail, get off the road or speed up!

the biker walked away from this one... found on https://www.facebook.com/Forever2WheelsMotorcycles

it happens this fast. Driver cuts off motorbike, biker not driving defensively, WHAM

Found on http://blog.motorcycle.com/

Be more careful out there my friends, the life you save... could be your own whether you are in a car or on a bike

George reposted this on his Facebook, and in the comments and analyzation, it was pointed out that the car was facing the sun (see the long shadows) and that the car used it's turn signal (at the 6 seconds point in the video when looking at the back of the car) but it's obvious that the turn signal can't be seen as it is on the far side of the car from the bikers point of view, and looks like it doesn't have a yellow lens in front, or doesn't work in front.

News flash: Agent Orange contamination, was also happening due to contact with the airplanes that sprayed it, for a dozen years after they came back from Nam

From 1971-1982, Air Force reservists, who flew in 34 dioxin-contaminated aircraft used to spray Agent Orange and returned to the U.S. following discontinuation of the herbicide spraying operations in the Vietnam War, were exposed to greater levels of dioxin than previously acknowledged, according to a study published today in Environmental Research by senior author Jeanne Mager Stellman, PhD, professor emerita at the Mailman School of Public Health’s Department of Health Policy and Management.

These aircraft were subsequently returned to the U.S. and were used by Air Force reserve units between 1971 and 1982 for transport operations. After many years without monitoring, tests revealed the presence of dioxin (also known as TCDD). All but three of the aircraft were smelted down in 2009.

The Air Force and Department of Veterans Affairs have previously denied benefits to these crew members. http://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/blue-water-navy.html

http://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/air-force-aircraft-returned-vietnam-postwar-source-agent-orange-contamination.html

the more time goes by, the more the rules change when the powers that be figure out they were wrong.

Found on http://twentytwowords.com/ 

Drunk on the job... but that's ok, he's not really an employee. He's a homeless guy hired by the guard that needed to get more sleep. Seriously.. In Manhatten, anything can happen

Found on http://autos.aol.com/article/transit-work-hires-drunk-homeless-man-to-direct-traffic/

The actual Transit employee Santiago was covering for, Max Caramas, was filmed asleep in a bus on the lot while Santiago was drinking and directing traffic.

Don't trust the repair shop to take care of your rare and valuable car... often, the mechanics joy ride and wreck the customers car.

In Stuttgart Germany, this 300 SL was worth 3/4s of a million dollars, roughly.... before it was rolled and wrecked by the 26 and 19 yr old mechanics. Found on http://www.businessinsider.com/super-rare-mercedes-gets-totaled-after-mechanics-take-it-for-a-joy-ride-2013-3#.UVRGMy5_sbY.reddit via http://flaviogomes.warmup.com.br/

And not very long ago I posted about the ZL1 Camaro the dealership was refusing to replace after it's young mechanics wrecked it http://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2014/01/dropping-off-your-new-zl1-camaro-at.html

how to stop drunk drivers from leaving your bar, restaurant, etc etc... brilliant

a gate at the parking lot, they have to blow a breathalyzer to get out


In an experiment in Belgium, an organization called Responsible Young Drivers aims to reduce drunk driving by installing parking barriers at popular party spots that will only open for departing cars after the driver has proven his or her sobriety with a breath test… http://www.ryd.be/en/

Found on http://twentytwowords.com/

Meanwhile in Russia sets a dangerous UK precedent

HOPE you’ve enjoyed a pleasant week’s motoring, bereft of bumps and scratches. Meanwhile, in Russia, footage of a fishtailing Lada has been uploaded to YouTube for your evening entertainment.

You can’t have failed to notice the sheer quantity of clips being uploaded to YouTube of Russians crashing things, badly filmed by dashcams of family saloons slogging their way through a snowdrift somewhere in Siberia. This compelling concoction of spins, rolls and crashes – think of it as sort of You’ve Been Framed meets Police Camera Action, with added Moscowprofanity – has proven so popular that petrolheads over here now happily use #meanwhileinrussia as a hashtag on Twitter.

If you don’t know what a hashtag is, get your children to fire up YouTube and enjoy someone else’s motoring misfortune to while away a few idle minutes. It is weirdly compelling for the same reason that you’ll always slow down on the motorway to gawp at a car crash.

Yet what worries me isn’t these clips’ weirdly addictive edge. It’s that the things which make them possible – those crude, dashboard-mounted cameras – are becoming increasingly fashionable over here too.

Already I know of one court case which involved a lorry driver whose dashboard camera proved an unfortunate meeting between his cab and motorcyclist wasn’t his fault. As a result of this and the increasing appetite for the insurance companies to have our every movement monitored – black boxes, anyone – dashboard camera sales are booming in the UK. You might even get one under the tree this Christmas.

While the idea behind them has an appeal – film your drive to work, so you can prove it was the prat in the Audi A3 who drove into your front bumper at 40mph – I can’t help but wonder if we’re unintentionally creating Channel Four’s next comedy series for them, free of charge.

At the moment at least, there’s precious little to prevent these clips escaping into cyberspace, where spotty teenagers will be able to compile them into amusing ten minute videos, which will amuse office workers in Moscow endlessly. The clips will be just as morbidly compelling, but with fewer errant Ladas involved. Being involved in a crash, for whatever reason, is frightening enough, but knowing it’ll sit on YouTube for the rest of eternity or be forever repeated on Britain’s Best Car Crashes is something else altogether.

Meanwhile in Russia, for now, has a certain crude ring to it, but Meanwhile in Formby is a scarier prospect altogether.

Top safety ratings for four new cars

FOUR new arrivals at showrooms across the north west have all been given a coveted European safety rating.

Crash test experts at the Euro NCAP programme have confirmed the new Jeep Cherokee, Mercedes-Benz CLA, Suzuki SX-4 and Peugeot 2008 have all been awarded its highest rating of five stars – good news for anyone thinking of buying one.

To find out how your car performed in the tests go to to the Euro NCAP website.

Qoros leads the way for safer Chinese cars

A GROUP of European safety experts have awarded their highest accolade to a Chinese-built car for the first time.

These days a five star rating from Euro NCAP is a big selling point on new cars, so Qoros will be delighted that its latest saloon, the 3, passed the safety tests with flying colours. Euro NCAP also gave Kia its latest five-star rating, after the Carens people carrier impressed the testers.

If you want to know how your car performed go to www.euroncap.com

VW's electronic nannying makes me want to rage against the machine

IT’S a debate that 21st century philosophers ought to be debating. Is it right to reprimanded by your car?

I was thinking this last weekend, when – having successfully navigated 65 miles across two different counties – the electronic brain of the Volkswagen Polo I’d borrowed decided to give me some help with parking. Help, incidentally, that I hadn’t asked it for.

“LOOK!” the digital readout on the dashboard screamed. “SAFE TO MOVE?”

The Polo might have gained a bit of girth over its 40 year career, admittedly, but it’s still what I’d call a small car. Even Maureen from Driving School could master it. Yet the Polo’s electronic brain, in its better wisdom, decided it needed to remind me anyway that I need to look before I back into a parking space.

It gets worse. Germany’s supermini of choice also decided that the last thing I needed while backing up a small hatchback was music distracting me from the job in hand, so it automatically turned the radio down and steadfastly refused to let me turn back up again.

Katy Perry’s roar, it insisted, would be a distant hum for the duration of the parking. Drivers with tasks as dangerous as a bay park deserve not the dulcet tones of Russell Brand’s ex-wife!

I got out of the Polo a bit peeved, wondering whether I’d somehow annoyed it earlier on with a fluffed gearchange or a cheeky overtake, and it’d decided I was an idiot and therefore needed all the help I could get. Despite it being a sturdily-built, family-friendly package that’s blessed with tidy handling and restrained good looks, my overall verdict on the Polo is that it’s never good for a car to be patronising.

True, drivers too stupid to put on their seatbelts deserve the book – and some safety beeps bonging out of the dashboard – thrown at them, and even I’ll grudgingly admit the high pitched whine almost every modern motor makes when you forget to turn the lights off has saved me the occasional flat battery. When I’m driving, however, I’m the boss and I’ll reverse however I choose to. If I prang an L-reg Fiesta in the process – and, in five years of driving, I’ve never yet come close – then that’s my lookout.

I suspect that, hundreds of miles away, in a bunker in deepest Wolfsburg, some VW engineers decided to instil the Polo with its annoying Nanny State tendencies in a bid to avoid Polo owners going to Claims Direct in about ten years’ time because they’ve reversed into pedestrians. Maybe it’ll become compulsory in the distant future, and for someone who takes pride in how they drive, that worries me.

Given the choice between cars which constantly tell you what to do, and Katy Perry, I know which I’d pick.

The sun sets on another summer of motoring fun

COULDN'T resist sharing this shot of the MX-5 bathed in evening sunlight, which I took by the beach at Southport a couple of days ago.

With the nights drawing in, the air getting chillier and the wet British summer set to turn into an even wetter British winter, it's probably one of the last times I'll be able to snap a nice, summer-esque photo of the bargain ragtop. From Sunday onwards, driving around after about five-ish is firmly a night time, lights on affair.

All of which neatly brings me to one charity's calls for us all to stop becoming accident statistics at this time of year.

Road safety charity Brake have said they're keen to help combat the annual trend of road accident numbers rising during the winter months by urging drivers to take extra caution when behind the wheel due to the lack of daylight during evening commuting.

Ellen Booth, the charity's senior campaigns officer, said: “We can all help to reduce terrible and needless road deaths and injuries in winter darkness, and drivers in particular can make big a difference by committing to slow down.

"Slowing down to 20mph in communities gives you time to stop quickly should you need to: particularly vital when visibility is low."

She also urged walkers, cyclists and joggers to help themselves avoid becoming part of the accident statistics, by wearing hi-vis clothing to help make it easier for motorists to see them.

Consider the advice noted. I might just go for one more roof-down blast before the clocks go back...

Mr Honda Concerto ought to agree with my take on rural speed

THE Honda's rear haunches have never looked so frustrating. Even though it was the crack of dawn on a dry weekend morning, Mr Concerto was dawdling.

Bikers among this column's readers will already know why the Cat and Fiddle road, between Macclesfield and Buxton, is worth seeking out - and why it's such a regular visitor to all those accident statistic surveys as a result. It is, carefully driven, a stunning route across the Pennines well worth seeking out. If you've brought a car - and not a superbike - the 50mph speed limit is plenty, but Mr Concerto was having none of it. He was determined I'd be doing 28mph, and not one measly mile an hour more. A great drive ruined by someone dangerously determined not to be overtaken.

Anyway, it was all part of my quest to answer a question I left hanging a couple of weeks back - is it better to head somewhere the fun way or the quick one? The answer, unless you're absolutely insistent that every journey must go via the Buttertubs Pass in the Yorkshire Dales, is emphatically the quick one. On a really long drive motorways are infinitely preferable to getting lost in Mansfield's one way system.

Besides, little country lanes are going to get slower still if the Coalition gets its way; successive governments have struggled to deal with rural accident rates, and now Cameron and Clegg (which, by the way, sounds like a dodgy estate agent) have hit on a solution. Rather than a blanket reduction, they're considering making it easier for local authorities to lower limits as they choose. It is The Big Society versus speed.

For what it's worth, I reckon it's a good idea - there are far too many winding lanes which you could technically shoot down at sixty, but to try would be lethally dangerous, and chances are your local council knows more about accident hotspots than Whitehall does. Great power, however, comes with great responsibility.

If I head to somewhere like Lincolnshire or Yorkshire behind the wheel of something sporty, it'd comfort me greatly to know that the speed limit's been considered locally by folk who know the roads. What I emphatically wouldn't want - and what a lot of the nationals reported last weekend - is a blanket lowering of rural limits to 40mph from the current sixty.

I'm not a speed freak - a proper petrolhead values good handling over doing a million miles an hour anyway - but what I reckon motorists want is education rather than punishment. We want to know people are actually thinking about road safety rather than just blindly and blanketly laying down the law.

Hopefully, Mr Concerto agrees with me.

I couldn't agree more with traffic calming, but are speed bumps really the answer?

I KNOW it's a victory for safety but it's a crashing defeat for my suspension and - by proxy - my spine. The council has ruined one of my favourite roads.

If, like me, you ever travel between Churchtown and Crossens you'll know what I'm on about. Where once there was smooth tarmac there are now rows of humps, right the way between these two charming parts of Southport, and they haven't succeeded in slowing me down. They've made me stop using it altogether.

“A-ha!” I can hear the council's road safety boffins retort in response, Alan Partridge style. Where once souped-up Saxos and Corsas screamed along this stretch of road they're now having to brake before each and every bump; that or face the prospect of either breaking their backs or damaging their shock absorbers. I'm sure, in a year's time, the stats will show the council's mission of reducing the speeds along Bankfield Lane and Rufford Road will have been easily accomplished.

Don't think for a moment that I'm demanding the right to drive down it like a man who's late for the birth of his first child - I couldn't agree more with the need to slow people down along some roads (and everybody's got at least one in mind). There are, for instance, far too many single track roads I know which you can legally do 60mph on, but to even attempt it would be insane. 30mph too fast for Bankfield Lane? Yep, at quite a few times of day I'd go along with that.


Bankfield Lane is one of my favourite roads for a very simple reason - more often that not, it connects where I live with where I want to go. I know that plenty of motorists took the mickey a bit with it, and on some tragic occasions with fatal results. As a motorist I loved it, but as a Crossens chap I couldn't agree more something needed to be done to slow people down.

But did it really need an endless series of enormous speed humps to cure the problem? Couldn't chicanes have done the trick? Or lowering the speed limit? Or even - and I know this is dangerously avantgarde thinking - road safety cameras? I have a particular hatred reserved for speed bumps because while they slow down the dangerous minority (who'll only find a different road to strut their stuff on anyway), it's the majority of motorists who have to pay the price of the additional wear and tear.

The irony is that it's those who live locally - the ones who called for traffic calming in the first place - who'll suffer the most.

Is car insurance for the young too expensive?

A PARLIAMENTARY committee led by a Liverpool MP has come to the same conclusion most motorists already know; that car insurance is crippingly expensive for younger drivers.

This week the Transport Select Committee has reopened its inquiry into the cost of car insurance, armed with new research which suggests a whopping 96% of younger drivers feel they are being “priced off the road” due to high insurance premiums.

Liverpool Riverside MP Louise Ellman, the committee's chairperson, said:

“I am extremely concerned about these results, which show that young drivers think they are being priced off the road because of the high cost of motor insurance. It is shocking that so many young drivers are considering breaking the law – by driving without insurance or changing the details they provide to insurers – in order to get a cheaper premium.

"It's revealing that most young drivers are also unaware that many insurers receive referral fees in order to deal with claims they make. This highlights why the committee called for referral fees to be made more transparent in its report on the cost of motor insurance earlier this year."

However, insurers continue to charge younger drivers higher prices than their older counterparts, and point to high accident rates to justify them - Department for Transport statistics show that although people under 25 make up just 12% of those on the roads, they're involved in more than a quarter of the accidents.

Are you a younger driver being hit by the cost of insuring your car? Or do you think the accident statistics justify the prices? Share your thoughts by sending an email to david.simister@champnews.com