Chaos and Ignorance

There are times in life when the truth is hard to cope with. There are times in life when sometimes it is probably wiser to withhold information to lull a person into a false sense of security because the horrible reality of a situation is too difficult to contend with. There are times in life when not saying anything is the easiest if not the right thing to do.

This happens to me frequently, and I can explain precisely when this happens to me and how it affects me.

Travelling back from work on many evenings, I get in my car, I switch my radio on to my dependable Radio Four and I have the technology tuned in to tell me of the misfortune ahead of me as I make my way south. Only sometimes, I hear nothing about what I am about to experience.

In London, the traffic news is frequent, as are the same names that you hear daily, repeated every quarter of an hour throughout the two hours of heavy traffic in the morning and evening.

It’s the Hogarth Roundabout or the Tolworth Junction or the Hammersmith Flyover or the Blackwall Tunnel. Frequently it used to be the Albert Bridge but that is currently closed for repairs or Kensington High Street or Chelsea Embankment and so forth. If you live in London you know these places because they are always on the travel reports, and I have clearly missed some obvious ones as well.

For those who do not live in London, let me tell you a little secret that the rest of the world hasn’t cottoned on to. The majority of the places listed about happen to be in the West of London. My word, says the geographically intelligent population outside London, that western part of the city must be a nightmare. It’s only the Blackwall Tunnel that seems to be blocked on the other side of town.

But no! Recently I wrote about the Chipping Norton Set and here is the thing, here is the truth and reality of life. The Chipping Norton Set and their friends and colleagues don’t have to travel to the East of London to get into the godforsaken city. They have to travel over the Hammerhell flover, returning via the Hogarth Fuckedabout and that, as well as a ridiculous amount of traffic, is why you hear these names so often. They affect the rich and famous!

However, the real damage, the real and perpetual gridlock is happening on my patch, thank you very much, as I inch down the Eastway to that interminable tunnel approach before crawling through and receiving even more traffic south of the river.

It is a gloriously, revolting nightmare, only made easier by the company of Eddie Mair, Jenni Murray and the likes.

But what is this about this withholding information?

As I approach the motorway (well I call it a motorway because it has three lanes and looks and feels like a motorway apart from the 40mph speed limit), I have my radio ready. The travel information frequently comes on as I sit at the traffic lights in anticipation, and I wait. And wait. Obviously the news from the west of town takes precedence for the reasons I have explained previously. It is only when a nuclear bomb has been diffused (can you do such a thing?) that the Blackhell Tunnel gets a mention first; when the traffic is seemingly going to require a wait of an hour or so to get through the blasted tunnel.

And yet, even then it is sometimes ignored. Sometimes the news from the west takes so long, it seems as though they run out of time before they can tell us Blackheller’s of what we are about to receive. Sometimes, however, I have now come to the conclusion that they don’t actually tell us what is happening on the approach to the tunnel because it is too damn scary. They would rather us drive in ignorant trepidation rather than reveal the calamity of what is the main route between north and south at the wrong side of town.

Sometimes I honestly think that they can’t be bothered to inform us of the potential misery because it is too bleak to do so with such frequency. The poor announcers are simply bored by the repetition. So they just calmly forget to mention the Blackwall buggery.

Or even worse, the simply don’t give a toss because it is not involving themselves or their friends.

The amount of times I have been foolish enough to think that all will be well because the BBC have not felt it important enough to mention that there is a three mile tail-back that will take me over an hour to travel through. Fifteen miles it is from A to B, and I can guarantee that the journey, at a certain time in the evening, can take me up to two hours, certainly never less than one hour and twenty minutes – at a specific time.

I can cope with the truth and make my decision based on the reality of a situation but what I find intolerable is this lack of information so that I have already stuck my indicator out, despite having listened to the travel report, to take me onto the main road to Hell, only to find that the Hogarth Roundabout had a fingernail out of place on the driver of the 5 series BMW which had caused a slight blip in Jemima being picked up from the child minder by 5.59 pm which meant the news about my route home was deemed to be insignificant.

It’s tragic.

But the tragedy does not stop there. Not only do they conveniently forget to mention the horror of fume-fuelled disaster awaiting me as I sit in stagnation every evening, but also someone made the monumental decision to close the tunnel every night bar Friday and Saturday from 9 pm so that if you want to return from north to south on the eastern side of town after 9pm, you have to wheedle your way along the slowest road in town, that was clearly not designed to take the heavy goods vehicles, through the terribly sweet but utterly annoying Rotherhithe Tunnel. The joke is that they have a sign up saying 20 mph – I wish!

Have these people never considered a contraflow?

And it doesn’t stop there.

Someone from Transport for London had the absolute brainwave of informing passing travellers of precisely how many incidents of disruption have occurred through the tunnel for the last month.

How very informative, I hear you say, but can I please ask a simple question...... what is point?

What is the point of telling me that there are currently 40 dimwits whose cars broke down either immediately before or in the tunnel during the last month? Is there any purpose in telling me that the traffic was halted due to 80, yes 80, trucks or lorries being too tall to pass through the barrier, thus having to be taken out and directed to an alternative route?

That is more than two a day. And this, I assume, for the month of August when the traffic is allegedly less problematic because we are all allegedly away from the city finding a source of sun and enjoyment without school runs to clog up the system.

Surely, the money that has been invested in furthering the angst of the frequent Blackheller’s to inform them that there have been 80 incompetent lorry drivers and 40 useless drivers who have either crashed their cars, broken down or, heaven forbid, forgotten to learn how to read a petrol gauge could have been better spent by putting some notices up further down the road to prevent the fuckwits from causing havoc before they get to the bloody tunnel? Or am I being naive?

It is utterly intolerable that there appear to be three incidents a day that close the tunnel – all due to the stupidity of the people that we carefully trust our lives with every day as we accompany them towards the tunnel only to find that they either can’t drive or can’t judge the size of their juggernaut.

And even more intolerable is that nobody seems particularly bothered about putting some preventative measures in place to stop this from happening.

I cringe at the thought that this is what is going to be greeting the many visitors that we are about to receive in this country for the Olympics. I wonder why nothing was done about this when we had the announcement in 2005, when everybody has now known for nearly seven years that this side of town seriously needed some help and consideration.

Talking of 2012, the television skit on the Olympic planning team even had an episode about the flaws and problems of the traffic approaching and travelling through the Blackhell Tunnel. The irony of this particular episode was that the Blackwall Tunnel is so bloody hopeless and so terrifying that they couldn’t actually bear to show the vile thing in reality and ended up filming the Limehouse Link instead – just in case the reality of Blackhell was too frightening to put on television. It might put people off. Of course, had they used the tunnel for filming, then there would have been a tailback from Gilligham to Cambridge, so that wasn’t likely to happen.

More veiled truth.

Whilst I may sound like the most tedious of bores with a bee in her bonnet, I am writing this slightly with a tongue in my cheek, but sadly, there is too much reality in what I am writing. Yes, it is frustrating to sit in traffic having made assumptions that no news is good news but as my darling Dad said to me once when I was flipping about something quite incidental, “For goodness sake, there are children dying in Africa”.

And he was right. Traffic is mind-numbingly tedious and incredibly frustrating, all the more so when no information or veiled truth is being sent down the airwaves, but there are more important issues to concern us with, and every single time I am caught up in this sort of traffic, I have to think positively. I go to work because I love it. I travel in the car because it gives me the independence to move as and when I choose rather than being reliant on a strict timetable, and the endless hours of travel enable me to stop, listen, think, not think (other than being in full command of my vehicle) and spend some time with myself in a very busy schedule.

So many times I have been caught in this sort of traffic and have had time to plan my writing or reflect upon a wonderful day, whilst listening to the real disasters in peoples’ lives around the world.

Perhaps this is what we should really be reflecting on. Perhaps we should all take a calmer and more tolerant look at the world.

Before any friends to the West start screaming, and before any non-Londoners accuse me of being ignorant and dismissive of the rest of the country, I say outright, I sympathise with anyone caught in intolerable traffic, and I am all too painfully aware that London, and the East of London is not the only place that suffers with this debilitating problem.

Recently, it took me over two hours to reach the Hogarth Roundabout from work; a journey that by right should take no longer than 45 minutes. There are huge traffic problems in the west of town too but at least it feels as though someone gives a damn.

The other day, I was travelling back from work after Blackhell had been closed for the night. Some ludicrous person had then decided it was a good idea to dig up large chunks of Commercial Road (the road to the alternative tunnel of Rotherhithe) at the very same time as the Blackwall Tunnel was closed. Over an hour, and I was still some way from the old Victorian warren to Southwark, and nobody seemed to care. Coordination is really bad.

As for the rest of the country, they don’t fair too well either. Last night, I crawled through Port Talbot at less than six miles per hour, clogging up an entire town because the motorway had to be closed for maintenance.

I am not suggesting our roads should not be closed for repairs, but there needs to be more management of such situations. Do you, for instance, really need to close a stretch of four junctions simultaneously? Do all lanes need to be worked on at exactly the same time? There has to be an alternative to diversion, and talking of diversions, if you are going to introduce such a system, please make sure the signposts are all in place. It was only due to my relatively decent sense of direction yesterday that I managed not to follow the diversionary sign that would ultimately have sent me back to the motorway in the wrong direction.

But returning once more to reality, however hard it may be, sometimes, one just has to accept that traffic chaos is annoying but not necessarily the worst thing that we have to endure in life, and for those who disagree, then you are either the fortunate ones who genuinely have no threats or concerns with life or you simply aren’t enlightened and intelligent enough to want to know anything about the world, the injustice and the problems that so many of our fellow men and women live with on a permanent basis. If a fucked up transport system is really the most important thing in your life, then you are fortunate or foolish.

That said, here is a plea to the BBC, Transport for London and others. Remember little us on the other side of town. Don’t hide behind withholding information or simply not telling – the resentment that can build from such dispassionate behaviour is extreme. Keep us informed, consider ways of preventing Blackhell from being so called and spare a thought for those of us who choose to love East rather than West.......... and if you forget, well believe me, you may well regret your procrastination and disregard when it comes to wanting to visit the wonderment of the Olympic site for next and subsequent years.

There is life on the other side of town and we are prepared to let the Western grockels come and have a look, but don’t forget our plight once you flee back to the dismal delights of the other side of town.

I mean, just think how many thoughts are amassing in that approach to the Blackwall Tunnel. If someone managed to gather that, well, the East would have its day.

Enlightenment approaches.