Traffic hell (again and again)

This morning I had an important appointment to keep (a timeslot booked on a microscope at the York nanocentre). My usual commute takes 45 minutes. An hour and twenty minutes before I had to be there I checked the traffic news; my normal motorway route was down to one lane and the queues were already 7 miles long. I was immediately filled with panic that I was going to be late. With an hour and ten minutes to go I set off along an alternative route that was shorter by distance but on smaller, lower speed limit roads. I arrived twenty minutes late and lost a quarter of my microscope time. This is the second time this week that the A1 motorway has gone down. Today was not as bad as monday but the delays still caused a 12 mile tailback and 2 hour delays for those determined to plough through.

There are simply too many vehicles on the roads. People cannot live near where they work because of the nature of the housing and jobs market. A couple who live in Doncaster might individually have jobs in Leeds and Sheffield and their home is a halfway point. Homes are expensive too and difficult to sell so people can't always live in their choice location. The authorities don't make things easier. There seem to be very few contingency plans for when one of the motorways in Yorkshire goes down. The diversions don't seem to work. One day in 2005 the M1 was closed so they diverted onto the A1 which got blocked by an accident and then the last escape route, the M18, was blocked by an accident. The resulting jams I will never forget.

So in a week like this what do we need? What we don't need is Doncaster council conducting a traffic census on one of the approach roads that feeds the A1 motorway and central Doncaster itself. They forced the road to one lane and slowed this down as they called people over to get a sample of travelling habits. Result; tailbacks for miles and miles and miles back into South Yorkshire. Idiots. Not a good idea to make the rush hour worse, especially considering the commuting hell that this week has brought.

Criminally underrated albums

1. Monster (R.E.M.)
2. One Hot Minute (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
3. Hail To The Thief (Radiohead)
4. John Wesley Harding (Bob Dylan)
5. Fables Of The Reconstruction (R.E.M.)

Thank you

This morning my 45 minute commute to work took 3 hours. The A1 motorway was closed due to a bad accident and the knock on effects on surrounding motorways caused 20 mile tailbacks. There was no indication that the motorway was closed ahead until I hit the wall of traffic. If I'd known I wouldn't have got on the motorway and would have gone the long way round. The local TV news didn't even carry the warning which is most unlike them. Given that the accident happened in the early hours which gave plenty of time for the services to get organised I'm a bit miffed.

I queued for about 20 miles along country back roads to go around to join another motorway. In the small villages we passed through there were no police marshalling people through. In fact lots of small stretches of roadworks caused even worse bottlenecks. The workmen could have just put a road plate over the holes in the road and shut down their roadworks for the day (I know this because I used to do roadworks). The traffic light sequences weren't changed either. So in the one direction you had a half mile queue made up of local traffic and in the other direction a 20 mile queue of thousands and thousands of stranded drivers. Why isn't there a traffic flow contingency for such days. When one motorway in south yorkshire is hit the whole road network goes down. Grrr.

FA Premier League Abroad

The Football authorities here in England are considering the idea of staging some extra league games abroad. The fundamental flaw with this is that some teams would have to play each other three times instead of the usual twice. This undermines the whole idea to such an extent that the plans must be shelved. The league table should be a completely objective measure of how a team performs over an entire season. In a cup competition there can be anomalies where a team can get a lucky goal or a strange refereeing decision. But in the league these random blips get ironed out. Everyone plays everyone else home and away and the best team on average tops the table. If extra fixtures were added then the integrity of the league would be comprimised; some teams might have to play more matches against difficult sides and others might get lots of easy games.

The second argument against this idea is that it isn't fair to the fans. A Sunderland season ticket holder would not be able to attend a match versus Fulham in Los Angeles. Their team would be taken away from them just to make money. And that is the big motivation here; money. And because money is the motivation the fixtures that get scheduled abroad might magically turn out to be Man Utd vs Chelsea or Liverpool vs Arsenal rather than Fulham versus Sunderland. In the same way that the Manchester derby was magically scheduled on top of the 50 anniversay commemorations for the Munich air disaster.

File sharers banned from internet

The UK government is considering the idea of banning anyone from the internet who is found to be downloading copyrighted music or films. Here's why people download torrents;

1) Music in the mid 1990s was ridiculously expensive £15 for a CD album. It is no coincidence that file sharing developed as a response to these ridiculous prices.
2) VHS/DVDs/BLU-RAY video formats are a rip-off and always have been. I don't need expensive packaging for my movie. I don't need a format that changes every 10 years forcing me to rebuy everything. I just need the data stream. I should be able to download a film for £1.
3) The cost of legal downloads is just plain wrong. iTunes rips off UK customers mercilessly.
4) Choice online and in the shops is thin. I struggle to find some records that I could find on the high street a few years back.
5) HMV stop being a music retailer and went for DVDs and went for the pile em high sell em cheap greatest hits market.

The plan to ban people from the internet won't work. The government can't even enforce the driving ban properly. And drivers need a license. HM government have a fundamental misunderstanding of how file sharing works anyway. They seem to think people are swapping whole files like they did a decade ago. Nowadays each file is broken into pieces so small they can't be detected as illegal or not. How could they tell the difference between me downloading a fragment of a copyrighted song or me downloading a fragment of an mp3 file from an unsigned band that they uploaded for free? They could try and attack the infrastructure by killing the websites that host the torrent files but this would be a minor inconvenience and the torrent sites are doing nothing illegal because they are just hosting information and not copyrighted material. The last word comes from the internet service providers association

Internet providers are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope

And they also don't want their best customers taken away.

The blog is back!

Regular updates from now on since I've now got myself organised after Japan.