Notes From the Hard Shoulder (4 page)

Professor Stephen Hawking once averred that for every mathematical equation he included in his book
A Brief History of Time,
the readership would be halved. This gives us:

(Where Ra is the actual readership, Rp is the potential readership, and N is the number of mathematical quotations. And if you think I'm making this up, it's all been checked by Yan-Chee Yu of the Oxford University Mathematical Institute. So there.)

This leads every other one of us rather neatly to the work of the Swiss scientist
Daniel Bernoulli (1700-82), whose work on fluid flow showed us, in simplified form at least, that:

(Where P is the static pressure,
p
is the density, and V is the velocity.)

What Bernoulli was saying, in essence, is that when the pressure in a fluid system is reduced (by a constriction, for example), the velocity must increase, and vice versa. The rate at which the fluid flows will remain the same. It's hugely useful stuff if you design the air intakes for racing cars.

If, however, you are simply annoyed at being stuck in traffic jams at roadworks, you may prefer Bernoulli in its layman's form, which is known as May's
Motorway and Dual Carriageway Jam Avoidance Velocity Modulation Principle. This states that when one or more lanes of a busy multi-lane road are closed, the speed limit in the remaining lanes must be
increased
if the traffic is to keep flowing smoothly.

But here we arrive at a socio-political problem. For years it has been accepted that the most dangerous job in Britain is that of trawlerman. Recent research shows that a trawlerman is some 50 times more likely to be killed or injured at work than, say, me. If he is not despatched by the cold, the cruel sea or a rusty chain, he will be starved to death by the iniquities of EU fishing regulations.

A few years back he was briefly usurped by elephant handlers, since they are few in number but two had been trampled in quick succession, making the profession statistically unsurvivable. Roofers and glaziers are at considerable risk and aircraft carrier flight-deck crew should ensure that their children are well provided for. And surely no working man is in greater peril than the fitted-kitchen salesman who arrived uninvited at my door a few weeks ago just as I had finished reassembling (following a thorough clean) my Beretta.

But here are British road
workers, suddenly at number 16 in the hit parade of hazardous jobs. In the last few years the number of deaths and serious injuries sustained by these people has risen sharply, from only one fatality in 2004 to four in the first half of 2005 alone.
The Highways Agency is pretty sore about it, which is why motorways and dual carriageways are now strangled by sudden 30mph limits and all that 'lane closed to protect workforce' malarkey.

Quite right, too. No civilised society could possibly want to see its road workers in hospital. We'd quite like to see them mending the roads. By now you're thinking
what workforce?
and you may have a point. Over the last few weeks I have been monitoring these roadworks, and I have driven just over 26 miles at temporary speed limits past lanes closed supposedly to protect the workforce but without seeing so much as an endangered wheelbarrow. It would appear to be more a case of workforce staying at home to protect workforce. But I don't blame them. It's bloody dangerous.

So here is the solution. Roadwork should only be practised at night, when the traffic flow is light. Slowing to a constant 30 or 40mph for a few miles is really neither here nor there as far as total journey times are concerned. You can even calculate the difference it makes yourself:

(Where T is the extra time taken, D is the length of the roadworks in miles and S is the temporary speed limit.)

During the day, when the traffic is very dense, the workforce should stay away, since the traffic has to keep moving fast to prevent a total jam. At the same time, we can't really expect them to put all those bollards away every morning and so, in accordance with May's principle, the cars should actually speed up through the roadworks. For example, if only one lane
is still open on a busy three-lane motorway, the speed limit should be 210mph. Or:

(Where S is the new temporary speed limit, E is the existing speed limit, L is the number of lanes normally available and O is the number of lanes still open.)

I'd be amazed if anyone is still reading this.

It must be 20 years since
Jimmy Savile told us that this is the age of the train, but maybe, finally, it is. Just as the last of the InterCity 125s he trumpeted so memorably terminates in the long rusty siding at the side of a scrapyard somewhere, things are looking pretty good on the permanent way.

I've been on three
trains in the last month. Two between London and Manchester operated by
Virgin Trains, and one from there to Hull operated by
Northern Rail or something like that. I must admit that I preferred the era when one simply turned up at 'the station' and got on 'the train' instead of arriving at a retail and dining complex with some rails attached and then standing for an hour in front of a massive flickering monitor trying to work out which of a countless number of operators will accept the brightly coloured £135 stub in your hand. But still.

Apart from that, the whole experience was rather good. These were the new
Pendolino trains; sleek, stylish and very cool. I know some railway commentators have criticised them for their weight and thirst, but they strike me as a Lexus amongst rolling stock. They are quiet, draught-free, smooth riding and very fast in an unflustered sort of way. The seats are very good, the upholstery subdued, the announcements intelligible. It's some years since I've been on a proper train and I was very pleasantly surprised.

For example, I'd reserved a seat. In the olden days this would mean there was a bit of cardboard wedged under the antimacassar, or was until some pissed pikey
removed it, chucked it on the floor and then filled the table with empty Carlsberg cans so you felt better off in the concertina bit between the coaches.

Not any more. A little dot-matrix display above my place read 'Reserved, Mr May' so there was no argument about that.

There was still a chance that a zealous vicar or malodorous railway enthusiast would sit next to me but, again, I was lucky. For two of the journeys I had two seats to myself, and on the third I was joined by a woman who not only smelled rather nice but didn't speak to me at all, which was marvellous.

Crikey, even the buffet has improved. Once there was a slimy carriage offering the following range of sandwich fillings: cheese. Now there is a trolley piled high with fruit cake and pies and a big samovar thing for making hot drinks, a sort of wheeled five-star-hotel tea-and-coffee-making-facilities facility. Any more wine at all with your meal for yourself, sir? Why, yes.

What a pleasant and, as widely claimed, efficient way to travel up the sceptered isle. London to Manchester takes just two and a quarter hours, during which one may of course work on a laptop, read important documents or hold an impromptu meeting with colleagues. Obviously I did none of these things. I looked out of the window for a bit and then fell asleep with my head resting on the seat in front, dribbling on my trousers. But if you did work in IT or a customer relations role, you could annoy everyone else on the train by talking in a loud voice about managing expectations or tapping noisily on your strawberry personal organiser. You can't do that in the car.

However.

I said London to Manchester takes two and a half hours. Unfortunately, it's a place in London where I don't live to a place in Manchester where I don't want to be. And here we arrive at the crux of the public transport conundrum.

Obviously, long-distance communal travel makes sense. You wouldn't fly yourself to America in your own
Cessna – you'd get on a big aeroplane with lots of other people and complete the bulk of the journey very rapidly. You wouldn't sail your own dinghy across the North Sea to Norway. You'd get on a ferry and stand around a bar with a load of lorry drivers and pimps. Lots of people seem to want to go from London to Manchester at any time, so they can all go together.

It's the little bits at either end of the journey that cause a problem, yet it's in the towns and cities that public transport is presented as the solution to all our woes. It's rubbish. If I'd had to find my way from Manchester Station to whichever hotel I was staying in using the local buses, I'd have given up and gone home again.

You can bang on all you like about trams, light rail, bendy buses and maglev, but until such things stop outside my front door in the space where I keep my car, they're not really any good. My local underground station – and the estate agent told me I was buying a property ideally situated for local transport facilities – is still 10 minutes' walk away, and with a big suitcase it's just too much trouble. No matter how comprehensive the public transport network becomes, there's always going to be a little bit of the journey requiring something personal.

And let's be honest here. Posh InterCity trains are generally full of respectable people, but local public transport isn't. I'm sure London tube commuters are largely upstanding pillars of society, but there are still enough of them that smell of old pants to make the journey unsavoury.

I have the solution. In my vision I step outside to find something like a Fiat
Panda or
Smart Car that doesn't belong to me but is open and starts with a simple button. There are no keys. I drive it to the station and leave it. Someone coming from Manchester then uses it to get to the offices around the corner from my house. Then someone else uses it to go to the shops. Occasionally they might pile up in one place or another, but in that case the people who we currently employ as traffic wardens are used to redistribute them a bit. It can't be any harder than running a bus service.

And you can't nick them, because they are electronically tagged to prevent them straying beyond a radius of a few miles. This is a simple matter, one of utilising the technology so readily used to punish us as a means of liberating us instead.

I can't really see why it wouldn't work. This is the age of the true city car – a car owned by the city.