The Plague Of Weekend Drivers Is Very Real And We Need To Stop It Now

There’s little better for petrolheads than threading a nice car quickly down a twisty B-road, Phil Collins at full volume and manual gearstick in hand. You feel free, powerful and fall back in love with driving after a long week of traffic, which makes any driver feel suffocated, frustrated and hard done-by. The M25 (London’s 117-mile ring road), especially, is hated by all in the UK.

Traffic, however, is an inevitability in the UK and when you do get stuck, it’s because you’ve probably chosen a bad time to hit the road. In the big smoke of London, these times are between 00:00 to 23:59, Monday to Sunday, 364 days of the year. FYI.

Outside the most built-up areas, however, you will also find another, more dangerous phenomenon: weekend drivers. These drivers are the very people who spend their week either walking, cycling, tubing or bussing their way to schools and places of work. On the weekend, these people then drive their neglected cars, which is where the road system often breaks down.

Last Saturday, for example, I had to avoid crashing into two drivers within the space of 10 minutes. The first lady was pulling out of a junction to turn right, but forgot to look both ways before doing so. Hearing my horn, she then stopped her manoeuvre and was surprised to see a bright red Seat Ibiza just a few feet away from her door. She looked at me, stalled her engine, then pulled away completely oblivious to the danger she’d put herself (and me) in. She couldn’t have been older than 35, so the delayed reactions of a more mature driver were no excuse. This was driver inattentiveness, pure and simple.

Approximately five minutes later, I turned left into a tight road with a hump-back bridge. As I approached the bridge, I pulled up behind a Fiat Brava (a hideous looking thing), which had stopped to give way to oncoming traffic.

The approach to the small bridge was on an incline, so I left more of a gap than usual, just in case the driver rolled back while engaging first gear. To my amazement, however, the reason why the driver actually rolled back was because he’d simply taken his foot off the brake pedal to make more room for other drivers (this was not necessary).

With the gap between him and I quickly closing (again, he failed to see a bright red Ibiza behind him because he didn’t even glance in his mirrors) I had to punch the horn. It took the guy approximately two seconds to apply the brakes, meaning that we were almost touching bumpers - I’m sure you couldn’t even have squeezed a fart between both cars.

But the plague of the weekend driver doesn’t stop there. Sure, you’ve got your inattentive drivers who seemingly lack common sense, but you will also find inconsiderate drivers on the weekend. The picture above is a case in point, where two drivers seem to have conspired to make my life as difficult as possible on my return to the car - again, the same bright red Ibiza. The gap between both cars to mine was so narrow, in fact, that I had to walk around the Audi to get to the driver-side door. It took me eight shuffles of the wheel before I managed to wriggle the car free, which I was happy with nevertheless.

Also on the weekend driver’s hit list are failing to use indicators (something that infuriates me) and not paying attention to traffic lights because he or she is too busy looking down at a mobile phone - apparently the same rules don’t apply on weekends…

In summary then, typical weekend drivers are inattentive, too busy to look out for fellow road users and a general nuisance. They are also occasionally dangerous, discourteous and often drive cars that are battle scarred from car park incidents and poor spatial awareness.

Please, if you are one of these drivers, take the bus, tube, bicycle or your own legs to wherever it is that you are going; my sanity, tyres and body panels can’t take much more. Let me know in the comments if you feel the same way.