This morning's commute and other commuting stories

It is noticeable when cycling (I guess as you're paying much more attention to traffic) how much effort drivers will go to put themselves a car-length ahead. Cutting in and out of lanes, screeching off from the lights only to merge 50 yards later, getting het up at a cyclist in primary position or someone crossing the road.

Cyclists are the same, squeezing along the gutter or between a couple of trucks, hopping on and off the pavements, jumping lights (often only to sit in advance of the stop line where they can't see the lights change).

Yes, it's essentially the same thing except that cyclists can squeeze through gaps or go onto the footway and so the futility of their actions is less noticeable. Generally, if you travel at the same speed as an RLJ-ing rider, you will most likely encounter them again at the next major junction, i.e. one where it's more difficult to jump lights than at the minor junctions or the signalised pedestrian crossings, unless they manage to jump the lights there, too, of course. If not, they tend to lose the time there that they 'gained' by RLJing the little junctions earlier. (And no, I don't have evidence other than having tested this lots and lots of times.)

It all just seems so much hassle for such a small gain. I wouldn't say it's a London-centric, city-centric thing though. Driver behaviour appears to be like that everywhere.

Oh, it's certainly not just a London thing. Elsewhere in the country, the relatively sustainable network of small market towns has long been dismantled (it happened first because of the coming of the railways and got considerably worse with mass motorisation), so that people have had to drive ridiculous distances all over the place for decades. Economic opportunities have been becoming more and more centred in more major centres for the last thirty years or so, a process much more marked in other countries than the UK. The UK's saving grace for the last twenty years has been the absence of any concerted road-building programme, which would have continued to accelerate the process, but other recent technological developments have certainly picked up some of the slack there. Road-building is a terrible way of borrowing from the prosperity of future generations, as the design life of roads and especially bridges is quite short, as they're currently finding out in Germany, where they're saddled with ridiculous maintenance needs. Generally, if you want to make your economy sustainable, reduce the need to travel and enable people to make a decent living where or near where they live. Try to avoid over-concentrating power.