On the way back from Belgium last night, I stopped off at Clacket Lane services on the M25 only to find it once again grid-locked by trucks. This quite often happens as drivers ‘out of hours’ - faced with at least 50 miles to the next service area - try to squeeze into a parking area quite unsuited to the purpose. Until last year, a lot of truckers, in an effort to resolve the problem, would line up along the wide margin of the on-slip that leads back to the motorway. They were out of harm’s way and had moved on before the services got busy with white-collar punters. Slightly illegal it might have been, but a workable and perfectly safe compromise that harmed no-one.
But no. someone in the Highways Agency decided that truckers should not be allowed to break the law, no matter how shagged-out they might be, and must be made to keep moving, even if in so doing they broke another law that was someone else’s problem. And to make their point, the HA dumped a 500 metre-long line of concrete blocks where otherwise truckers could have earned a good night’s rest.
Yet last week, some 12-year old from a road-safety quango was bleating on the box about how truckers often break the law, and put other drivers at risk, by contravening driving-hours regulations. So tell me, Ms 12-year-old, where are they supposed to park? The French, the Belgians, the Germans, the Dutch all provide on their motorway networks ample 24-hour parking lots that are seldom more than 20 clicks apart. But truckers heading up the M40 for the Midlands (for example) who are unable to ‘park-up’ at Clackets Lane (in Kent) have to drive all the way to Oxford before they encounter another service area, unless they waste time and fuel looking for an off-motorway lay-by with no facilities other than a bush.
It’s time the authorities gave truckers a break, in more ways than one.
