ambient chilled motorway driving

What with this being a Bank Holiday weekend, I'm now pleased to be sightseeing ahead of many of the motorists who will be hitting the road.

It wasn't all plain sailing though. There was a vehicle fire on the motorway which held me up for a long time.

I was one of the motorists not breaking the law during the incident. There were hundreds more who decided that they had important places to visit and so they would use the emergency lane on the motorway instead of staying in line like the rest of us.

It started with just a couple of foreign-plated vehicles (Romania and France), and then in minutes had turned into a complete flow. As a side note, I notice that some foreign plated articulated lorries also seem to be using the outside lane on 3 and 4 lane motorways, which is prohibited for those that read the highway code.

The emergency lane is really for emergencies, such as breakdowns, or in the case of a fire on the motorway it is so that service vehicles can get through quickly.

This was a case in point, where the extra lane just became a traffic jam of law-breakers and effectively blocked the access to the emergency site from the fire, police and ambulance services.

In the picture you can see an incident vehicle to my left trying to get past a row of cars which have all decided to use the emergency lane. It took them about 10 minutes to pass just three or four cars to my left and at one point they had to get out of the vehicle to direct traffic back onto the legal part of the motorway.