Well actually they’re not ace at all, they’re a severe irritant. I say this because I’ve been clocked by one doing 39 in a 30mph zone. The thing about this road (Blackley New Road) is that it doesn’t have permanent speed cameras on. But it does, every now and then, have a camera in a van.

So why do they have a van on a quiet road mid morning on a Monday?

Because the people who are running the cameras know that Blackley New Road goes downhill, it’s a nice wide road and it’s incredibly difficult to keep the speed at 30 without dropping into 3rd and wasting petrol and destroying the ozone layer more rapidly.

So it becomes a trade-off between being green or going green in the face because you’ve got a speeding fine.

And just when you thought that was it on the speed camera front, I noticed that the M60 (junction 19) near the Three Arrows pub and the Middleton turn-off has average speed cameras installed (not in use this morning).

I’m hopeful that they’re only there for the roadworks that seem to afflict the M60 and will be removed when they’re finished. I’ll let you know. If anyone else had any news about it let us know too.

And lastly the average speed cameras placed strategically along Victoria Avenue appear to have been playing up and not coining the revenue in for the “Greater Manchester Casualty Reduction Partnership.” I noticed the workmen digging bits of pavement up around the camera gantry near St. Clare’s church earlier in the week. Although it looks as though work is finished and money can start spilling into council coffers.

Interestingly Swindon took all their cameras out and found there was no change in the number of accidents.

After the farce of a vast array of bollards preventing happy shoppers vacating Sainsbury’s on Saturday they’re back!

As I reported before the leak is still on Middleton Road. So two diggers have been sent in to dig a hole to find where the leak is. I’m just hoping they don’t go straight through one of the 3 mains water pipes under the road and cause absolute chaos, confusion and flooded gardens again.

There’s some traffic buildup behind the one lane of traffic cones and I’m quite sure that come the rush hour tomorrow there will be plenty of gnashing of teeth as people queue up on the M60 motorway to queue up to go round the roundabout as they queue up to go into Manchester.

Don’t say you’ve not been warned!

In the meantime, things appear to have gone quiet outside so I suspect they’ve dug as far as they can with the pneumatic drill and are now shovelling the earth out with the mini digger. All great fun…

I’ll let you know when the hole gets filled in and the bollards removed, and whether it actually resolves the problem too.

In the meantime, happy alternative route searching.

Hollingworth Lake has been going a long time and has been used since before motor cars were the normal mode of transport for most people.

And whilst the beach is not particularly enormous it’s a great lake to tootle over to for a relaxing couple of hours. Be warned that you pay for parking before 6pm, after that it’s free. Although to be fair 70p (currently) for 2 hours is pretty good compared to Manchester Airport’s £2.00 for 30 minutes.

Anyway, so it’s sunny, so we went to Hollingworth Lakes, fed the ducks, paddled from the jetty and walked on the beach. Although to be fair I’m not sure whether there’s any sand there.

And of course we all had the massive genuine Italian ice creams to round off our trip nicely.

So next time you’re footloose trundle down the M62, come off at junction 21 and follow the signs to have a pleasant relaxing few hours. And if you’re children there’s a visitors centre just past the enormous white pub across the other side of the lake. The visitor’s centre also has a rather nice little playground.

I was minding my own business on the M60 car park the other day when I noticed a tiny car zip by in the middle lane. The thing that caught my attention was that it had a large pole stuck vertically up on the roof to which were attached what looked like 4 cameras.

Then another few days later I saw a similar car driving through Blackley.

I noticed one of these same types of cars in London earlier this year when I was with a client. He explained that the cars had been used by Google to take images of every corner of London so they could create a virtual London anyone could “walk” through. The cars had then been taken by Ken Livingston (then Mayor of London) to help him with policing of the congestion charge and/or parking.

So it looks as though we’ll be able to walk through a virtual Manchester in due course.  Will the little cars be used to police the congestion charge I wonder?

It does all seem to be very Big Brother. Maybe George Orwell’s vision didn’t arrive in 1984. Maybe he was 24 years late in his prediction?

And then to cap it all I got caught by a mobile speed camera operating from one of those anonymous looking white vans!

A virtual Manchester is going to really help anyone looking for a house as they’ll be able to wander around the neighbourhood and see the shops, the schools and all the houses.

The only downside maybe Greater Manchester will adopt the cars for enforcement of everything – litter, jay walking, speeding, incorrect parking, congestion charging .

Is the next step to equip everyone with a pair of glasses with cameras on them to record everything you do to see if you break the law? Interesting times…

We live 3 minutes from the M60 and another 2 minutes from there to the M62 and M66. So we’re always the first to know whether there’s a problem on the motorway. What normally happens is that we see a sudden influx of cars crawling slowly past our door.

Take today…

I’d not listened to the radio or seen the TV so I didn’t realise that a band of bikers had set off from Birchwood Services on a fuel protest to the centre of Manchester. That meant they would go past the slip-road I normally use to join the M60. What alerted me to the problem was, you guessed it, a bunch of slow moving cars outside the door.

I bundled the school-runners into the car and we set-off. For the first 3 minutes everything was great, a clear road as usual. Then we got onto the M60 (originally Junction 1 on the M66) and discovered a lengthy queue starting to build up.

So avoiding the M60 I continued straight on to the M66 to exit via the Heywood Distribution Park exit, the next junction down.

As we passed under the M60 you could see countless cars and lorries simply parked on my favourite “free” car park.

Without wishing to get overly political it does seem rather crazy that we appear to have the most heavily taxed fuel in Europe, maybe even the world. And I don’t believe that using tax will make people more green. Looking at our island population we’re a tiny drop in the ocean of polluters, CO2 and methane producers so us “doing our part” by taxing everything that moves doesn’t really help the environment and instead makes our goods even more expensive to transport.

And yet transport companies across Europe can fill up with cheaper fuel there and then come over to the UK and because they’ll be cheaper they’ll get the jobs currently done by UK hauliers. That means that the majority of lorries which transport almost everything we buy or sell will not be affected by the UK’s green tax on fuel. Instead that burden will be taken on by the car driver.

With one fell swoop the government has managed to decimate the haulage industry, increase UK taxes through the back door and actually achieve very little for the green cause.

Carbon Neutral Lorry Journey

Finally while I was in one of the queues getting back home after the school run I noticed an advert for something on a lorry. Below the advert it said that some company was making the lorry have a carbon-neutral journey. What are they doing planting a tree for every 5 miles they travel.

If the lorry is moving it’s not carbon neutral! Even if you off-set the carbon it produces by saying that the advertising will be seen by thousands of people so you don’t need to do advertising in print which has a carbon cost. You’re fooling yourselves. If that’s how it works every supermarket lorry that delivers around the country would also be carbon neutral because they’re advertising their store on the lorry sides.

If someone knows what it means for a lorry to be carbon-neutral I’d be interested to hear what it really is…

Over the last few weeks as I’ve been going around the M60 I’ve noticed vehicles and men with theodolites measuring roads and roundabouts and bridges around chunks of the M60. More specifically I’ve noticed them measuring

• the Three Arrows roundabout (the M60 Middleton exit)
• the carriageways past that roundabout
• near the intersection with the M62/M60
• the Rochdale Road bridge across the M60.

The amount of backup up traffic to the M60/M62 interchange on most nights is extensive. All lanes towards the interchange also fill up if there’s an accident pretty much anywhere else on the M60/M62/M56 network. When that happens we also get overflow traffic piling down Rochdale and Middleton Roads.

All of which draws me to wonder whether the road planners are thinking of extending the M60 motorway and creating more lanes it.

Personally I would have thought increasing the number of lanes on the M60/M62 around junction 17/18 would be much more effective, and maybe making one lane straight through to the M62 with no way to get to any other lane. At least it would reduce the M60s other use as a car park.

Anyway, you heard it first on the Manchester Blog!

Let me know if you’ve noticed ones and twos of high visibility surveyors measuring widths!