I witnessed another fine example of middle lane madness today, something I see every single day in all honesty. It erks me most when drivers do it so blatantly, sitting in the overtaking lanes for junction after junction with hardly an obstruction to overtake in sight.

This morning a young woman with dark, shoulder-length hair in a black Volkswagen Polo (a very recent registration, ending with ZXM) hurtled westwards along the M56 in the middle lane in an apparently catatonic state. I could see her in my rear view mirror clocking up mile upon mile, at first in the middle lane and then the outside lane, at times with no car within several hundred yards. At one point, there was a driver in the inside lane and she sat in the outside lane – nothing to stop her pulling back across – with a great 4 by 4 tailgating her.

What possesses these people? When she finally passed me – in the outside lane – she wasn’t on the phone or singing… nothing that would explain the oblivious attitude. It seriously worries me – because that indifference to the road will inevitably lead to accidents or road rage… and then who will she blame.

Driving provides a thoroughly wretched barrier between home and work. I could enjoy my day far easier if not for the 90 minute plus commute (that can balloon to around 4 hours or more on a bad day). In a world struggling to cling on to the environment, where the atmosphere grows thin and thicker in all the wrong sorts of ways, we can do without road trips double or triple in size at the drop of a hat.

Curiosity seems to be a strong factor in the problems on the motorway. Yes, sometimes an accident will strew debris across the whole carriageway; but, more often than not the evidence of an accident gravitates toward the hard shoulder with considerable speed. Efficient emergency services want to get the traffic flowing again, but rubbernecking prevents that from happening. People cannot help but stare wide-eyed and open-mouthed at the smallest evidence of an accident. The chance to spot a drop of gore or a horrifically twisted wreck overcomes the natural sense of urgency that generally grips those doing 100 mph along the outside lane.

You can easily link congestion with rubbernecking just by taking an active part in one of the queues yourself. Having sat on the motorway for an hour covering half a mile, you finally reach the site of the accident – then, as if catapulted by an invisible siege engine, you go from 5 mph to maximum speed in the space of 6.8 seconds. The congestion dissipates in a moment, like a thin morning mist evaporating under the rays of the rising sun. It beggars belief.

Perhaps drivers should be required to wear some kind of crash-sensitive blinker system that prevents them looking left or right when within 5 miles of a pile up. You can see the value of the automatic traffic control seen in the movie ‘Minority Report‘, because taking the human factor out of the driving equation means more time moving toward your destination – and less time staring at insurance write-offs and distressed drivers.

Last night I got caught in the sort of traffic jam that you never want to see at the end of the day. The sort of jam where you’re moving so infrequently you could safely go for a short walk without worrying about interfering with the flow of traffic. So, as I had reached a point yards from a sliproad, I decided to take my chances with a back road tour of north Cheshire. I came off the motorway, headed towards Warrington and aiming for Lymm, knowing that this would get me going in the right direction for home without all the hassle of not actually moving.

Heading into the outskirts of Warrington I reached a junction where a right turn would take me off to Lymm, as I wanted. The raod might have been wide enough for two lanes of traffic if not for the fact that the drivers heading straight and left weren’t especially tight to the kerb and on the right, several people had parked half off the road. So, I made a minor course adjustment towards the right, remaining on my side of the road, and waited for the light to go green.

At this moment, coming from the direction of Lymm, arrives an articulated lorry wanting to head towards the motorway – the way I had just come. He made the turn and got as far as me – and then starts swearing. This guy was easily in his 40s+ – and yet I was suddenly confronted by a blathering psychopath who might as well have been a drunken teenager in overtly combatitive mood. He nudged forward and I tried to pull a little into the left again and he finally got the space to squeeze his cab into the gap. Apparently I was a f*cking idiot or something, what with my being on my own side of the road trying to turn left and he trying to drive an enormous lorry up a minor road in heavy traffic and with parked cars forcing him to come over from his side of the road to mine. Oh yes, that was my fault.

Do haulage companies specifically look to employ people with a hair-trigger temper and attitudes akin to football hooligans? I had no issue with my own conduct, because I wasn’t doing anything wrong – but to have already contended with heavy traffic and a delay that meant I was going to miss an appointment, I didn’t need abuse. I hope that the lorry driver was headed to the motorway and I hope he got stuck in the jam or the one that formed on the opposite carriageway filled with rubbernecking nosy-beggars.