Noticed when I collected my son from school today that somone had driven all the way down the grass verge along the street and now it looks like a ploughed field.

When considering the overall environmental damage caused by the manufacturing, construction, maintenance and usage of road vehicles and the associated infrastructure, a bit of muddy grass outside my house seems a bit insignificant imo.

pet hate… folk who drive past a passing place and expect you to stick your car in the ditch or reverse half a mile so they can get past just because you have a 4×4…..

most of them when you dont move into the ditch will stick their audi into the ditch trying to pass you rather than reverse 10ft……
Oh yes, had this a couple of weeks ago on my way over to pick up a mate to go to the pub. Car coming towards me was approaching a passing place after I’d passed one on my side, so I kept going. He just carried on, then was forced to stop. Halfwit driver just couldn’t grasp that the passing place he’d driven past was there for him to use, instead he was convinced that any approaching car should reverse, in the dark, around a bit of a bend, just for his convenience.
Typical Mercedes owner, if you ask me. I didn’t think I should reverse my Octavia or drive up onto a narrow grass verge and into a ditch, to save him a few seconds. Prat. 🙄

We had this problem where we used to live when the road layout was changed. Local residents acted very promptly (as a group): We contacted the council (Leeds), who supported our strategic placing of rocks, their only stipulation was that the rocks were painted white, and that the paint was renewed when needed. Once a year we all went out and painted a rock. Quite fun really. We also turned over and reseeded the bad bits, and chucked some wildflower seed in. It helped that the project was owned/driven by a residents’ association. Verges still look lovely, and the work fostered some community spirit. Anyone for a hug?

Edit: And WTF is going on with the litter situation / fly-tipping in the South East? The A41 is basically one giant stream of abandoned building waste, and today I walked into town to find two gas boilers dumped on the pavement.

Falkirk council are proposing having no, zero, zilch team of street cleaners and antisocial behaviour enforcement team. So fly tipping, dog poo, litter, graffiti etc will have no-one to clean up, to prosecute or to prevent. At present they have five doing the job 30 used to do, as of next couple of weeks we find out if they have none.

Can you imagine the free for all on dumping waste when this is made public. Half the central belt will use Falkirk as the tip…

Like willjones, my MiL had white rocks on her verge for a while, but when that failed to deter poor driving/parking, they were joined by some short steels, vertically driven. Word soon got around – delivery truck to the pub opposite managed to burst three tyres in one misjudged manoeuvre.

pet hate… folk who drive past a passing place and expect you to stick your car in the ditch or reverse half a mile so they can get past just because you have a 4×4…..

most of them when you dont move into the ditch will stick their audi into the ditch trying to pass you rather than reverse 10ft……
Oh yes, had this a couple of weeks ago on my way over to pick up a mate to go to the pub. Car coming towards me was approaching a passing place after I’d passed one on my side, so I kept going. He just carried on, then was forced to stop. Halfwit driver just couldn’t grasp that the passing place he’d driven past was there for him to use, instead he was convinced that any approaching car should reverse, in the dark, around a bit of a bend, just for his convenience.
Typical Mercedes owner, if you ask me. I didn’t think I should reverse my Octavia or drive up onto a narrow grass verge and into a ditch, to save him a few seconds. Prat. 🙄

Had a good one of those. So I can reverse a Landy towing a trailer with a 7T digger on it 200 yards up a hill round a blind bend, or you can reverse your car 10 yards into a passing place the size of a supermarket car park. A tough choice made easier when the large Yorkshireman I was with suggested a third alternative involving rectal insertion

Had one of those as well, on the Fosseway, not far from Castle Combe. There’s a section which drops down pretty steeply, and which has a couple of bends in it, with a passing place on the left on one side of a blind right hand bend, going down, with the other on the opposite side of the road, about a hundred yards the other side of the bend, the slope of the road is about a 1:6,
I’ve come down the hill, around the bend, to be met by a Micra, coming up, that has passed the passing place on her side by a couple of car lengths. I sat and indicated that they should reverse back into the space just behind. Shakes head. Call over to driver, asking her the just back up a bit. Shakes head. Get out of car, walk over, and again ask the driver, who’s sitting staring straight ahead, to just let the car roll back twenty feet, so I can pass. Shakes head again.
At this point I start to lose my temper a bit, and point out to the stupid baggage in her ridiculous little car, that trying to reverse two hundred feet up a steep hill, with a blind bend, is either going to result in my clutch burning out, or my car being rear-ended by a farm vehicle coming around the blind corner, and if she didn’t reverse back I was going to pull her out of the car, and reverse the bloody thing myself!
At which point she made a big fuss about not being able to find reverse, see where she was going, etc.
Thing was, all she had to do was keep it in gear, foot on clutch, other foot on brake, and let gravity do its thing and just roll a few feet. 🙄

Ross Noble on how to deal with drivers who won’t reverse From 1:40 onwards 🙂

Yeah what about all that. I presume considering how insignificant it is you drop all your rubbish everywhere as well. Actually now I think about it, given all the pollution China belches out it’s pretty pointless us doing anything to protect the environment.

Anyway, back to the passing places thing – I think it was on Skye when I met a woman driving quite a big car who did the driving past the passing place and then refused to reverse. I got out and offered to reverse it for her – at which point she did manage to work it out, though TBH it would have been quicker if I’d done it for her.

I value everyone’s opinion but I’ve got to say that wildflower-leeds-whitestones makes me feel a whole lot warmer that Marcus-FU-not-my-problem-wotyoulookinat.

There’s one bit of grass verge near us that has tonnnnnnes of safe, on-street parking near us but it’s obviously 15 seconds nearer to the front door of some poxy new-build so the first metre from the kerb now looks like The Somme. Gits.

Ok not grass verge stuff but can I just say ‘parents who park on the zig-zags outside their own children’s school’…..

Essentially this seems like a series of complaints about the selfish tossers who live in this craphole we call Britain. What a dump this place is.

Can I play? Why don’t the selfish so and so’s who have a verge outside their house park on it? Not the bloody road.

Now we have off street parking I want to mend the verge that has been chewed up.
I’d like either to stop people parking on it or make it more robust if they do.
People down the road have “ornamental” logs on “their” verge. Can some random stranger relay the grass and plant a little tree on it?
We already have trees and the council planted more trees last year.

Equip yourself with Hi-viz work suit and borrow a white van to park alongside as you plant a tree & support stake; no-one will challenge you.

Use an RSJ for the stake and put it on the road side of the tree.

put a few of these up:

Interestingly, just around the corner someone put a polite notice up saying “Please do not park on the verge”. Surprise, surprise, it appears no-one does.

Trees are good, trees are good.

Last summer we were coming down the Via del Sole from Prada Alta in our LWB T5 and got to this hairpin

a German couple in an audi were coming up and refused to drive on the wrong side of the road for 10m so that we could pass each other. In the end after 5 minutes of them sitting shaking their heads I ended up just driving at them so that they were forced to reverse off the corner a bit, which then made them realise that actually there was room to pass. I certainly wasn’t going to reverse 2km back up a nearly 20% road. In hindsight, probably not the best road to go over in a longish van, but there was a good view at the top, and i believe the view on the way down was good as well, although I was concentrating quite a lot.