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Australia’s Least Wanted Drivers (In Car Parks, Anyway)
The following are the drivers we least want to see in carparks in our local shopping malls or similar. Give them all a great big raspberry!
#1 Able-Bodied Amanda
Amanda can be found parking in the disabled park, even though there is nothing the matter with her. She’s “only going in for a minute and nobody uses the disabled car park anyway”. Nobody, that is, except at least half a dozen people in any typical urban neighbourhood, who all fume at Amanda as she makes them take their wheelchairs from the other side of the carpark. One day, they will be rolling past as she gets back into her car and she will wish she could bury herself in a large hole.
A close relative of Able-Bodied Amanda is Childless Charlotte, who takes up the parents-of-small-children parks in a similar fashion.
Do not confuse Able-Bodied Amanda with the drivers who have disabilities that are less than visible and legitimately park in the disabled carpark.
#2 Jovial Joe
Jovial Joe is more likely to be found in the car parks of supermarkets in small towns. Joe knows everybody and loves to stop for a good old yarn. This sees him stopping his Toyota Hilux ute in the middle of the non-parking bits of the carpark (you can’t really call them roads but you know what I mean) and rolling down the window to have a long chat to Garrulous Gary. Alternatively, he will stand with the door of his ute open, taking up the car park beside him as well as the one his ute’s in while Chatty Charlie beside him does the same, thus taking up yet another car park. Small-town carparks are not huge.
Just be thankful you’re not waiting for Jovial Joe to move his ute away from the bowser at the petrol station while he’s in talking to the attendant.
#3 SUV Sarah
SUV Sarah is in the running for Super Mum Of The Year and wants everyone to know it. She drives a softroader SUV with all the bells and whistles (e.g. Audi Q7) to keep the kiddies safe. If she could put all those front and rear parking sensors to better use, her ownership of this large vehicle would not be a problem. As it is, she always seems to take up three spaces, or even five when the doors of the SUV are thrown open.
You could blame the designers of the carparks – some of them do seem to have been thinking of teeny tiny classic Minis or Fiat 500s when painting the lines designating the parking spaces.
#4 Squealing Simon
Squealing Simon is more of an urban nuisance and is often found on the upper floors of car parking buildings. Squealing Simon has seen too many movies involving shoot-outs or car chase scenes set in car parking buildings and is trying to emulate them. The end result is that you come up the ramp trying to find a park where you’re not likely to be collected by SUV Sarah, Wonky Wilma or Learner Larry (or if you are Wonky Wilma or Learner Larry trying to minimise your nuisance value), you will be suddenly confronted by screeching tyres and a revving engine attached to something that narrowly misses him.
#5 Learner Larry
Learner Larry is forgivable but still a nuisance. Learner Larry has the L-plates carefully in place and is learning how to park a car properly. Larry is very, very new at this and is terrified that he is going to hit the fancy new Mercedes behind him, so he goes v-e-e-e-r-y s-l-o-o-o-o-w-l-y. The long line of other drivers waiting for him to finish his manoeuvre only adds to his nerves and makes him take it even more slowly. Try not to honk your horn at him.
However irritating he is, Learner Larry is preferable to the closely related P-Plate Peter, who thinks he knows it all, forgets he’s not in Mum’s vehicle with all the sensors and cameras, and goes careening backwards into your bumper.
#6 Wonky Wilma
Wonky Wilma is not spatially gifted. She never gets the angle exactly right for getting into an angle park (don’t ask about what her parallel parking is like). At least seven times out of ten, she will not be in the right place in the parking space. She will be right up close to the white line, making it impossible for you to open your door without taking her paint off or she will be straddling the white line and hoping nobody else comes along. Sometimes, she’s in the space on a slight diagonal rather than straight, but at least that’s not going to be a problem for others in the car park… until it’s time for her to back out.
#7 Canine Carrie
Canine Carrie loves dogs. She owns several of them and takes them with her wherever she goes. She would take them into the supermarket with her on her frequent trips to buy dog sausage and other treats for her precious fur-kids. However, this is not permitted, so she leaves them in the car, with the window open so they don’t overheat, of course. As she leaves, the furry tribe breaks into a volley of barking caused by separation anxiety. When she is doing her shopping, further barking breaks out every time anyone walks within 10 metres of the car. Little noses with sharp little teeth will appear in the gap at the top of the window as her smallest dog (the one that has the Napoleon complex) tries to defend the vehicle with everything in his tiny little body. The car can be seen wobbling as the dogs rush to and fro for a better vantage spot for barking at passers-by. The dogs go berserk when Carrie comes back, increasing the amount of barking and wobbling.
The advantage of Canine Carrie is that her dogs provide you with entertainment while you wait for Learner Larry to finish manoeuvring.
#8 Trailer Trevor
Trailer Trevor is a hard-working contractor who just needs to pick up supplies from the hardware store or grab a few groceries for the wife on the way home from a job (might as well make use of the fact that the run to and from work all goes in the log book as a work trip even if you grab the shopping on the way). However, he’s got his trailer hitched to the Nissan Navara. He’d like to find a pair of parking spaces nose to nose that will let him park with the minimum of nuisance; he really would. However, such parks are not available, forcing him to take up a long line of parking spaces as he parks sideways.
Any additions to this list are most welcome. Or not welcome, as the case may be.
Safe and happy driving,
Megan (self-confessed Wonky Wilma)
Road Surfaces Over The Millennia
If I were a better artist, I’d love to create a wordless book tracing the development of a road across from a single game trail to a modern superhighway. History is pretty fascinating, so let’s take a look at how road surfaces have changed over the millennia. I’ll just stick to road surfaces, as including the wheres and whys of roading would make this article far too long to read in one sitting.
If you’ve ever seen a house where they park on the grass during winter, you soon see why. All that pressure and squelching soon becomes deep, thick mud, where wheels get bogged. Shortly after the wheel was invented (around 5000 BC), road surfacing followed shortly afterwards.
Roman road still in use in Jebel, Syria.
The earliest form of road surfacing was just plain brick, and examples can still be seen today in the Indus Valley. However, paving stones proved to be superior – they could just be cut out of rock and dropped into place, rather than baked like bricks. What’s more, rain and grit didn’t wear stone away like it did brick.
The Romans were the first ones to do more than just chuck stones down on top of the surface of a dirt track. They figured out that if you put down a good base layer, all the rain would drain away more easily, so you didn’t get problems with rutting and potholing as often. The Romans invented basecourse and subbase, and these techniques are still in use today.
At the bottom of a Roman road, the earth was levelled off at a fair depth down and rammed. After this, a layer of large stones the size of a hand was put down. Next came a layer of concrete (yes, the Romans invented concrete). After that, a layer of very fine gravel. On the very top came flagstones, and they were laid so the middle of the road was higher than the sides, rather like the shell of a tortoise, for better drainage. Not all roads in Roman times got the full treatment, but the most important ones did – the key ones for trade and military manoeuvres. Other rather familiar things found on a proper Roman road were milestones and pavements (sidewalks).
The Romans also introduced the idea of roading standards – they had a set of measurements that had to be stuck to for all roads, as least as much as possible, complete with different measurements for straight bits and for curved bits.
Legionaries building a Roman Road. “Metopa Columna lui Traian Constructie drum”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons –
Tar did get used to seal roads during Classical times. This mostly happened in the oil-rich Middle East. Back then, tar was the only thing an oil well was good for. But the idea of combining the Roman method of construction with the waterproofing of tar didn’t come for nearly 2000 years later. From 500 BC to about 1800 AD, it was cobblestones all the way. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that a new method was discovered… ironically, it was about the same time that better suspension systems in the form of leaf springs put in an appearance.
The breakthrough was invented by the Scotsman John MacAdam, although some credit does have to go to a couple of other civil engineers of the time, Pierre-Marie-Jérôme Trésaguet and Thomas Telford. These three engineers had the goal of making good roads cheaply. Needless to say, it was hard work making cobblestones that fitted nicely into roads to give it a good smooth finish. Cobblestones, after all, had to be cut by hand by a skilled bloke with a hammer and chisel.
Macadam did two things. Firstly, he did away with the club sandwich of layers that the Romans used, although a plain sandwich of basecourse and subbase still gets used today. Secondly, he found out that a good layer of gravel pushed into the right shape allowed for good drainage and was a lot smoother than cobblestones – and could be bashed into shape by a machine or by a road gang (possibly of convicts) in large quantities. Your typical back-country gravel road is what a Macadam road looked like.
Macadam’s roads had one problem, even though they drained pretty well and gave a comfier ride. They kicked up heaps and heaps of dust, especially once motorized transport became really popular thanks to the manufacturing efforts of Ford and others. A solution was found pretty quickly: tar, which had the added advantage of being waterproof. This was known as “tarred Macadam”. This method involved two coats of tar or bitumen: one on the subgrade before the macadam gravel, then a top layer to seal it all in. You can still see this method used on a lot of country roads.
Then came Edgar Hooley, who had the bright idea of mixing the aggregate (the finely crushed gravel) with the tar before putting it on the road. This was then flattened into place by a steamroller (which really did run on steam) and was super smooth as well as waterproof. He patented his method under the name “tarmac” (short for “tarred Macadam”, although we also call it after the form of tar mixed with the aggregate: bitumen or asphalt.
Modern asphalt/bitument/tarmac.
Naturally, the development of road surfaces is still going on today. Slipping, cracking and rutting still happen. Who knows what they’ll think of next?
Safe and happy driving, whether your wheels are on gravel, cobbles or tarmac,
Megan
Off-Road Driving That’s Out Of This World
A lot of us have discovered the joys of off-road driving. Plenty of modern vehicles come with AWD capacity so you can do a little bit of off-roading of some sort – or so you can get the extra traction that a four-paw provides. There are plenty of very desirable 4x4s out there with all sorts of this and that to help them do better in the rough stuff. But no matter how good your Nissan Pathfinder or your Skoda Yeti is, there are some vehicles that are a lot snazzier than that.
Good-bye Land Rover , hello Moon Rover. The Apollo Lunar Rover must be one of the quirkiest and most famous of all the vehicles designed by General Motors (and a handful of others), although you are never, ever going to get to drive one. Only a handful of people, all from the USA and the former USSR have driven about as far off the road as you can get, going for a wee jaunt about on the surface of the moon before the manned moon landings were scrapped.
So what’s the Lunar Rover like?
The styling of the Lunar Rover is somewhat reminiscent of an old-school farm tractor. Keeping the weight to a minimum was in the design brief, as was the ability to fold the car up for storage (now there’s an idea we could try to apply more widely to avoid parking problems), so flash-looking body kit was out of the question. Aluminium trim was very much in evidence, however. There was also no need for climate control – all that was provided by the space suits. You could say that it was designed for maximum visibility and the whole cabin was one big sun roof, moon roof or possibly Earth roof. It did have a seatbelt that used Velcro to overcome the problems that would occur with inertia reels and the like in one-sixth of the earth’s gravity. The Lunar Rover has seating for two, with both seats being fully foldable and with a shared armrest. The steering “wheel” is a multifunction joystick.
The Lunar Rover was a very early example of an electric vehicle, which does leave one wondering why this technology was pretty much ignored for terrestrial vehicles during the 1980s and 1990s. It was powered by a pair of 36-volt non-rechargeable batteries with a life of 121 ampere-hours each for a total range of 92 km. The wheels were 23 inch aluminium jobs and the tyres had a chevron tread for extra traction. They weren’t your pneumatic rubber jobs, either: they had a mixture of zinc, steel and aluminium. You could call them the ultimate run-flats.
Performance-wise, the Lunar Rover is no speed freak, with a top design speed of 13 km/h. However, this speed was exceeded by Eugene Cernan of the USA, who holds the current lunar land speed record of 18 km/h.
The handling, however, is excellent. For a start, the suspension is superb: double horizontal wishbone with upper and lower torsion bars and a damper unit between the chassis and upper wishbone. The front and rear wheels have separate steering controls, allowing the front and rear wheels to turn in opposite directions for a tighter turning circle, although the driver can select to steer with front or rear wheels only as needed. Each wheel had its own separate drive unit and each wheel could freewheel if needed. Ground clearance is 36 cm.
Navigation, information and communication systems are also brilliant – modern cars are only just starting to catch up with this 1970s model. Navigation used a combination of the odometer and a directional gyro, plus a sun/shadow monitor to get the right heading. Communications involved two TV cameras, another camera (with film) and several antennae for communication with the Lunar Module. Display panels inform the driver of the current speed, heading, pitch, and power and temperature.
You can see the Lunar Rover in this clip:
The Lunar Rovers (only four were made) were used on three Apollo lunar missions and were left behind on the moon each time (have a look here to see the exact spots). However, if you’re really, really desperate to drive about as far off the road as you can get, there is still hope, but your window of opportunity is closing rather rapidly, if it’s not too late already. The volunteers for the Mars One one-way trip to Mars will get Martian Rovers to drive in as they spend the rest of their lives on the Red Planet.
I think I’ll stick to off-roading in the other half’s Nissan work ute.
Safe and happy driving,
Megan
Holy Roller: The Popemobile
Not too long ago, I did a wee post telling you all about the fancy-pants limo used by the President of the US of A, known as The Beast. The research for this led me to odd bits and pieces about the Popemobile, so I thought that the opportunity was too good to pass up.
The Beast at least looks like a car. The Popemobile… doesn’t. Maybe that’s the real reason why the current pope, Pope Francis, doesn’t like it, as well as his apparent preference for keeping things simple. And I have to say that I’d prefer to drive myself around in a Ford Focus or a Renault 4 , too, like he does, rather than sit in what looks like a glass box on the back of a ute.
Popemobiles are a comparatively recent arrival on the scene, unlike presidential limos. Prior to 1976, the pope got carried about on a mobile armchair known as the sedia gestatoria, which roughly means “portable chair”. Pope Paul VI scrapped the idea of being carried about on the shoulders of fellow human beings and organised a modified Toyota Land Cruiser instead. It used to take 12 blokes to carry it, partly because that padded throne was pretty heavy and partly in memory of the 12 disciples of Jesus… although Jesus’s preferred forms of transport were foot, rowing boat and a borrowed donkey.
Popemobiles tend to come in two varieties: open top and bulletproof. The uncovered ones tend to get used when the Pope is on his home turf in the Vatican, with the bulletproof ones being kept for overseas trips. The bulletproof ones came in after the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in 1981.
A number of vehicles have been modified over the years to be used as Popemobiles. Fords, Fiats, a SEAT Panda (close cousin to the Fiat of the same name), a Kia and some British Leyland trucks have all been customised for the task, which is as close as a car comes to being consecrated. A few other obscure vehicles have also been used over the years. The current Popemobile is a modified Mercedes-Benz M-Class SUV. All Popemobiles have the same license plate: SCV 1, with the SCV standing for Status Civitatis Vaticanae meaning “City State of the Vatican”.
Engine: 5-litre V8, petrol fuel. There are probably plans afoot for greener versions.
Seating: Five maximum: two in the front (one chauffeur and one bodyguard), one in the special chair and two aides in the rear cabin facing backwards and lower down where the general public can’t see them so well. The answer to the debate over how many guardian angels you can fit in the rear of the Popemobile along with His Holiness is probably the same as the one about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The actual chair itself has a hydraulic lift system to get it up to the top of the turret for maximum visibility. Entrance to the seat is through the rear door, and to get into this seat, the Pope goes through the rear door, climbs up a couple of steps, sits down then presses a button to get the chair up into the right place.
Performance: Tipping the scales at 5 tonnes thanks to heaps of body armour, the current Popemobile has a top speed of 160 mph and does the 0–60 mph “sprint” in 15 seconds, assuming that there’s a clear space in front. The usual speed while on duty is more like 6 mph. Fuel consumption is 15 miles per gallon.
Safety and security: The bulletproof glass around the rear cabin is actually plastic glass and is three inches thick, capable of withstanding explosions. The underside of the car is protected by a bombproof steel plate half an inch thick. Kelvar body armour lines the sides of the cabin. The rear cabin has its own oxygen supply and air filters to withstand biological attack. The run-flat tyres are able to be used at speeds up to 70 mph.
I did notice that the special chair thing in the rear cabin doesn’t have a seatbelt…
Safe and happy driving – and don’t forget your seatbelts!
Megan
Level 2, 9 Help Street