• Parking on the pavement particularly when the vehicle is a van or big SUV type thing.
• Washing cars with a hose – use a bucket there’s a drought on you know! (well in some parts of the country there is)
• The amount of space they take up – not only roads but when they are parked on the road
• Pulling up to pick someone up and beeping instead of getting out of the car and knocking on the door
• They cause a lot of accidents! Perhaps not the cars themselves obviously but you could say that if there were fewer cars I am sure the amount of road accidents would go down
• Smoking in cars – why would anyone want to smoke in car especially on a hot day. Apart from making the car stink and turning it into a large ashtray – some smokers tend not to think of fag buts as litter and are quite happy to dump the contents of the actual ashtray out of the window without thinking twice.
• Cars parked in disable spaces that aren’t displaying a disabled badge. In the UK the badge is the Blue Badge and it is an offence to park in a Blue Badge parking spot without displaying the badge. Not only that, again it shows complete thoughtlessness on the part of the driver. It is amazing how common it is as well.

That’s all I can think of for now but I’m sure there are plenty more thing that will occur to me on my travels.

One thing that made me laugh today which apparently has been the hottest day for 95 year in this country, was the headline that appeared on boards advertising our local paper. The headline was along the lines of ‘What caused the hot weather traffic chaos!‘.

I think the answer to many people would be something complicated about road closures and bad planning etc – but the easy answer is that there’s too many cars!

I walk to work most days and something that annoys me cars half parked on the on the road and half parked on the pavement. It seems worse when the vehicle in question is a van or some kind of massive suv or 4×4. I took the picture on the left the other day on the way to work. This shows a classic example of what I am talking about. Not only is the vehicle the size of an elephant it is virtually parked on the pavement. One other thing you might notice is the childrens crossing sign, this is because just around the corner there is a primary school – hence all the other traffic at this time in the morning. For those parents who do walk their children to school and might have a pram or pushchair I can see this vehicle parked on the pavement being a bit of problem.

I can understand why people might park on the pavement. The road where this picture was taken can get quite busy particularly in the morning right next to the school. People do it because they don’t want their wing mirrors knocked off or wings being scraped by the other cars that are driving by too quickly and thoughtlessly.

So which comes first? I think attitudes need to change towards cars they need to treated as luxuries rather than essentials. I think drivers need to treat all road users with respect even when their car is parked and they’ve forgotten about it.