traffiic and horses

Sounds like Nirvana, SF.;)

I would say traffic in the more built up areas of Surrey has got worse in the 7 years I've been in it, yes. More people are in more of a hurry and the urban ring has expanded noticeably, bringing urban pressures to bear on areas that have traditionally been more horse-aware. Most of the people I know who have had trouble, it's been with couriers, tradesmen on deadlines, people driving show room condition cars who refuse to go anywhere near hedges/ditches and other users who likely have little knowledge of horses.
 
Something needs to be down as so many car drivers are careless driving around horses. With top gear I heard that Richard Hammond does not believe that horses should be on the road. They other one Jeremy Clarkson also does not think horses should be on the road. I ride on the road nearly everyday as I have no choice. I always wear lots of hi-viz and I am always polite to drivers but still many drivers are rude. Last year a driver hit my foot when he decided to carry on going as my horse was shying. I now wear a hat cam to catch this bad drivers
 
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SF, yes the roads have got a lot more dangerous in recent years.

I've been here for 28 years, and for many of those years I could hack out on the roads for a couple of hours with very few problems. We're out in the sticks, and the lanes are pretty but narrow. Sometimes there is a verge that you can ride on, but very often there isn't, or there is just a socking great ditch alongside the road. I've always been very traffic aware and courteous, and always trot on if necessary to allow them to overtake and thank drivers. If I picked my times, I could be out for an hour and see perhaps a couple of cars and a van, all of whom would slow down and give me plenty of clearance.

Now, its just nuts. Its not just when riding, but when driving and when walking the dog. Drivers come haring round blind bends and then, even when they spot you, carry on gunning it without even moving over to their own side of the road.

The only device that has any noticeable effect on driving is when we go out with the car with L plates on with son no 2, that seems to steady them up a bit.
 
Lunchbox legend said:
Far too many car drivers believe they own the road and nothing else should be on it, some of them just don't have a piggin clue about horses and some people resent us on the road because they think we should be riding in the fields and don't realise that we're not allowed to (I said to someone a few weeks ago, if you don't like it then campaign the government to put pressure on the farmers to let us use their fields).
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Wow. "Put pressure on the farmers" eh? You do realise that farmer's fields are their livelihood, right? I'm sure they'd be delighted to have a bunch of riders gallumphing about all over their grass/crops/stock, falling off and sueing them.

And of course the majority of motorists have no clue about horses, how could they? Most people don't ride, nor have they even met a horse.
 
I drive a white transit van (lowest status on the road!) and although I don't use it commercially I get people being aggressive towards me as though I am about to cut them up.
I am placid in my driving,sticking to the speed limits and rules, giving cyclists, pedestrians and horses right of way and a slow wide berth which does often pee other drivers off as someone else mentioned earlier and they don't like it when they can't get their cars past me.
I was so fed up with the bad driving out there by other drivers that I use a dual in car camera, one camera facing forwards and one rear facing into the cab.
It's got GPS tracking, microphone, G sensor to sense a sudden change in direction or impact, it will then automatically save to the Micro card the last 20 seconds before and the following 20 seconds worth of film. And it's got night vision.
In the event of an incident or accident I can now prove no I wasn't speeding, on my phone or swearing at them and I was where I said I was. Sad times when you have to use these cameras.
I recently caught a woman in a car infront of me illegally turning right at a junction and making a transit van slow down or he would have run into her, I sent it to the police, they do take it seriously and have dealt with it.
This junction is notorious for drivers ignoring the NO RIGHT TURN and pushing their way out into traffic.
Personally, I feel driving standards in the country are at all time low, as ROG said earlier, the majority of drivers KNOW what they are supposed to do
they just WON'T do it.
You can't educate people who won't listen!
Everyone knows it's illegal to drive using a hand held mobile phone yet how many drivers do you see everyday on their phones?
I see plenty.
I use my van to take my 3 dogs round to the local woods for their walk less than 5 minutes away, I simply won't use the roads to walk them to the woods as I have had bad experiences down our road. The cars and large vans are parked so far on the path you cannot squeeze past at all on foot so you have to walk in the road, with 3 dogs on leads (who are well behaved) it's scary.The cars fly down the road and you have nowhere to go to get out of the way and they simply won't slow down.
The police have been involved, it gets better for about 1 week then back to normal, times have changed and not for the better.
I really don't know what the answer is regarding vulnerable users on the roads.
 
As much as I deplore how unsafe the roads around here are and wish that drivers were more careful, I do think that some posters are living in la-la land when it comes to what can or should be done.

Incorporating horses as a mandatory element of practical driving training and the test is completely impractical. I know some driving instructors who incorporate horses into training; that's because they're horsey themselves. In the middle of a big city, it's just not feasible.

One reason we see so many commuters in a hurry on country roads is because people are priced out of the cities. That includes professionals that can afford the lease on a nice car, but who cannot afford a family home in the city. I know many people like this. It's not that they are malicious towards things of the countryside (although there are those too, I assume), but that they are literally stressed out of their gourd at having to spend two hours in the car every day, and want to expedite this process as much as possible. "Educating" them might make them more careful for a few weeks, but after a short time of not encountering a horse or cow around every blind bend, they will soon drive as fast as before.

Also, no amount of education will make the human race as a whole less selfish and self-absorbed. It also won't change the "invulnerability of youth", which people have been complaining about since the ancient Romans and before. Sure, it will help, but even if only every third car that passes me is going too fast and close, I still don't want to be anywhere near it.

I think the speed differential among motorised and non-motorised traffic is too great in the country, to share roads without wide verges and good visibility, and preferably a multi-use path that is at some remove from the road.

As a cyclist, I feel that the traffic laws governing the place of bicycles in traffic are antiquated, and do not mesh well with modern road conditions. For example, to cycle to work, a large part of my journey is along a dual carriageway with initially a 70, and then a 40 speed-limit, incorporating several roundabouts, and one of the major rat-runs into the city. There is a wide, generally completely unoccupied footpath running parallel to the road, with a grass strip between. I would be suicidally stupid to ride my bike on the dual carriageway, instead of this footpath, although that is what the law technically requires. So I slow to a crawl on the rare occasions that I meet a pedestrian, greet them cheerfully, and have never been in the remotest danger of colliding with anyone. Within the city, where the traffic is much slower, I feel safer on the street.

If we're serious about getting people out of cars and improving the safety of country roads, there needs to be serious investment in several facets of infrastructure: reliable public transit (oh, wait, they've privatised or dismantled most of that...), alternative, maintained path networks that comprehensively connect areas without the need to interact with cars, and some sort of regularisation of urban housing costs. All this would be terribly expensive and legally presumably very entangled.

Regarding the question of the paths in particular: I hear tell very often of angry farmers, who are upset at people insisting on their "rights of way" but behaving like plonkers without common sense. Perhaps the creation of paths that are properly routed around crops and livestock fields, that are possibly fenced to keep poorly-trained dogs and sprogs off sensitive areas, and for the establishment and maintenance of which the farmer is paid a fair amount, might go a long way to help relations among rural land-owners and and-users. (Again, a huge expense to establish, I think!) As a person that wants the opportunity to travel across land away from traffic, I appreciate why organisations such as Ramblers have acquired such a reputation for thick-skulled insistence on their rights above common sense; nevertheless, the precedence of "well, people have walked here since the ancient Romans were in town" isn't always practical in a modern context.
 
Spookypony - what an intelligent and insightful post! OH and I have decided that we're too long in the teeth to take on this aggressive and selfish world but so that we don't completely lose our contact with the horse world we are going to keep a couple of shetlands to box up and drive on the moor or somewhere safe. It makes me incredibly sad that so many people have had to give up the quiet pleasure of hacking along our beautiful country lanes. We were lucky to have that chance before the explosion of traffic spoilt our peace and to be frank I think it will only get worse.
 
Lunchbox legend said:
Far too many car drivers believe they own the road and nothing else should be on it, some of them just don't have a piggin clue about horses and some people resent us on the road because they think we should be riding in the fields and don't realise that we're not allowed to (I said to someone a few weeks ago, if you don't like it then campaign the government to put pressure on the farmers to let us use their fields). Frankly, I'd rather ride in the fields.
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That is a very ignorant comment. Not sure whether you understand the concept of farming but our fields are actually being farmed for crops, I'm not allowed to ride in them, so why should everyone else be?
 
Thank-you, Patchworkpony! :o

I know that here, there's the "Core Paths Network"; I know too little about access elsewhere in the country to know if that's a regular institution. The problem with this network is that it still isn't easy to get on to it in certain areas (such as from my place!), and that the bits of it don't connect with each other. So while in theory, once I got on to the paths, I could hack all round the area, in practice I would still have to go along many very dangerous portions of road immediately next to the traffic. They're building a new housing estate across the road from me: from the plans, there are lots of interconnecting little paths planned, and I hope that once that is done, I can access these paths to make my way towards off-road hacking. I will still have to take the pony a short distance along a rat-run road, but it will be much shorter than now. I may be willing to lead him along there.
 
Spookypony - The Core Paths Network sounds very interesting, I also noticed that you support 'Adults who ride Ponies'; nice to know there are plenty of us around. What breed of pony do you ride?
 
Patchworkpony said:
Spookypony - The Core Paths Network sounds very interesting, I also noticed that you support 'Adults who ride Ponies'; nice to know there are plenty of us around. What breed of pony do you ride?
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I have no idea! :D He's got approximately 4 legs, a tail at one end, and a head at the other...and a big belly-like thing in the middle... :D (in my sig). He's 14.1. I have another little mare whose breeding I can trace back centuries, but she's technically a horse.

I think the Core Paths Network is in principle a very good thing! The problem, at my end of town, is that the paths don't do the "networking" thing well enough just yet. :)
 
When I was learning to drive 45 years ago I was taught that one should adjust one's speed so that one could stop within the distance that one could see. This means driving slower on winding lanes even though the nominal speed limit is 60 (until cars are fitted with devices to enable us to see round corners!) . What some of these drivers fail to think about is that there might be a stationary vehicle, dog walker, child, loose cow or anything in the road round the bend. I regularly drive back along a narrow lane marked as "Quiet Road" with a suggested speed of 20 mph on the way back from buying my horse feed. I have had a "boy racer" driving up my back end reving his engine and flashing his lights to try to get me to drive faster. In a particularly narrow bit I'm afraid I lost patience and stopped my vehicle and walked back to have a word with the driver. I pointed out that with a heavy load on my car would take longer to stop, that the lane was popular with walkers, cyclists and horse riders, and that should he be in a hurry he might be better served by using the longer but faster main road. Foolish of my I know, but he looked suitably chastened and I felt much better!
 
Gwyntbryn said:
When I was learning to drive 45 years ago I was taught that one should adjust one's speed so that one could stop within the distance that one could see. This means driving slower on winding lanes even though the nominal speed limit is 60 (until cars are fitted with devices to enable us to see round corners!) . What some of these drivers fail to think about is that there might be a stationary vehicle, dog walker, child, loose cow or anything in the road round the bend. I regularly drive back along a narrow lane marked as "Quiet Road" with a suggested speed of 20 mph on the way back from buying my horse feed. I have had a "boy racer" driving up my back end reving his engine and flashing his lights to try to get me to drive faster. In a particularly narrow bit I'm afraid I lost patience and stopped my vehicle and walked back to have a word with the driver. I pointed out that with a heavy load on my car would take longer to stop, that the lane was popular with walkers, cyclists and horse riders, and that should he be in a hurry he might be better served by using the longer but faster main road. Foolish of my I know, but he looked suitably chastened and I felt much better!
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Like!
 
I think that a visual message is what we need to send, rather than focusing on the horse and rider focus on the car and have very clear images of the amount if damage a horse can do to a car. Also remind drivers that there a potential for them to be seriously injures in a horse v car collision. That way th message might sink in.
 
Gwyntbryn said:
When I was learning to drive 45 years ago I was taught that one should adjust one's speed so that one could stop within the distance that one could see. This means driving slower on winding lanes even though the nominal speed limit is 60 (until cars are fitted with devices to enable us to see round corners!) . What some of these drivers fail to think about is that there might be a stationary vehicle, dog walker, child, loose cow or anything in the road round the bend. I regularly drive back along a narrow lane marked as "Quiet Road" with a suggested speed of 20 mph on the way back from buying my horse feed. I have had a "boy racer" driving up my back end reving his engine and flashing his lights to try to get me to drive faster. In a particularly narrow bit I'm afraid I lost patience and stopped my vehicle and walked back to have a word with the driver. I pointed out that with a heavy load on my car would take longer to stop, that the lane was popular with walkers, cyclists and horse riders, and that should he be in a hurry he might be better served by using the longer but faster main road. Foolish of my I know, but he looked suitably chastened and I felt much better!
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I also 'like' this!
 
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