My journey to work on the mountain bike takes me through perhaps the oldest part of town - narrow victorian streets, with narrow footpaths on either side. The houses are mostly terraced, and have very little garden - so the residents park on the street. This results in a single path forming along perhaps half a mile of the journey - snaking past parked cars, and avoiding the inevitable queue of drivers hoping to use the route as a rat-run to avoid the centre of town.
This is all fine, and most mornings the traffic tends to find a way through the maze without too much difficulty. Today was not one of those days.
In the middle of perhaps the most difficult stretch I happened upon a refuse collecting truck, stopping all traffic in both directions. Being on the bike, I was able to skirt around it, and re-join the road immediately - only I couldn’t get any further, and the reason annoyed me.
One 44 truck was parked outside a house, and another 44 truck was waiting in the queue of traffic adjacent to it. Of course they were not really trucks - they were “sports utility vehicles” - off road vehicles that have never been off road in their life - used by wealthy mums to deliver their children to school (following the line of thinking “as long as my car is a tank, if I have an accident, I will kill the other people - but I’ll be fine).
I’ve seen this happen before - only more amusingly/dangerously. When two suitably “impressive” 4x4s meet at a narrower stretch of the road a little further on (that is plenty wide enough for most cars), they have no option but to mount the footpath on either side of the road in order to pass each other.
Anyway - I had to go back off the road, off the bike, and squeeze past the waiting 4x4s, along with people trying to walk along the footpath. The owners of the 4x4s were completely oblivious to it all.
Time for a related aside;
There is a bridge in town - a very old bridge - built as a prototype for the one that spans the Danube in Budapest. The bridge has a weight limit - and guess what - quite a few of these “more impressive” monster trucks that the trophy moms drive are heavier than the weight limit - sometimes considerably so. Do you think that even crosses their mind? Of course not.
On at least two occasions in the last couple of years the local police have manned the bridge, and fined everybody with vehicles heavier than the weight limit. They collected thousands and thousandseach day. The residents who were fined were aghast at the injustice of it all - you know - being fined for taking no notice of the weight limits on the bridge…