Obstruction To and By •
Page 1
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
• . Drivers of 'Heavy Motors. .. Complaints about obstruction by drivers of heavy motor vehicles, inclusive of motor chars-ii-banes, are of Occasional recurrence. Each case, as we have previously.insisted,_must be judged on. the facts and its merits. Nobody can it in a chair, at a distance, and confirm the •complaints,of the party who states he was obstructed, any more than he can condemn the 'driver .against whom •the, complaint is lodged. Each complaint generally . calls _for a. considerable amount of investigation, and not unusually, if.it gets before a court of summary-jurisdiction, . produces a great.deal of contradictory-testimony. . We are ,desirons, with the. aid. of our wonderful circulation amongst .users, to do anything in. our power to help to alleviate the genuine risk to: drivers of 20 m.p.h. vehicles of suffering delays which are reasonably avoidable. :Too many. drivers of the lighter types of motorears appear to forget,so far as we can observe, the 'essence of the law of the highway in the United Kingdom. . The principle of the equal right of user is too often forgotten—as much by theldriver at speed, who wants to get through, as by the driver who crawls along regardless of the fact that he is wasting the road. The right to use the highway is a communal right; everybody has the right to pass along the -highway, but each person individually begins to expOse,that? right to a6sault :at law when he claims -to-.be entitled to.
-loiter or to rest upon the highway. We have heard the difference aptly summed in the aphorism One can pass along the highway, but may. not be upon it." This, of course, is -a paradox.
We appeal for a wider appreciation of the bene ficial effects of give-and-take behaviour. The driver of a slow horse-drawn cart, ,if -he deliberately keep on the crown of the road and sneer at the driver of any motor who calls the road from him, is perhaps more in the wrong, than the active-minded motor driver who wishes to getby. There is, we know, a distinct .amount of resentment amongst some of the older, drivers of slow horse-drawn vehicles, and this feeling is sometimes so pronounced as to. be economically harmful to the interests of the community. A. frequent remark, from the lips of such a man, is.