Yesterday I picked up a lot of grief from 'Road Rat' who felt that while he was tipping at Purfleet at 7:00am this morning I'd be tucked up in my little wooden bed...yeh right. In fact 30 minutes later I was standing getting soaking wet at Ashford Truckstop while various equally-wet members of VOSA and the Highways Agency handed out free fresnel lenses to rather surprised (and dry) foreign truck drivers sitting in their cabs minding their own business. This bloke is Hungarian and is pointing out to the HA officer that the description of how to fit it is in Polish, French, Spanish, English and German... but not Hungarian. nevertheless he was most grateful.
It was a typical DfT press event--everybody wandering around not knowing quite what to do while sheets of rain blew up my trouser leg. And the first question the HA and VOSA people asked the drivers was: "DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?" Anyway here's a picture of the fresnel lens fitted to the side window of a Croatian Daf that was parked up. 
The free fresnel handout is an extension of the pilot scheme which saw 40,000 of the little devils handed out to left-hookers entering the UK. And they work by magnifying the deadly blindspot which on foreign trucks is on the front offside when a car gets level with the stepwell of an artic, which then moves to the right and Kerrrrunch...'. As the trial was so successful---the DfT says that there's been a 59% reduction in side swipe accidents involving foreign wagons---it's handing out another 90,000.
Road safety Minister Jim Fitzpatrick (above) was also getting wet too--to his credit he didn't seem to mind and even managed to keep his cool when a TV reporter demanded to know why drivers weren't being forced to pay for them. In fact he (the reporter) was so grumpy he asked the question twice. And got the same answer. I.e. - Because the cost of accidents involving the hundreds and thousands of left-hooker HGVs currently on our roads every day far outweighs the price of these devices which cost less than £4 each. Hard to question that...
Meanwhile, click through for a few more rain-soaked shots....I bet Road Rat wasn't a drowned rat!
In general, the reaction from the few foreign drivers still parked up was pretty positive--and being drivers they weren't about to turn down something for free! This young man working for Nobby Dangerousdangle seemed delighted to get one.
And this young man (there seemed to be an awful lot of fresh-faced drivers) was from Bosnia and told me 'I come to UK every day..' Every day? Well he meant once a week and to prove it he showed me his passport which was filled with entry stamps. His name was Drazen Jovic and he was a perfectly amiable cove---but then he could afford to be. He was inside his Volvo, I was standing outside in wet shoes watching the ink run off my note pad.....
And this was how hard it was raining.....
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