The hard shoulders of motorways

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, especially since over the last few months I’ve covered about 10,000 km along the A-6 and A-52 on account of some press cars I was driving to Galicia. Travelling there and back at a relaxed pace gives you time to see a great deal and to observe how other people drive, and to gain experience too.

And there’s one thing that is becoming more and more frequent: stopping on the hard shoulder of motorways and dual carriageways. Lately I’ve seen all sorts of things, but on almost every trip it’s easy to spot someone who has stopped because of a technical problem, because they’re checking the car, but it gets far more dangerous when people stop to relieve themselves.

The last straw came a few weeks ago when halfway along the A-52 a driver overtook me in a great hurry and a few kilometres further on you could see the vehicle parked on the hard shoulder, the man outside the car without a high-visibility vest and as calm as you like, relieving himself (with poor visibility, it was around 9 in the evening). I’ve also seen cars parked on the hard shoulder with their hazard lights on and the driver inside, chatting on the phone as if nothing were happening.

Another situation that surprised me was during the road test of the Opel Antara: as I passed Benavente a storm broke with very heavy rain, until at one point the wipers could not clear the water. The car in front of me and I slowed to around 50-60 km/h, with our hazard lights on so that we could be seen clearly. To my surprise, a high-powered vehicle overtook us at high speed. To this day I still wonder how the driver could see the road, or whether they knew it by heart and were guessing, because with the heavy rain there was no way to see anything.

So, nobody is free from the risk of an accident, but we shouldn’t tempt fate and hope we’ll be the lucky ones. In just a few months I’ve already seen all of these bad habits, not to mention the lorry drivers and professional drivers who spend all day on the road and will see more madness in 24 hours than most of us see in a year.