David Gillon

Last Friday afternoon, I get to a set of temporary traffic lights on the main road out of Rochester, I'm first in queue, the lights have just turned to red.

They turn to green, I start to pull away, they turn to red again.  I manage to stop before passing them.

This Friday afternoon, I get to the same set of traffic lights (if 100m further down the road). They're red, I wait, and think "at least they're not trying to kill me this time". They turn to green, I pull into the now-open opposite lane, and find a dump truck 25m in front and trundling towards me. I slam my brakes on and stop, hoping the car behind isn't too close - fortunately he seemed not to have pulled away, not sure if they changed the lights again.

Guy in the dump truck never stops, but just keeps coming towards me, screaming "Go back! Go back!" Which I'm perfectly willing to do, just as soon as I manage to check just where the car behind me is past my wheelchair in the back (and it's worse than usual because he could be off to the side given we were pulling into the opposite lane).

Dump truck squeezes past me as soon as there are two inches to spare (not exaggerating, I was half-expecting the scream of ripping metal). I'm now opposite the traffic light, I look across at the guy operating it and ask "What the hell?!?" He shrugs.

That's an incident every other time I've been past those lights this week, god knows how many incidents there've been in total if my experience is typical. And given both my incidents were on hot Friday afternoons, you have to wonder if someone's been indulging in liquid lunches.

The roadworks are for CityFibre, who are digging up roads in 60 cities to install high speed fibre, I just sent them, and the local council, a scathing comment on twitter.

Annoyed.

Incidentally there was a second set of temporary lights just further on (I think this one's the council doing sewers), and I got a good look at the guy operating those lights, who was riveted to his phone. If he's using that to monitor cameras on both sets of lights and relying solely on that, then it's no wonder they're doing unsafe releases by not monitoring the site traffic between the two lights. And if he's using it to play games, god help us.