We commuted home tonight in the dark. There had been torrential rain all afternoon which was still falling, visibility was very bad and there was widespread flooding. DH was driving because my license was (mistakenly, I think) kept by the licensing people as part of my application for a new one. We were in enough time to get to the creche about 30 minutes before closing time.
At one point there was a choice between routes. Route 1 was a national road, two wide lanes with hard shoulder on both sides, a good road surface, straight and flat. There was a junction with traffic lights a couple of miles up which would have had us sitting in a tailback for maybe 6 or 7 minutes but aside from that it would have been constant motion all the way home.
Route 2 was maybe 8km of small country road, twisty, narrow, with potholes, lots of mud, drifts of wet leaves and flooding. This road would bypass the traffic lights and take us out onto the main road beyond them. On one part of that route last week (the narrower, windier part), DH and another driver clipped wing mirrors on a bend hard enough to shatter the glass.
I asked DH to take the national route, given the awful driving conditions and the incident last week with the wing mirror. I had already said last week that I was nervous of that route in winter conditions.
He took the second route, though he did turn of it halfway and miss the worst part of it. He is now angry with me for taking issue with it. He agrees that the first route would have been safer, but he thinks that since he was driving, he was entitled to make the decision (which is a fair point), and that my fear of that combination of route and weather conditions is excessive. He also thinks that I'm overreacting to the wing mirror incident, that it was 'unfortunate but could have happened anywhere, a cyclist could have shattered the glass brushing past'. He says that since nothing happened, I'm being completely over the top. He also thinks that it's better to take any route (or speed) that 'gets us off the road sooner' as he believes that that makes us less likely to be involved in an accident.
I think he's being unreasonable to have decided that getting ahead by a couple of minutes (when we weren't late) was more important than our safety, and that in very bad weather it's best to default to the safest route, even if it slows us down by a couple of minutes. And the 'getting off the road sooner' thing I can't even begin to deal with.
Go on, Mumsnet jury, sort us out.
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The logic of route choice
9 replies
BuilderMammy · 11/11/2014 21:07
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