A FRIEND recently told me all about her move from the outskirts of town to the centre.

She used to live in Beggarwood but has downsized to a lovely quiet part of Brookvale, and is already finding that it has made a marked difference to her happiness levels.

The main reason? She no longer has to spend much time imprisoned in her vehicle, stuck in rush hour traffic getting to work and back, and taking her children to their part-time jobs or their activities.

Now, she walks to work, and to the shops, and to the train station – and to most of the other places she might need to go.

I listened to her talk about how much better she feels and felt extremely jealous because I absolutely hate driving in Basingstoke.

I have been writing this column for a long time now, and one of the first pieces I ever wrote was about the mad behaviour that goes on every day on our local roads.

In the intervening years, nothing has changed, and things have, let’s be honest, got even worse, as there are more people here and more high profile roadworks currently carrying on which have caused even more severe disruption to journeys.

The same stupidity and law-breaking carries on every day, sending law-abiding drivers round the twist.

The latter, for example, move into the correct lane approaching roundabouts and accept that they have to queue. Those who prefer to be a law unto themselves still choose to deliberately use the wrong lane – particularly past the Leisure Park approaching the Thornycroft Roundabout.

Every day, drivers see the queue and deliberately move into the middle lane to turn first left during the morning traffic. I see these people do this as I wait in line, and there’s no pattern of offenders – they are men and women of every age.

The same problem also still applies approaching the Winchester Road roundabout, where chancers see the traffic in the right hand lane and think, nope, I’ll ignore the signs and use the left hand lane to move all the way round to the Winchester Road section approaching Brighton Hill.

A recent story ran in the paper concerning the issue of speeding drivers, but I have always felt, personally, that other behaviour seems to be much more dangerous within the town itself, not out on the M3 or M25.

As we all drive along Basingstoke’s roads and encounter what is inescapably terrible driving – we can easily see other drivers at close proximity when parked at junctions and when driving behind or beside them in traffic – I can’t help but think that it’s not really the person doing 35 miles an hour in a 30 zone we should be worried about.

I am more concerned about drivers who are texting, or tailgating, or cutting people up or are on the phone, or are using the wrong lane.

Surely, it’s more likely to be this unsafe behaviour which is going to hurt or kill someone. These issues are much harder to tackle than sticking up / concealing a speed camera.