Traffic & Transport
‘We’re not out to get anyone – we just want to slow you down’: why do lollipop people face so much road rage? | Social etiquette
There aren’t many jobs that often involve jumping out of the path of speeding cars – but for the lollipop people of Britain today, this is the sad reality. And it doesn’t stop there: aggression, swearing and middle fingers are just a few examples of the intimidation and abuse they face on our roads.
“Oh my God, I mean, abuse of lollipop people? What has the world come to?” says Lynne Gorrara. It’s a crisp, sunny afternoon in Ipswich and the 61-year-old is holding a towering stop sign above her head, clearing a crossing for a stream of schoolchildren. This spot – on a narrow residential road, with a hospital in one direction and shops in the other – is notorious for abusive drivers.
It’s hard to miss Gorrara and her colleagues, because, as she says, they are “lit up like a Christmas tree” in their neon jackets. Unfortunately, this makes no difference. Motorists have, on occasion, hurtled towards them at 50mph, some even waving as they pass. Of course, the lollipop people are not the only ones in danger. “It’s really scary, because you’re constantly watching the children – that’s my priority,” says Gorrara. “When you know they’re not going to stop, you’ve got to make sure you’ve got everybody else out of the way, too.”
To combat the epidemic of abuse, Suffolk county council has given lollipop people body-worn cameras to record drivers behaving badly. “We know that it’s a national problem. It’s not just happening in Ipswich,” says Mike Brooks, the council’s safer active travel manager. According to the most recent Home Office data available, for 2024, more than 3.5m motoring offences were recorded by police in England and Wales – the highest figure since records began. Meanwhile, the Telegraph reported in 2024 that, based on freedom of information requests, the number of crimes committed in the UK that mentioned “road rage” or “aggressive driving” in police logs had shot up by 34% in three years.
Some times of the year are worse than others. On a sunny day like today, drivers are in a chipper mood. But Gorrara and her colleagues dread what should be one of the happiest seasons: Christmas. “The volume of traffic is even higher and people get impatient,” she says. Despite the abuse, she loves the job, which she has been doing for 10 years. “It’s not for the money or the uniform,” but for the joy of serving her community and seeing the schoolchildren grow up. “You’ll see them in high school jumpers and think: oh my goodness!”
Alongside Gorrara is Michelle Whinney, who has been a lollipop person in the county for 12 years. The 57-year-old says things have got worse “in the last four to five years” and she has seen drivers “punching their steering wheels and sticking their fingers up” at her. She, too, has had to dodge oncoming cars. “They can be quite rude at times and there’s no need at all. We only stop you for a second.” As well as what seems to be a rising tide of anger in society, Whinney blames “more cars on the road” (there were 42m vehicles on Britain’s roads in 2025, a rise of more than 5m in a decade).
There is also a problem with drivers not understanding the role of lollipop people. Suffolk county council has fitted the body-worn cameras as part of a campaign called Lollipops Aren’t Just for Children to make motorists aware that lollipop people “can legally stop traffic for anybody”, says Brooks. He says this lack of understanding is often the source of abuse. “It usually takes the form of a driver saying: ‘You shouldn’t be stopping me, because there are no children here – there’s only adults.’”
Among the adults being guided across the road today is Abby Hart, 40, who has just picked up her kids from the nearby primary school. “They’re phenomenal,” she says of Gorrara and Whinney. “So kind, friendly and good with the kids.” Hart says she has seen some “close encounters” first-hand where cars weren’t willing to stop. “It’s a bit sad. No one’s in that much of a rush, surely?” Her children are approaching the age where they will be able to walk to school alone. “Knowing there’s someone here to help the kids safely cross just makes sense.”
Suffolk isn’t the only council trialling body-worn cameras for lollipop people: they are also being used in Greater Manchester, as well as Clacton and Basildon in Essex. Brooks says several other councils are looking to Suffolk for inspiration, including some in London, where low-traffic neighbourhoods, which close residential roads to cars, have provoked vicious rows between motorists and local authorities.
Some of the footage captured by the body-worn cameras has led to action by the police, with officers having a stern word with abusive drivers or handing out fines. “Nobody should go to work and receive abuse. Unfortunately, our patrols have got into the frame of mind that it is normal, and that’s wrong,” says Brooks.
Gorrara and Whinney work with a crossing patrol manager, Andy Patmore. The 58-year-old says lollipop people bring joy to pedestrians, especially when they embrace their crossing as “an extension of their personality”, but he warns they are in the same boat as other people policing our roads, including parking wardens, who report enduring physical violence, verbal threats and sexual assault. During one shift with Gorrara, lasting about 30 or 40 minutes, he says that seven cars tried to drive though them.
He has a message for drivers taking out their frustrations on his team: “Please don’t. We’re human beings as well. You’re not going to shout at a traffic light, but you can shout at one of us. It hurts our feelings and gets us down.”
The stream of schoolchildren peters out and the team lower their stop signs. Their shift is over. Despite the threats, Gorrara is excited to return tomorrow. “I just love it, because it gives me a reason to get up in the morning and get out of the house. I recently lost my husband, so it’s given me even more of a purpose to serve my community.”
Lollipop people have helped pedestrians across Britain’s roads for almost 90 years. In 1937, Mary Hunt, a school caretaker, became the country’s first lollipop person, guiding schoolchildren to safety in Bath. “She absolutely loved it,” says her grandson, Colin Hunt. His grandmother was “not much more than 5ft tall”, he says; she told him the first sign they gave her was so big that “she would go sailing off down the road” when hit by a gust of wind.
Hunt’s appointment was announced in the Bath Chronicle in September 1937 with the warning that drivers who “flash by when she is seeing her youthful charges across the road will have their numbers taken, and if an offence has been committed, will be summoned”. She patrolled the roads of Bath for nearly 25 years. Colin Hunt says abuse occured even then, including from “speeding vehicles that just wouldn’t stop”.
After the second world war, several councils in east London followed Bath’s lead and appointed their own “able-bodied pensioners” as lollipop people. The idea soon spread across the country. But, at the turn of the millennium, things changed. With the passage of the Transport Act 2000, councils were no longer legally obliged to appoint lollipop people. This – and later the government’s austerity policies – resulted in their numbers decreasing. The Mirror reported last year that councils were employing half as many lollipop people as in 2014, and many local authorities are axing them entirely. Durham county council, which has been controlled by Reform UK since May 2025, has proposed a hiring freeze on lollipop people as part of an Elon-Musk-inspired “Department of Government Efficiency” audit to eliminate “wasteful spending”.
And yet, while the number of lollipop people has fallen, the risks to children on the roads have increased. The number of under-16s killed or seriously injured has risen by 17% in England, jumping from an average of 1,884 between 2017 and 2019 to an average of 2,204 between 2022 and 2024, according to the Department for Transport. “Children are important and lollipop people take their lives into their hands to make sure they’re kept safe,” says Hunt. While bad behaviour has always been an issue, including in his grandmother’s day, he says it is an “absolute tragedy” that lollipop people have had to resort to wearing cameras.
Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst and the author of All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World, says anger on the roads is “about the link between rage and humiliation”, with road rage incidents marking “mini, momentary power struggles … where people use the road to try to exert power over the other person”.
Social media can help fuel this, he says, by “feeding us a constant stream of provocations”, and creating scapegoats. “It’s quite easy to imagine a scenario where lollipop people become public enemies on social media by impeding the flow of traffic.”
For anyone in doubt, Gorrara emphasises that lollipop people are nothing to fear. “We’re not out to get anyone,” she says. “We just want you to slow down.”
Traffic & Transport
Number of cloned number plates on UK roads at record high, data shows | Transport
The number of reported “cloned” vehicles involved in offences on UK roads has reached a record high, official data shows.
More than 11,400 drivers contacted the DVLA last year after being issued with fines for offences they said they did not recognise or accept responsibility for – most of which are believed to be down to cloning, where a number plate is copied fraudulently on similar vehicles to avoid enforcement cameras.
The number of complaints about misattribution was 9% higher than in 2024 and almost double the figure recorded in 2018, according to the RAC motoring organisation, which analysed data obtained under freedom of information requests.
The rising figures underscore concerns about the number of illegal number plates in use, allowing criminals to evade detection and dangerous drivers to avoid being caught.
Although drivers should provide number plate suppliers with the V5C vehicle logbook and proof of identity, an investigation last year uncovered more than 130 official suppliers in the UK willing to sell cloned versions, which allow drivers to dodge police and congestion charges.
Cloning vehicles has left many innocent car owners having to struggle to prove they were not responsible when enforcement camera images apparently caught their vehicle committing offences.
A parallel concern is the use of “ghost” plates which are designed to be unreadable by the UK’s 18,000 automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras, which enforce safety measures such as speed limits or lane closures on smart motorways.
The RAC said the UK needed to overhaul an outdated and poorly regulated number plate system. Its head of policy, Simon Williams, said: “If number plate suppliers were carrying out all the checks they’re supposed to, it would be much harder for dodgy drivers to buy cloned plates in the first place. It’s only when a fine arrives at a vehicle keeper’s home address that they realise someone else is driving around using their vehicle’s number plate illegally.”
He said that more also needed to be done to catch drivers with ghost plates, “whether that’s more police officers being equipped with handheld devices that can detect if plates are unreadable, updating ANPR cameras and introducing higher security standards for number plates and for those who produce them”.
The government last month said there would be a new nationwide crackdown on illegal number plates, with funding from the Department for Transport for a new roads policing team. A new National Roads Policing Coordination Centre would share intelligence as well as trialling new technology such as specialised goggles to detect number plates that have been designed to be unreadable by cameras.
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Drivers using an incorrectly displayed number plate can be fined up to £1,000.
A Department for Transport spokesperson said: “We’re cracking down on illegal number plates with significant investment in a new roads policing team and innovative tech to stamp out the scourge of cloned numberplates.
“Illegal number plates help facilitate crime, and we are supporting the police to work with the DVLA to make it easier to report these crimes and support victims through a new digital tool.”
Traffic & Transport
‘A big responsibility’: Clifton Suspension Bridge master hails £7.6m renovation | Bristol
The job does not give the holder age-old perks such as the right to drive sheep across the great structure, but the title “bridge master” does have a certain ring to it.
“I don’t tend to say I’m the bridge master when I’m at a party,” said Tristan Ralph, the current holder of the title. “But people do seem to know and bring it up. It’s a job less ordinary, isn’t it? It’s a Victorian sounding title and people are really, really interested.”
There is, however, nothing ceremonial about the title. Ralph is in charge of maintaining and running the Clifton Suspension Bridge, a UK feat of engineering, without any public money.
“It does feel a big responsibility,” said Ralph. “When the chairman of the trustees rang to say we’d like you to do it, you suddenly feel the pressure. It’s so famous and people in Bristol, quite rightly, are proud and almost possessive of it. Bristolians think: ‘It’s our bridge.’”
The bridge master – and the not-for-profit charity the Clifton Suspension Bridge Trust – have the task of maintaining the bridge “in perpetuity”. “I’m a temporary custodian,” Ralph said. “When I’m finished, I have to make sure it is handed on in just [as] good a condition or better than I inherited it.”
Ralph, a bridge engineer by profession, was speaking to mark the conclusion of a large refurbishment project that has taken two and a half years and involved hand-painting more than 4,000 original iron chain links and installing an energy-efficient lighting system. It has cost about £7.5m. “It’s been a big job,” he said. “But it’s come pretty much bang on budget, which is rare these days.”
That is important because, to many visitors’ surprise, the bridge does not receive public funding. “The upkeep of the bridge, the running of it, the salary costs and everything are all paid only by our toll money,” said Ralph. “People think that we might get something from local or central government. But, no, it’s just the toll money.”
Motorised vehicles – including motorcycles – pay £1 to cross the bridge. There is no charge for pedestrians, cyclists or horse riders. As well as being a beautiful structure, it is also a vital part of Bristol and North Somerset’s transport system.
Ralph said: “It draws the tourists in. We get visitors from hundreds of countries every year but primarily, it’s still a vital piece of local infrastructure. If the bridge wasn’t here, the difference it would make to Bristol traffic would be incredible. We average over 8,000 vehicles a day still. Maintaining it as a transport link is utterly vital.”
The end of the refurbishment does not mean Ralph can rest on his laurels and spend more time hobnobbing with members of the Bridge Owners Forum.
“In a few years, we’ll need to paint the underside of the bridge. The under-bridge gantry unit itself will be replaced over the coming years. So there’s always something. We need to keep on top of things. It’s like your house or your car. If you just ignore it, don’t do things for a couple of years, they start breaking down.”
As in most walks of life, the climate emergency is a challenge Ralph and the trust are having to face. “We were monitoring the bridge daily in the summer with the very hot weather. And maybe if the bridge was being designed today, there would be a little bit more robustness around wind.”
The prevailing south-west wind is not usually a problem and the bridge rarely has to close but if it blows directly through the Avon Gorge it can be more difficult. “We need to keep an eye at both the magnitude of any wind events but also their frequency,” Ralph said.
The engineer admires the bridge’s designers, including Isambard Kingdom Brunel. “It’s remarkably advanced for its time.”
And there is no sign that its days are numbered, largely because the Victorians did not skimp. Ralph said: “There are three layers of chains. The original Brunel design only had two, but because it went from a timber design to a cast-iron deck, they upped it to three.
“There’s a little bit of comfort in there. Today there might be pressure to say, well, can you keep it to two, but in Victorian times they did like to add a little bit of meat on the bones.
“It doesn’t have a finite life. There’s no end date in our plans. We all just keep it going in the highest standards as we can. It’s in really good condition as long as we keep doing what we need to do, keep our attention on it and don’t let things drift. Forever is a long time but there’s no reason why we have any need to worry at the moment.”
Uber has begun a trial of autonomous vehicles on the streets of Manchester as it looks to bring robotaxis to cities around the UK.
The first self-driving cars are operating, using the technology of its partner firms Pony and Verne, with whom Uber recently launched Europe’s first autonomous taxi service in the Croatian capital, Zagreb.
Uber said it was “excited to take this first step toward making this technology accessible to people across the UK”.
In social media posts, Verne said it had “started our autonomous vehicle testing in Manchester”, while Pony said there were “plans to bring robotaxis to the city” and that testing was under way.
The tests involve the company mapping the streets of the city in north-west England with a safety driver behind the wheel and no passengers.
Limited passenger services started last month in London, but with a safety driver in the front seat of cars supplied by Wayve under Transport for London’s licensing rules for private hire vehicles.
The next steps are unclear. Opposition from Uber drivers, their unions and the capital’s politicians to the rollout of robotaxis is mounting. The GMB and ADCU unions have both said thousands of drivers jobs will be lost and have called for help for those affected.
A critical report from London assembly’s transport committee this week called for the government to devolve authority over autonomous taxi services.
It said there was “considerable uncertainty about many of the claimed benefits of autonomous passenger vehicles”, and fears over the impact on public transport and congestion, as well as safeguarding and accessibility for disabled passengers.
There has been no official application to launch passenger services in Manchester so far, and the vehicles are operating under government licence via the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) and the Department for Transport.
A spokesperson for Transport for Greater Manchester said it wanted the city’s taxis to be the safest in the country.
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“New technologies play an increasingly important role in the growth of our city region,” they said. “But they need to be introduced responsibly, safely and with real thought about what it means for our residents.
“Although no applications have been made to operate driverless taxis in the Greater Manchester, we’re aware of potential interest from companies to do so.
“Safety will always be our top priority, and we will need strong assurances that no vehicles will operate on our roads that pose any risk to residents.”
Uber said it expected to offering robotaxi trips in as many as 15 cities worldwide by the end of 2026, mainly in the US and the Middle East.
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