Dover

[lankeela]

Hearing about the gridlocked roads I wonder why they didn't stop the lorries leaving the motorway and allowed them into the town?

[Buenchico]

The geography of Dover is such that any lorries using the M20 towards Dover Eastern Docks (where all of the main ferry terminal are) effectively pass through the town centre (or, at least, right alongside it, just a very short distance from the shopping areas) on their way to get there.

Even fairly routine queues (e.g. when sailings are disrupted by poor weather) quickly clog up traffic moving around central Dover. Queues would have started forming in that area as soon as the port was closed, giving the police no time to prevent those lorries reaching the town centre. (i.e. Once the barriers at the Eastern Docks come down, it can be only a matter of minutes before the tailbacks reach the town centre, which is almost next door to the docks. With over well over 200 lorries arriving per hour at peak times, the slightest delay at the port can cause chaos nearby)

[lankeela]

Could they not have turned them round at the roundabout where the reporters were standing and sent them back up the motorway once the way in to Dover was closed?

[lady-janine]

and then send them where?
Think you have to have driven down that road to understand how quickly it gets gridlocked.

[ichkeria]

Allow several thousand lorries into the centre of a small town? Elsie idly w place like Dover which is a dead end

[ichkeria]

“Especially”

[sddsddean]

Until this recent episode, I don't think most people appreciated how much freight traffic there is between UK and Continent. In the 90's, when I was running to Austria and back every week, the French fishermen/farmers kept blockading Calais. On one occasion they did this at midnight and luckily the firm I worked for phoned me to tell me, so I diverted up to Zeebrugge to get the Dover ferry from there. Normally there are only 3 sailings a day on that route( although now I believe it has been stopped altogether), but fair play to P&O, they put all the Calais ferries on the route too for trucks only. I hit the back of the Zeebrugge queue at 0945 (9 hrs after the blockade started) 5 miles outside Zeebrugge! Luckily, I had my wife with me (who also drives), so one of us was always ready to drive up the queue. We passed several trucks whose drivers were asleep! Long and short is, we got a ferry 0330 the next morning. Bear in mind the conditions...Ok, we had food and drink, but no facilities (pooing on a bit of newspaper in the trailer is no fun, trust me!) and no one came by with supplies. I feel really sorry for all the guys and girls stuck in Dover. Spare them a thought when you tuck in to your lunch tomorrow...which they won't get, but probably brought some of to you. Merry Christmas.

[Maydup]

The lorries in the town were already there queuing for the ferry when the situation began. Since then the rest have been waiting on the motorways outside the town, on both sides of the roads, and thousands more directed to a disused airstrip in Thanet.

https://www.kentonline.co.uk/maidstone/news/m20-closed-london-bound-for-more-lorries-239794/

[New Judge]

What sdd says is quite right. Th eFrench fishermen think nothing of blockading the ports of Calais and Boulogne at the drop of a hat (though Boulogne sees very little traffic these days). Previous episodes had nothing to do with Brexit and nothing to do with Covid. As I said in another thread, the French fishermen believe they have an unconditional right to do as they please and the French government is usually supine in dealing with them. There have been enough episodes of this to demonstrate that relying so much on a single route is folly in the extreme. No doubt when the "transition" period contained in the fishing agreement that is about to be signed expires it will all kick off again.