The image shown here was taken on April 7, 2022. It shows the M20 that morning viewed from near Junction 9. The motorway has been transformed - yet again - into a lorry park. There are now far more trucks entering Kent than can leave thanks primarily to P&O taking their ferries out of action and the failure of the Government’s IT system that facilitates cross-Channel movements. See www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-60965245 for the basics of the story.

Three lanes are used for parking coast-bound trucks, a fourth is seen letting trucks out in the Dover-bound direction. London-bound traffic is restricted to two narrow lanes, with no hard shoulder. Coast-bound traffic is diverted onto the A20, a slower and much lower capacity single lane road, resulting in long, very slow queues in rush hour. Further, according to the BBC, East Kent Highways said the system was holding 4,500 lorries last Thursday, when it "normally has capacity for around 2,000".

I posted this image on my Flickr originally, and there were several comments about (a) how this represents the last 15 years in Kent, (b) how useless the current UK government is in getting to grips with this situation and (c) poor bloody truckers. There is not much more I can add to that other than to point out that the people of Dover are having lives and businesses ruined, with the town subject to such travel disruption that even the community nurses are having a hard time getting out to vulnerable patients to provide their insulins etc.

A recent piece in the Financial Times summarises the situation perfectly, making the point that the UK is now suffering real reputational damage from all this. Two quotes from it. “EU truckers, who drive 85 per cent of the lorries that cross the Channel, are increasingly reluctant to take work in the UK to avoid day-long traffic jams in Kent where there are limited washing and toilet facilities for stranded drivers”. “Businesses that we want to do business with are increasingly seeing us as too much hassle to deal with”.

Situation normal, all…

FWIW: the image is a panorama stitch of 6 original images in Lightroom CC. The images were made with the Nikon 500mm f/5.6 lens adapted onto a Sony A1 using the Monster LA-FE1 autofocus adapter.

Update 2022-05-17. It is still there. The cones and traffic barriers are still out, and although the lines of trucks are not as enormous as they have been. Although Operation Brock is “reviewed on a weekly basis”, it seems to be in place for the indefinite future. Oh the joys…

Update 2022-05-28. And still, it goes on. “Operation Brock is also in place on the M20, and Dover is said to be "very busy" with around 750 lorries waiting in the queues.”

Update 2022-07-25. It has got worse again. With the start of the summer holidays, holidaymakers heading for France via the ferries at Dover or via the Channel Tunnel have been stuck for many hours waiting to go through passport control. As the travel journalist Simon Calder explained, this is downstream of the UK Government’s insistence that we should have an external border with the EU where passports are individually inspected and stamped. This triples (or more) the time required for each clearance at the UK-EU border. It was entirely foreseeable that delays would be inevitable in the absence of tripling the number of passport booths at Dover and the Channel Tunnel. I should not be surprised at this — after all, we have a deputy Prime Minister who did not understand how reliant UK trade is on the Dover-Calais crossing — but I am horrified. About 3000 trucks are stuck in the queues around the M20. It is getting harder to go anywhere in Kent at present. Speaking as a resident of East Kent, I am getting seriously pissed off with the mess the Government has made of this and gives no impression of giving a damn about it.