There is a reason so many punctures turn up on the nearside front. That tyre is the one sweeping the gutter, and the gutter along the A11 is where everything ends up. Screws, staples, wire, glass and grit all get pushed towards the edge of the road by passing traffic and then sit there waiting for the wheel that runs closest to the kerb.
There is a second mechanism, and it explains the odd sense that punctures come in pairs. A nail lying flat on the road surface is harmless until a front tyre rolls over it and flicks it upright, at which point the rear tyre on the same side arrives a fraction of a second later and drives straight onto the point of it. That is why a rear puncture on a road like Grove Road often has the front tyre to thank for it. None of that changes what you should do, which is stop and ring, but it does explain why this happened to you and not to the car in front. It is also why the other tyres get checked before we leave, because whatever caught one of them was lying in a gutter all four went through.
The instinct is to nurse it to a garage, and it is usually the wrong one. Driveways in Mile End Park, side streets, car parks and the hard shoulder are all normal ground for us. Whether it is Stepney Green in rush hour or Bow Road at midnight, we answer. On Bow Road, day or night, Bow Common included, arrival across E1 runs 30 to 60 minutes. The E1 postcode and a street in Burdett Road: that is enough.
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Mile End Road is stop and start all day, with buses, worn junctions and gutters that collect everything the traffic pushes into them. That combination is why punctures here are so often on the kerb side and so often unremarkable in their cause. It is nothing you did. What matters is what happens next, and the answer is the same on the A11 as anywhere else. Stop, get off the running lane if you can, and leave the car standing until somebody comes to it.
The most common single job we do, and this one was textbook. A screw picked up out of the gutter running along the A11, straight through the tread, and repairable because she stopped quickly rather than pressing on.
A driver near Stepney Green who thought he had extraordinarily bad luck. He had driven the same route twice through the same debris. Bad luck was a much smaller factor in it than the gutter was.
A nail flicked up by the front wheel and taken by the rear on Burdett Road. It is a well known sequence and it is exactly why we look at the other tyres on that side before packing up.
Because that tyre runs closest to the kerb, and the kerb is where traffic sweeps everything sharp. It gets first pick of whatever is lying in the gutter along a road like the A11.
Not the same nail through both, but a front tyre can flick a flat nail upright and the rear on that side then drives onto it. Which is why two punctures down one side of a car is less of a coincidence than it looks.
They get looked at before we leave as a matter of course. If one has picked something up out of the same gutter, it is far better to know now than on Grove Road in three days' time.
Not on the roads round here, where the lanes decide that for you. It is not a driving fault. It is simply where the debris is, and it is why punctures happen to careful drivers as often as anybody else.
Yes. They are tight and parked solid, so tell us the street and the registration and we get the van as close as it will go and carry the kit the rest of the way.
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