Council Highways causing chaos

[Andrew]

[Andrew]

And that just encourages more people to buy heavy 4x4 suv's which cause even more damage to the road.

[Terry Casey]

My wife's grandfather had the name for it: Higgerant School!

[Andrew]

People with no brains should not be allowed to vote

[billyorange007]

Yes. I'd be in favour of an IQ test before being allowed to vote, or become an MP or President of America

[Harry Bloomfield]

Harry Bloomfield explained :

..and this mid-morning chaos with buses becoming trapped, unable to progress because the marked bays allowed parking on both sides :-)

I have just been past again and highways are there with red faces, remove the marked bays along the entire north side of the road, on my way back, they had been replaced with yellow lines. Such a shame no one foresaw the chaos it would cause before laying down the original parking bays.

[Tim Streater]

On 08 Jul 2019, [e-mail] wrote (in article [e-mail]):

Yes, funny how people are coming up with this stuff now, when they didn't before.

[Steve Walker]

I don't knwo but round here, on a busy B-road they have marked a double length bus stop outside a school and built out the pavement opposite, within abiut 35 yards of a mini-roundabout. As soon as a bus stops, the road becomes a single lane and the tailback in one direction gridlocks the roundabout.

Now you might think that it is only for a minute or two while passengers get off and on, but no. The buses park up there for half an hour or more waiting for the school to finish for the day!

150 yards or so in the opposite direction, the lights that used to be a cross-road, with a slip-road and give-way bypassing them for turning left (the major route) needed pedestrian lights. Now if it was me, I'd have added them to the existing lights and placed a set on the slip-road that only went red when a pedestrian pushed the button to cross. The council instead spent a fortune building up the slip-road area into a pavement bulge and leaving just the the plain crossroads, then put new lights on. The result is that the vast majority of traffic, which is turning left, is stuck behind one or two vehicles waiting to turn right and the capacity of the junction is probably less than a quarter of what it was, with resulting long queues.

SteveW

[Steve Walker]

4x4s are not heavy enough to do significant damage to the roads, it is almost purely down to goods vehicles.

A study many years ago (when 32 tons was the maximum weight for HGVs) showed that a single, badly loaded wagon did as much damage to the road as 130,000 cars. I know 4x4s are heavier than normal cars, but not that much.

SteveW

[The Other Mike]

7 feet? so maybe 2 foot narrower than a bus then? No wonder they struggle

It's either a bus route or it isn't. If a bus won't fit the bus company won't waste time on serving the route.

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[Vir Campestris]

Road damage is proportional to the 4th power of the vehicle weight (so the road builders tell us)

So that girt big 4x4 weighing twice as much as my car is doing 16 times as much damage.

(Of course the truck is doing way more than that)

Andy

[The Other Mike]

Some relatives lived on an unadopted road, houses of quite high quailty on large plots built maybe in the 1950's The road is around 100m long and it and the also unadopted adjacent road were a potholed mess in the 1970's, the house prices were accordingly always somewhat lower than those in the surrounding streets despite the other houses being 1970's rather tacky builds on much smaller plots.

I'd have no reason to visit as the relatives are long dead but out of interest I just looked on google earth streetview and both roads are still a potholed shithole 40+ years later.

It's like no one living there gives a f*ck.

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[Roger Hayter]

Does no-one believe me when I point out that this is a good safefy feature for a road, especially if one has children or pets? Why should one want to get down one's own residential road quickly?

[Jack98]

On the other hand it isnt a great idea to be focussing on avoiding the worst of the potholes when little kids can be running out from between parked cars chasing a ball.

[The Other Mike]

Driving down a road, even at sub10mph without breaking a spring or bending a wheel rim or grounding the underside or for the human on foot stumbling into a pothole and ending up in A&E is also a quite handy safety feature.

[The Natural Philosopher]

OTOH where residents get together and do thisgsw properly

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.2811102,-0.4428778,3a,75y,150.73h,84.2t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1shDFC5OqUYcxO8i4oO7t85A!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

[Marland]

At what stage was it refused, had permission to use it been given then rescinded or were Wetherspoons told before they would not be allowed to use it but carried on in developing an outlet on the site regardless.

GH

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Most useless thing I've seen recently round here is a sort of roundabout changed to a T junction with cycle lanes - to save them going round that island. Complete with special traffic lights for the cycle lane. Which they ignore, same as any others. Making it very difficult for traffic to turn left at that T junction.

[Terry Casey]

It wasn't that bad before:

[The Natural Philosopher]

It was 40 years ago. When the resident association first was formed.