TOT road Improvement

[alan_m]

Over the past 8 years or so my local council has spent 10s of millions improving road junctions.

Re-allocating lanes at busy junctions for left hand turns which very few use.

Adding a right turn filter light on many traffic lights where the filter has its own set timed sequence.

Replacing a large round-about with a T junction and adding to the mess a shared pedestrian/bus/taxi road. Include unsynchronised traffic lights on the junction so that when travelling in any direction motorists have to be ratcheted around 3 or 4 sets of lights in 200 yards.

Road narrowing at the other side of junctions to promote traffic calming.

The net result is traffic bottlenecks in various places/junctions where motorist are stationary for a very much longer period than before the road improvement.

Who could have predicted that the air quality in these areas of road improvements has deteriorated so much that the council has been forced to declare these locations as ?Air Quality Management Areas?? I wonder now if more 10s of millions will now be spent on the same junctions to remove some of the ?improvements ? in order to speed up traffic and not having it waiting at lights for so long? The council seem to be pining their hopes on everyone using a bicycle!

[Jim GM4 DHJ ...]

ha ha

[John Rumm]

That sounds like the end of Victoria Ave where it meets the A13 in Southend!

ISTR in the case of Southend, they admitted that the improvements were not as successful as they had hoped, but don't have the money to put it right.

(I suspect they will try and get a private contractor to pay to fix it in exchange for being allowed to redevelop the Queensway site behind Victoria Circus)

[Jethro_uk]

As you have documented (and the council has found out) , all of the "improvements" were actually disguised disincentives to motorists.

the history of "Going green" is basically an assortment of sticks and f*ck all carrots. Shrinking roads and junctions. (Deliberately) mistimed light sequences. More pedestrian crossings than streetlamps (on main trunk roads too). That's before you factor in the tarmac given to the suicidal death cult known as "cyclists".

The irony is C-19 may just have done for mass motoring before anyone realised.

[R D S]

Good, but not really... it's not just around here then. Darwen, small town, they appear to have applied city logic to it and it just doesn't work. And don't get me started on our fragmented bus lane.

Blackburn next door where I grew up, people don't shop there any more partly because of the road improvements. Despite motoring through there for years I can't get from some places to others without a good brain wracking. And there's one bit of road that they've made one way, from one year to the next they can't decide which way it would work best so keep flipping it around!

And I think the culprits earn 6 figures, you couldn't make it up.

I moved recently from a premises that had a junction installed outside. I'd developed a worsening cough that I wondered was being caused by the standing traffic outside. It came up during a conversation with a councilor who assured me that tests had demonstrated that the air quality had actually improved.

Standing traffic = better air quality. Yep. Seriously.

Anyway a few months later i'm not coughing myself to eye watering in the mornings anymore. Which is nice.

####s the lot of them.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Yes and many people can't ride a bike and those who do seem to not have any kind of common sense or appreciation of their ability to shock the shit out of pedestrians who either don't see them or can't hear them and tend to go around traffic signals by using pedestrian crossings and the footway outside of their area. Until we bite the bullet and get all cycles registered and riders tested and insured, a lot of pedestrians simply go elsewhere, and with the added pollution its just one more reason not to go there. Even before Covid, our council and the retailers were moaning about footfall die back. Of course they are not coming. Drivers can't park or it costs so much its stupid, the roads are all jammed, Cyclists tend to be passing thru, and pedestrians find the whole mess too much hassle and shop on line. Merry Christmas.. Brian

[tabbypurr]

For many years I sometimes thought they're waging war on drivers. Now they're getting more open about it and it turns out they actually are and have been for many years. They openly say their mission is to reduce traffic, and have adopted all sorts of antisocial antiproductive schemes all around the country to advance their aim. All of them are at our expense, both the direct costs & the resulting fall in national productivity & income.

The hard left thinking behind it is that we should all cycle. A lot do in the netherlands, but here it's hilly, too cold, too wet, too dangerous after dark and many journeys too far to be practical on a pushbike. And the risk of serious injury is many times as high. And of course there simply isn't the space in most towns & cities for a network of cycle lanes and car traffic to coexist sanely. Except in Milton Keynes, where it's doable but issues in the planning result in much increased rates of cyclist injuries.

If we lived in a 'take them out & shoot them' kind of society or were planning a B Ark I'd nominate the traffic planning idiots. The level of stupidity in UK traffic planning is shocking.

NT

[Jethro_uk]

Except it's not "stupidity". It's politically driven policy. Just not joined up.

On the one hand you have the greenies who long ago infiltrated all levels of government. Assisted by their mates who realised that "green" or "organic" are synonyms for "25% extra profit".

So all traffic plans must discourage private motoring, and that happens.

Meanwhile, across the town, the macro economic planners create an environment where nobody blinks at a 2 hour commute. Egged on by a car industry that has to keep flogging cars.

You set them running, and oil them both occasionally with little gems like reducing garages to outdoor box rooms, deterring off street parking and ensuring no public transport for miles.

Mix together for 3 decades, and Presto ! What have you got ? If it isn't exactly like what we have, it would be damn close.

The sudden and unexpected way Covid has casually shattered decades of hard won ignorance of remote/flexible/home working has completely stunned the powers that be. Coupled with the mysterious intransigence of the workforce to damn well do as they are told it's already f****ng up a lot of strategy. HS2 for example. Which was a crap idea any day of the week anyway.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Lol so true..

not discourage, tax.

Reminds me of an old sketch:

"What is the point, of point duty?"

"the point of point duty, sir, is to hold up motorists long enough for the traffic wardens to nick them for parking"

Indeed. Don't build more roads. install more fibre.

We will be ok until SHIP comes along - Sex Hormones Over IP.

[Jethro_uk]

You say that ...

Many years ago, I had a chance to collar someone who had a box open at a junction. I commented how the way the lights "appeared" to be set was such that cars got a green light, advanced about 3 car lengths and were then held by pedestrian lights which seemed to go red just as soon as the main ones went green.

I said if they changed the phase, they'd get a lot more cars though in a single cycle.

"Oh" he replied "We know. But this is how we have to set it to make cars wait. We can't do anything that makes it faster for cars."

As I navigate a few "bypasses" near me, I realise why they have sets of pedestrian lights that are deliberately phased to jam the flow of traffic. And my theory that it's quicker to bypass the bypass has held out in all cases I've tried.

If you can be bothered, take a trip down the A38 through Northfield and Selly Oak on Google ... particularly going into Brum.

[alan_m]

When I was commuting to work by car every local road "improvement" resulted in me turning off from the main road much earlier and using back street rat runs! I wasn't alone.

I do believe that many of the road planners in my local council don't drive, or they don't live on the side of the town where they have to travel east to west through it in order to escape!