I would like to nominate Basingstoke for the daftest road furniture in the country.. and its getting worse. Dual carriageways with silly islands that turn it into a single lane, humps that serve no purpose at all, raods half blocked with give way to on coming traffic signs,
entrances to roads narrowed so that one going out has to wait for the one coming in. Silly little mini roundabouts, I could go on and on, our roads here are being systematically degraded so the place resembles an obstacle course.
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Its not a problem.
You may have noticed that no-one wants to go to Basingstoke. The street furniture is to keep you guys in.
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Nobody? Didn't you notice Clarkson in Basingstoke last week AE? to be fair he drove around the shopping precinct and wisely avoided the raods.
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Nobody? Didn't you notice Clarkson in Basingstoke last week AE? to be fair he drove around the shopping precinct and wisely avoided the raods.
they were trying to find a way out Barney.
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>The street furniture is to keep you guys in.
Almost correct. It's actually to stop the outsiders escaping.
They're our only source of protein.
Kevin...
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my town has a bollard on the corner of a particularly narrow road which is restricted to vehicles of a certain width. It must have been knocked over at least 10 times each month and each time council contractors would replace it, relay the paving slabs around it and the kerb stones.
Only today after an absence of two months, the bollard was being replaced. As I walked past the workmen, a lorry drove by and promptly crushed the plastic cones they had set out near it. They just stood there and laughed, happy in the knowledge they probably have a job for life replacing it!
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Maybe they also have a sideline in body repairs - the cars hitting the bollard down must surely need repairing.
Looking at a house for sale yesterday, I commented to my wife that this particular street's traffic calming measures should be rolled out to more again. Cobbles. No speeding up and slowing down between the humps.
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Cobbles
Noisy - not just for the car but the residents.
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That road I mentioned is used by my local Ford garage to find the noises and their sources on cars ;-)
I was joking about cobbles.
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If cars regularly hit a bollard mounted on the kerb, then it's likely that without the bollard cars would be mounting the kerb, so the bollard sounds like a good way of keeping cars off the pavement.
Maybe the bollard should be painted dayglo orange for the benefit of the dumbo drivers who cut the corner?
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Or maybe someone got the space calculation wrong and it should be slightly further back? Maybe an inch or two would make the difference. It sounds like it's doing a good job in protecting people though.
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Near where I work is a long, straight, wide, single-carriagway A-road. When a new residential development was built on it, they made a new roundabout and started mucking about with the stretch of the road in the vicinity - cycle lanes, pedestrian crossings etc. Also included were about four sets of narrow (not much more than a foot) islands positioned to narrow the main lanes but not the cycle lanes, presumably some kind of traffic calming measure. These were marked with thin black posts with narrow reflective strips at the top. These got pretty mucky quickly, making them not very obvious in daylight and practically invisible after dark. Not surprisingly, the posts started disappearing, leaving some of the islands complete unmarked. Now they've had to position large plastic temporary kerb blocks on the islands in place of the missing posts.
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Yes. I often think that the highway 'engineers' design road modifications from the comfort of their offices, imagining that all the vehicles and drivers behave according to the rules, and foul weather and road dirt don't come into their calculations.
I'm sure many backroomers will know the frodsham swing bridge on the A56, which has suffered from unfillable potholes for several years, rather like the haunted bloodstains that can't be eradicated from old castle floors. On Sunday the bridge was closed for a few hours while a crew probably imagined that the problem will be sorted this time. We await developments.
Edited by Dynamic Dave on 15/12/2008 at 19:04
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Our road is houses on both sides,urban and 30mph. A couple of hundred yards down is a fairly sharp bend. Many times was the sound of car/brick wall interface heard in the night. Coming towards our house, at the optimum point of losing it was a lamp-post made of aluminium which was often lying flat in the morning. Guess what the council did..........they replaced it with a concrete one to punish those drivers who had the temerity to leave the road....nice !
Ted
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Where I live there is lots of silly pencils crayon poles on the pavement, the idea was supposed to warn drivers there are schools near by, anybody that knows my area and I know a few people that have replied to this thread do will know there is a massive red brick school just opposite the crayons which sort of render them pointless! It is also now a 20 limit which I agree with since its pretty hard to do any more that anyway.
They are now putting lots of speed indicators in place and I am told by Trafford Council that they are putting a load of traffic calming measures down Kings Road when I asked what is being done about the idiots that continue to do 50mph down there.
I do agree with traffic calming measures when they are needed but all mini roundabouts and stuff do is confuse people and cause driving test failures!
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>>f***sham<<
Prize for the weirdest swear filter settings on the internet?
{not really, we once had someone here (maybe still here?) who thought it was witty and clever to spell Ford incorrectly - anyway, now post now corrected}
Edited by Dynamic Dave on 15/12/2008 at 19:04
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As it happens, the "stealth" islands I described in my previous post started getting dug up and tarmac'ed over yesterday! Sanity has finally prevailed!
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When I visit England I usually find myself having to drive through the Liberal Democrat nanny state of South Somerset. I have never, ever, seen so many 'safety' signs and road markings - guaranteed to be a distraction in my opinion.
Incidentally, there's a poem (a bit out of date now) about the delights of Basingstoke. I can tell you the town is twinned with Alencon, not far from Le Mans, which is equally nondescript.
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Not furniture but the road itself. SWMBO told me that she had run a red light on a pelican crossing a couple of days ago. No one on it happily. The reason....she was pre-occupied with keeping an eye on her offside mirror as just before this point a slip road comes in from the RIGHT and lots of drivers just change lanes without looking in the nearside mirror for traffic, which has the right of way, overtaking them on the inside, as she was. The slip road saves people turning right at the actual junction and crosses the inward lane of the dual-carriageway she was on (controlled by lights) before merging into the outward lane (no control). There is another place on the M60 at Stockport where a slip road becomes the outer lane of the motorway. Presumably this was designed to save having to build a bridge to put in a 'flying' junction to feed cars into the inside lane. It's quite un-nerving to be driving along and suddenly find an Artic alongside you on the right. Of course, he will want to get over to his nearside as soon as he can because, as soon as the sip road ends, he will be breaking the law! Any other examples of this stupid design ?
Ted
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There is another place on the M60 at Stockport where a slip road becomes the outer lane of the motorway. Any other examples of this stupid design ? Ted
YES!
N1 coming into cape town... speed limit 120km/h.
Just before the infamous Koeberg Interchange, one lane peels off to the left, leaving two lanes of traffic heading onwards.
The slip on... drive at 90 degrees to motorway, take a left... then it goes through 270 degrees right, in a very tight curve, and you have about 100m to 'merge' into the RH lane of the motorway!
NOT fun, running out of roadas the slip road narrows, barrier on the right, and some loon coming up behind you at 120+, while you are flooring it because the max you can do round that curve is about 40!!!
Edited by Ian (Cape Town) on 17/12/2008 at 06:25
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The M8 / A82 / A804 junction in Glasgow has slip roads both on and off lane 3.
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>Any other examples of this stupid design ?
Perhaps you didn't drive on the New York Expressway in the 60's (and AFAIK it is the same now). Exits can be on the left or right side, and you need to know which in good time. As the road is 6-lane, you can imagine the amount of lane-switching that has to take place.
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>As the road is 6-lane you can imagine the amount of lane-switching that has to take place.
Can you imagine.... FOUR lanes of mimsers!
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