Unfortunately it isn't just Sunderland. Even in London, whose traffic flows have been severely restricted by chicanes, pavements built out into the road (especially at bus stops) and other malevolent, expensive road-damaging nonsense, this sort of thing is still going on.
It's grotesque and stupid. It shouldn't be legal. Perhaps it isn't.
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The Essen Way scheme is leading to a lot more road rage and pointless, dangerous overtaking at excessive speed.
Probably not the intention of its designer.
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Doctorchris - you are so right, the roads in this fair city are being ruined left right and centre with pointless little schemes. The Ryhope scheme next to Lidl was an absolute abortion and the re-engineering works ran to about £300,000 IIRC.
I just can't understand how they thought the original design would possibly work. On a couple of occasions when travelling from Ryhope towards the town centre when the congestion was bad I had to hang right back in order to obstruct the entrance to the bus lane to prevent the bus getting to the lights until most of the traffic had cleared. This wouldn't have been necessary had they not designed it so that the bus got immediate priority over all other traffic and held the cars up for several minutes per bus.
For those that don't know it, it's now a cross roads and the first re-design only allowed one road to go at a time. If you were coming from Ryhope and were in a long queue of traffic you tended to find that the lights would go green, one or two cars would get through and then a bus would come barrelling along the bus lane, the car lights would switch back to red and the bus would go through, you then had to wait your turn again for every other road to go green before it came back to you. If no bus came the lights were actually timed to stay on green for quite a while and let lots of cars through, but seeing as it's a main arterial route into town, buses were a frequent user, guess they didn't think of that!
So, now that the council has probably spent not far off £1million building and then re-building this junction we have something that functions almost as well as what we had in place before this monstrous traffic light controlled crossroads, which was a roundabout! God bless our Labour controlled council.
I only saw the Essen Way scheme a couple of hours ago as I turned right from the bottom of the Tunstall Hope Road (now there's a road that needs improving!) onto Leechmere road, all I could make out was the hatched area of the outer lane of the dual carriageway.
I possibly feel a bit anti-social now as my first thoughts were that it would make it far easier to overtake as most people won't drive on broken white lines when they cover the whole lane, I am more than happy however to use it to get past the morons who crawl along that road! From what you're saying I gather that there is a chicane further along which will naturally make this much more difficult.
I also noticed several months ago that the latest re-paint of the A690/A19 roundabout at Doxford International is actually incorrect, you follow a lane for the A19 and then suddenly without warning it turns into the lane for the A690, no wonder it's classified as a bit of a "point and shoot" roundabout rather than one with any actual lane discipline when leaving Doxford!
It's depressing really, I love my city, I think it offers amongst the best all round quality of life opportunities in the UK, but to see our short-sighted council slowly strangle the life out of it with missed opportunities and bodged projects is awful (Vaux anyone? I raised that with a councillor that I met on a night out once, he didn't try very hard to defend that screwup!).
Thankfully we are at least going to get the iconic bridge rather than a perfunctory hulk of concrete which the Labour council wanted to build, I would actually support a council tax rise if I knew that it was going towards that and not more white paint on existing perfectly good roads!
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I feel better now that I've got all that off my chest :-)
Think I might pop to the shops at Seaham along the coast road, now there's a pleasant drive which hasn't been ruined!
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tinyurl.com/Crazyjunction
Is that it ? (for us that have never ventured that far north !)
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Sort of, the pointer is on the wrong side of the road (look further north and you will see a car park, that is the Lidl and McDonalds).
The junction in question is where the A1018 meets with Toll Bar Road (scroll to the left a little and you'll see it), the picture on Google is old and shows the old roundabout that was there until about 7 or 8 months ago god bless it.
The whole junction was dug up and rebuilt as a crossroads with a bus lane running for a good length of the A1018 when approaching the junction from the south. Naturally as soon as work had been completed traffic ground to a halt with queues extending most of the way into Ryhope (the village to the south) and also running well back towards Grangetown to the north.
What we should install there is some sort of free flowing traffic management system that allows traffic coming from the four different directions to give way to each other in a universally agreed fashion and then resume progress as soon as it's safe. Such a system would also mean that when you negotiate the junction at 3am you don't have to give way to non-existent traffic.
Oh wait, we had that, they dug it up!
Edited by Blue {P} on 03/10/2009 at 17:29
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Ah Sunderland council
The council that built a big fountain on a roundabout (the one outside the Seaburn hotel) for some crazy figure I forget, was it half a million quid or three quarters of a million quid?
Anyways it looked nice when the sun was out in a "have they got so much money they need to waste it on stuff like this" kind of way, hey we know who is paying really...
And of course the rather inevitable wind blows and water blows onto the road surface and surprise surprise cars start skidding and crashing
Countless accidents, and injuries, later they realise that a big fountain on a roundabout is probably not such a good idea and remodel the roundabout at more vast expense
You couldn't make it up really
Anyone in the roads department or their contractors been sacked over this, I think you can guess the answer is no
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LOL, I remember that, it also used to turn the roundabout in an ice rink in winter, and in summer when someone put a bottle of washing up liquid in it the roundabout was turned into a foam party. Class! :-)
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To be fair, it seems to me quite likely that the actual road people would have anticipated the water and ice problems caused by a fountain on a small roundabout in a windy location. But their objections could easily have been overruled by (as it were) the mayor's office, keen to beautify the borough at eye and road watering expense.
I don't know this of course. It just seems quite likely in a land not far from that of the legendary T. Dan Smith, who these days would pass for go-ahead and just-the-sort-of-chap-we-want-to-get-things-moving... As he did in those days come to think of it.
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To the best of my knowledge the Sunderland mayor has very little actual power, it's always the leader of the council that seems to wield the political power. The mayor is the political equivalent of the queen... :-)
Fortunately the last one was ousted following his spectacular failure when he allowed Tescos to buy the Vaux site with a view to turning one of the biggest City Centre development opportunities in the UK into a supermarket rather than something more visionary. That was years ago, the site still lies derelict whilst the council spend lots of our tax on trying to CPO it back from Tescos, who would have thought that they could afford good lawyers eh?
Edited by Blue {P} on 03/10/2009 at 18:06
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to be honest my biggest gripe about Sunderland is the heavy handed nature of the way their staff and subcontractors shut off half the city for a stupid marathon, and in the process block off lots of streets they dont actually have permission to shut
got really cheesed off with their aggresive attitude, especially as I had a copy of the actual road closure notices and was being ever so polite with them telling them how far out of order they were
it seems the councils road department are a law unto themselves and the police will not touch them despite their bullying tactics
anyway those of us in the know move their stupid barriers
frankly im surprised someone has not been forced to use minimum force on these idiots to use the queens highway
one law for them another for the rest of us
if it were me id have them all the folk in their roads dept walking the gang plank off the end of the pier
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"fountain on a small roundabout" oh no it was a nice big fountain, you get plenty of fountain for that kinda money
shame the local services are rubbish
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What do you mean rubbish? I pay £1200 per year and for that I get my bin emptied every single week! I also get an assault course to drive to work on called Burdon Lane which tests my early morning reactions whilst at the same time testing my car's steering system as I try to avoid potholes oncoming traffic and hedges all at the same time. :-)
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No nice speed bumps to warm up the suspension Blue? (Alfasud suspension, rather charmingly, was said in the handbook to need warming up before it was at its best).
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Not on Burdon Lane, they're all in my estate, apparently some moron who lives here wrote to the developers and demanded they be installed for the "sake of the children". No one sped anyway as the road is a typical new build residential street with a blind bend on entry and which doesn't lend itself to more than 20mph even without bumps.
Fortunately the works safety police decided to fit them to our office car park, the really aggressive type that just bolt to the floor and force you to a complete stop in order to traverse them so that always finishes off my drive nicely.
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Now most of the 40mph speed limits on the seriously mucked about with roads mentioned above have been dropped to 30mph.
The trouble is, because of the design of this set of roads, hardly any 30 mph signs have been required, just the removal of some 40mph signs.
The only other warnings of these changes have been tiny printed notices on telegraph poles, only visible to pedestrians.
I predict a rash of money making camera vans appearing soon.
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dont worry chris
at least its not Coventry where the main road from the city centre to A & E has been thinned down with chicanes and bumps added so that now an abmulance on blue lights cannot get past a bin lorry or similar, Sunderland General as crap as it is can still be reached by several routes
or the 70 limits in greater Manchester dropped to 30, yes a whole 40 mph lower, strange how they were deemed safe at 70 for more than 20 years and now anyone doing 35 will be hammered by the anti speed nutters
and so on
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I must be one of the morons who use the inside lane at 30mph. This stretch of road is notorious for mobile speed cameras or have you not noticed ,with regards to the chicanes that have been built I think they are a recipe for disaster,they are poorly lit and if you were to ignore the road markings then god help you.
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Hoseman - the last time I used that stretch of road it was 40mph and was a lovely piece of dual carriageway, so if you were doing 30mph then I would have been fair blasting past you! :-)
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Essen Way has been 40mph since time immemorial, well, OK, at least the past 24 years but has suddenly become a 30mph road with the least of warnings, hence my comments about the revenue vans appearing very soon, probably to pay for the pointless road "improvements".
God bless our City of Sunderland local authority.
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Yes the Revenue Van is an annoyance of mine too, the only thing I'm grateful for is that it is a large brightly liveried affair with orange lights on the roof and a large camera sign on the sides. Far better than the plain white ones that they use elsewhere.
On the whole I guess I get annoyed as Sunderland has been the best of a bad bunch as far as driving is concerned, relatively few cameras, almost no congestion, no parking problems (that I see), just generally quite nice. I feel that this is being slowly, but deliberately eroded and it seems that we're powerless to stop it.
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Blue P
you said that you turned right after the Hope road which would have taken you on to Leechmere road which is a 30 MPH limit, if you turned left onto Essen Way then that would be a 40 MPH limit.
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Essen Way now 30mph. The poles are still there but the 40mph signs have been removed.
The whole system has become so confusing, hence my prediction of the appearance of speed camera vans soon to cash in on this confusing situation.
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Blue P you said that you turned right after the Hope road which would have taken you on to Leechmere road which is a 30 MPH limit if you turned left onto Essen Way then that would be a 40 MPH limit.
Ah but I just said that I saw it as I turned right onto Leechmere road, not that I drove along it. :-)
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another moan about our crazy city is the drive in to town , coming down chester road past the crem, down to the lights . the right turn is now banned [cars are now bombing down side streets] the lights change and you travel 100yds , new lights at the hospital turn red causing traffic to build up even when you are on green. its been a total disaster since the new light system was updated 6 wks ago.
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Yeah not sure who's idea it was to divert a main route down residential side streets, morons.
Just wait and see what happens if they get away with closing the bottom of Chester Road (outside the Uni who are apparently pushing for it) and divert the traffic onto the bottom of Durham Road... Makes you wonder what they smoke in their office!
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