My nearest town is Ipswich (don't snigger. It's not a bad place and I'm very fond of it).
Probably the busiest road into the town is the one from the A14, Norwich, Cambridge and Bury St.Edmunds. Just as you reach the beginning of the town centre (at the junction of Norwich Road with Valley Road, if you know the area) there is a really scary-looking large-double-mini-roundabout-thing. Despite the constant heavy traffic, this works brilliantly - I don't think I have ever been held up there, traffic flows round it freely, people behave sensibly, giving way when that is necessary and taking the opportunity to go forward when it presents itself. It's an excellent example of leaving drivers alone to get on with it and not treating them like idiots. It's been there as long as I have which is nearly twenty years.
This was the last sensible decision taken by Ipswich Borough Council so far as the roads are concerned. Since then the town has been blessed with ….
• bus lanes which narrowed a busy four-lane road to only two, on which empty Park'n'Ride buses can merrily and pointlessly gyrate …
• cycle lanes which are only wide enough for the handlebars of a (small) bike so that drivers still have to pull out to pass a cyclist. It must be quite frightening for a cyclist desperately trying to keep on a straight course because cars are swishing past only a couple of inches away. What makes them even worse is the way they just disappear every few hundred yards, only to re-appear a little further on. What's a cyclist supposed to do in between? Fly?
• boxes labelled for cyclists only, in front of the queue at traffic lights, as if any cyclist in his right mind would squeeze down the cycle lane to the front of the queue and then sit right in front of 50 cars all itching to accelerate as soon as the lights turned green. What's he supposed to do then? Are the cars seriously expected to wait while he creaks away and gets back in the cycle lane? Dream on ….
• a bus route serving a residential neighbourhood on its own special path where the bus is steered by a track at the side of the road. What's that all about? Don't they trust the driver to be able to steer? He can manage it all right through the centre of town, but once he reaches the leafy suburbs where there is less traffic he suddenly becomes irrational and irresponsible, apparently? I could see the point if he could get up from his seat and go and talk to his passengers or nip out for a fag, but he still has to sit there to work the accelerator and the brakes …
Traffic planners? They couldn't plan their way out of a paper bag.
Mind you, not all traffic planners are this stupid. I had a run-in with the Highways Agency recently. I wrote and complained about some alterations they had made to a slip-road onto the dual carriageway. They replied promptly and in excellent, clear English, explaining what they'd done, why they thought they should do it, how they saw it working and how they intended to check that it did. It made complete sense, and now having used that slip-road several hundred times I am convinced that they were right.
More power to them! Ipswich Borough Council, perhaps you should ask them for a few pointers.
P.S. Have you ever driven in Paris? I have.
It's a total free-for-all - incredibly heavy traffic with very poor lane discipline, mixed up with jay-walking pedestrians in a busy city designed before the motor-car was even thought of. They obey traffic-lights (mostly) and occasionally stay on the right side of the road, but that's about it. Apart from that it's every man for himself. They even park on zebra crossings, and they certainly don't stop for them!
And you know what? It works. The traffic flows, not all the time but at least as well as in London with its rules and one-way systems and congestion charges. And in my view there's a lot less bad temper - oh, they hoot at each other and wave their arms around, but they aren't really cross, not the kick-your-door-in-and-stab-you-in-the-chest kind of crossness we seem to achieve in our worst moments.
The trouble with traffic planners is they think it's their job to plan the traffic!
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