Living in London - with bus routes that run all night, trains to everywhere and an incredible number of people squashed in to every conceivable square centimetre of land - it’s easy to forget just how big the UK is. Most of the population is huddled in the south-eastern corner and the rest is often really quite empty. Well, I had my eyes opened over the weekend.

I went home to Leeds and stopped the night there, then set off driving for Kinlochmoidart, a sneeze of houses on the wrinkled hankerchief of the Highlands. And my word, is that ever a long way away. I’ve been to Scotland before, but I’m ashamed to say I had never ventured much north of the central belt of Glasgow and Edinburgh; a quick run up to the Friarton Bridge near Perth marked my previous most northward foray in the UK. So I set off from Leeds, up the A1, then A66, M6 and A74(M)/M74 to Glasgow. Stopping off at Hamilton services I congratulated myself on my excellent progress and having broken the back of the journey. I left there at 1.30pm, confident of a couple of hours more.

A normal person, you see, will look at a map and plan their journey. Me? I just use the map inside my head, and the map inside my head says M8 through Glasgow, Erskine Bridge, A82 to Fort William, then A830 and A861. Bish bash bosh. Job’s a good ‘un.

Several hours later - approaching 4pm - I reached this sign, just after passing through Tarbet. And then I stopped, and went back, and had another look, and took a picture. And then I nearly passed out.

Fort William - that’s nearly an hour from Kinlochmoidart, especially when it’s getting dark and you’re tired - is still 48 miles away. 48 miles! That’s quarter of the way from Leeds to London! The Highlands are very different sort of place, you see, and the first rule of driving there is that everywhere - no matter where you’re heading, and even if it’s just the next village along the road - everywhere is a long way away.

The A82 is, of course, stunning, and well worth the drive. On the way back on Sunday morning it was even less busy and the wonderful stretch through Glen Coe allowed plenty of opportunity for some very satisfying overtaking. I will be back, hopefully more able to stop and take in the scenery and less gobsmacked at the distances involved.

But eight hours in a car north from Leeds? And still a long, long way from running out of road? It’s good to be reminded of these things now and then, because it’s all too easy to forget just how much open road and unspoilt land there is in the UK - it’s just not anywhere near where most of us live.

First you will need a car. This sounds elementary but it’s quite important. My first video was of Lofthouse Interchange (M1/M62 near Leeds), shot from a range of off-road angles and edited together later. It was just strange. Photos from the roadside work brilliantly, better than through the windscreen in most cases, but the same is not true of video.

You’ll also need something that can capture video - and more of it than you think. Most digital stills cameras do this now, but I use a video camera for higher picture quality and the opportunity to shoot more video. The A329(M) video, which was mostly non-stop 70mph travel, used more than twenty minutes of tape - that went to make about four minutes of sped-up video. So it helps to have plenty of space available.

My camera is a Sony DCR-TRV230e (pictured), which is now six or seven years old and records onto Digital8 tape. It’s not very modern really, but it does the job. Its key asset is a DV port, which allows me to export video to my computer. I get 90 minutes to a tape and one-and-a-half tapes to a battery charge if I keep the screen closed. It sets its own focus and exposure too, which is vital. Normally when recording something I’d consider doing those myself, but driving around, these things have to be adjusted as the video is recorded, especially through tunnels or deep cuttings. My camera also has a slight blue tint to its plastic trim, which I rather like.

The last bit of equipment is something to stop the camera sliding into the passenger footwell as soon as you set off. My earliest videos were shot as a passenger, with the camera on a tripod in the footwell (and one leg between my legs - sudden braking being very much discouraged). This works very well but only if you’re a passenger.

Now that I drive myself around, I have a professional clamp (Hague SM1), which suction-mounts on the windscreen and holds the camera very steady indeed. It’s not the one that was shown when we were on TV, though. The one you see there was owned by the production company, and my clamp was used inside the car for the camera filming Steven and I because it was better than theirs! I would never mount my camera outside the car because I wouldn’t be able to operate the controls without stopping and getting out. It would also get wet.

If you’re not willing to invest in clamps or stands, I understand that gaffer-taping the camera to the dashboard does the job too.

With the camera set up I head off, and before reaching my first filming location, record a few seconds of footage, then pull over, rewind and check it. Usually this means moving in to the passenger seat to avoid disturbing the camera. It’s very hard to position the camera well while parked because you’ll never have a view in front of you as if you were driving along a road. As a result of this check, I can adjust the camera as necessary to make sure there’s no bonnet or windscreen wiper in shot, the framing is square, and the camera is pointing slightly left of centre to catch road signs on the left verge.

Then I can set off and record, being sure to not only to stop the camera but also to turn it off between takes. This saves battery life but also more importantly avoids getting confused about whether you’re currently recording or not. I have enough tapes showing all the dull bits that I had not intended to record, and missing out the good stuff, and I want to avoid collecting any more of them.

Often, I will try to read out all the road signs I pass. If I later refer back to see how something is signposted and it’s not legible, I have the wording recorded. More often I do this for the first three signs I pass and thereafter forget about it and sing along loudly to whatever music I have playing. I can’t sing at all so this means I have to turn the volume down when watching it back.

On an unfamiliar road I will usually do a dry run first, if I have time, to make sure I have some idea where I’m going and what I will be doing. It looks pretty bad on video if you’re changing lanes at the last minute, and if you make a wrong turn your video will be very messy.

Back home, I then record the footage on to the hard disk. If you’re a smug Mac user like me, you’ll already have iMovie, which is perfectly adequate for importing, editing and exporting video. Similar software - not always free - is available for Windows. I’ve never used it but I imagine that the built-in Windows Movie Maker will do the job OK. The edited and exported video then gets squashed into Flash Video (FLV) format using a freeware tool (for which I have to re-boot the Mac under Windows XP) and uploaded on to the web server. The front-end video player is another piece of freeware that is widely used across the net.

Croydon does have a ring road - sort of - and it’s the subject of a CBRD feature that’s currently in production. This post should give you a bit of a preview of what will be in it, and also ask your advice on how it might look.

Before we start, the ring road doesn’t exist any more, and that’s why you might not have heard about it. Croydon Council made several attempts to build it from the 1950s to the early 1980s, but gave up after completing three sides, and now signposts its component parts as separate roads. But it’s particularly interesting because, for the massive investment and the huge changes that were made to Croydon town centre in its name, and for all the colossal works of heavy engineering along the route, it would have been a terrible road. It has the occasional flash of brilliance, and it’s better than most of South London, but all the same it tends to hover somewhere between badly conceived and downright silly. My strap-line for the feature sums it up quite neatly: “common sense dictates that you shouldn’t be able to spend so much money on heavy engineering and end up with such a terrible road system”.

So far I’ve put together three photo galleries, one for each side of the ring that was built; a page of history is in planning to describe where the plan came from; and there’s also the usual CBRD hand-drawn map (this time with little traffic lights drawn on).

But is there anything else that I could (or should) be adding in there? Often I feel like the “In Depth” features covering specific roads (Queensway Tunnel, Coventry Ring Road, etc) are a bit too formulaic: there’s a page of history, maybe a video, and lots of pictures. Is there something else that would bring the Croydon Ring Road to life? Text on something else? Better photo captions? Something about lane markings? A children’s story about Bobby the Spotty Dog driving the Poochmobile around Croydon? Nothing immediately springs to mind, but perhaps I’m just overlooking the obvious.

You see, sometimes I will put something online and then get a well-meaning email straight afterwards that says “that new feature is great, but why didn’t you do this?”, and I usually bang my head on the keyboard. By that point I will have been slaving over the proverbial hot stove for several weeks, the photos and base material will have been gathered months before, and I will have no appetite whatsoever to return to it and add something new.

So this post is really an attempt to save my computer peripherals from taking any more sudden impacts from my forehead. All Croydon-based ideas are welcome!

The fact that almost every country has its own unique approach to the design of lettering on road signs is testament to the fact that you could discuss this one until the proverbial cows come home. Here in the UK, graphic designer Jock Kinneir was set to work designing the lettering we now know as Transport. He followed the advice of the RRL and gave us mixed case lettering, with different weighting (i.e., different thicknesses of line) for light-on-dark and dark-on-light, a carefully chosen balance of white space, letter spacing and kerning, and a friendly appearance with a great deal of character.

But really it could have gone either way. In America, road sign lettering leaves much less blank space so that, for example, the ‘hook’ across the top of the lowercase ‘a’ is more liable to be blurred into the rest of the letter. Their characters are generally wider and chunkier when used at full width, but sign designers can choose from a range of character sets with taller, slimmer lettering to fit their message on to the sign if need be.

France went for all-capitals (the jury is still, in all truthfulness, out on whether uppercase or mixed-case lettering is more legible; if you ask me I think you need to judge each case on its merits, and it matters more how widely you space your letters and how well you design them). Germany adopted a pre-existing typeface designed for clarity on engineering drawings. And so on.

This started me wondering just how much the form of lettering influences the appearance and personality of our road signs, so I did a little experiment.

On the left is an advance direction sign for a primary route crossroads as it appears in the TSRGD (Traffic Signs Regulations and General Directions, the UK road sign Bible). Perfectly normal, I think you’ll agree.

How does it change if you render the text in, say, the French Caracteres L1 or in the German DIN Mittelschrift? Well, it’s time to find out…

Here it is in Caracteres L1. It’s not quite correct for French road sign typography: I’m fairly sure, for one thing, that the spacing between letters is too tight, and since drawing the image up, I’m now aware that actually light-on-dark text should have been in Caracteres L2. But it’s close enough.

And it looks… strange. It’s still perfectly clear, but the simple act of rendering the text in chunky Gallic capitals makes it, somehow, a little less businesslike. I’m not sure exactly why.

Of course, Caracteres wasn’t designed for use this way, it was designed to have one word per individual sign panel, with masses of white space around it. The French are excessively bad at diagrammatic signs, and while before I thought that was the whole story, now I think maybe their lettering contributes to the overall poor effect of their map-type signs.

And here’s the same sign, now in DIN Mittelschrift. In comparison to chunky Transport and the borderline-obese Caracteres, the German lettering looks very thin, especially in black on white. It’s almost lost on all that empty sign.

But good heavens, doesn’t it look clean and clinical? The ’steam railway’ panel takes on a whole new air, like perhaps it is to be used instructively and not for enjoyment. The B1991 is a cold, harsh numerical reference. Dorfield might be a prison.

Okay, I’m getting carried away. But while the outline of the sign is clearly still British, the whole character of the sign has changed again.

So what have we learned? Not a great deal. I personally have learned how to edit pictures of road signs to use different typefaces. But this little experiment does prove something interesting: that graphic design is not everything. Yes, French signs could easily be distinguished from UK ones by the outline of the sign panel, the shape of the arrows, and so on. But the lettering really can be the clincher.

I am sometimes guilty of letting my mind wander to thoughts of a golden age of motoring when the roads were clear, the cars were sleek with plenty of chrome (but made an enjoyable amount of noise) and the sun was always shining, though never directly into your eyes.

The late fifties and early sixties are usually given as a time when it was really quite pleasant to go for a spin. Britain was in a frenzy of roadbuilding, paving countless miles of fast new roads every year. The fuel was cheap and the motor car was increasingly within the grasp of the average family man in his average trilby hat. There was, overall, an unmatched optimism about the whole motoring experience.

There is, of course, no highway equivalent of the steam railway. Volunteers do not keep three miles of preserved motorway in order to run ancient buses up and down for tourists at the weekend. (And what a tragedy that is.) But it’s still possible to go for a drive on a fast, open road of that era without being bothered by too much traffic if you know where to look.

Personally, I’ve always had a soft spot for the M45, or the Dunchurch Spur if you like. It was opened in its entirety in December 1959, at the same time as the first sixty miles of the M1. It was the only way to get from the new motorway to Birmingham and the north-west, taking you to Coventry and the A45. Its period of real usefulness finished abruptly in 1972, when the parallel M6 opened to the north, and since then it has become a trunk road motorway of astounding insignificance.

Take a drive along it and you’ll soon see what I mean. It’s best reached from the south, when you can approach it along the M1’s most chaotic section and experience it as a sanctuary. (In reverse, you will achieve a state of advanced motoring relaxation before being plunged into the fearsome melée. It’s like shock therapy conveniently administered at 70 miles per hour.) Its profound lack of purpose these days is evident from its direction signs, which suggest it is only fit for “Coventry (S)”. Even traffic for the north of Coventry is thought too much for this ageing relic. The M1 widens to five lanes in a moment of 1950s extravagance, but you will almost certainly be the only person in sight to use the two of them marked ‘M45’.

The sliproad peels away from the jostling madness of the mainline M1, and all is calm. For eight glorious miles the motorway rolls and unfolds before you, and for much of the ride you may well be the only vehicle in sight.

The bridges are smaller versions of those on the M1, designed by Sir Owen Williams, a man who achieved the rare distinction of making beautiful things with concrete. They are sculpted rather than built, with sweeping curves and smooth lines. Soon the M1’s handsome Williams bridges will be demolished for widening works – some have gone already – making the M45 even more of a treasured museum.

It’s also distinguished by what it lacks. The M45 is happily free of many of the hectoring road signs that major routes have sprouted in the last few decades. You don’t need to keep two chevrons from the vehicle in front because there isn’t one.

The scenery on the M45 is pleasant English countryside, but nothing to write home about. For a landscape worth seeing, make your way to Herefordshire and the M50 Ross spur.

There is something timeless about this road; something slightly innocent. It was opened in 1960, while the first sections of its parent route M5 were still under construction. Just two years after the very first section of motorway opened, there remains something experimental about its design. It’s certainly a far cry from the broad expanses of asphalt we usually associate with the word ‘motorway’.

Its hard shoulder, for one thing, is a fickle beast. It’s there one moment, bounding alongside the intrepid motorway traveller like the usual faithful companion. But as soon as there’s any hint of an overpass, or a bridge, or a drainage gully, or a retaining wall, or sometimes just a stiff breeze, it’s gone.

In fact, the whole M50 feels slightly claustrophobic. Its impressive crossing of the Severn is soured somewhat for those driving it. Make your way across and you could anticipate the lackadaisical hard shoulder to vanish; what you might not expect is that only the left-hand lane is full width. The right hand one has special signs asking you to breathe in. Even its interchanges are crammed into the smallest possible space, most remarkably at junction 3 which is little more than a break in the boundary fence, and which requires special signs reminding motorists to turn left as they join.

Who am I kidding? Nobody drives the M50 for the engineering. It’s considerably busier than the M45, forming part of the route between the West Midlands and South Wales for those in the know. But it makes up for all that with the scenery. Not for nothing was it described, at its opening, as a parkway to be enjoyed. In its early years people made the trip from Birmingham just to enjoy a scenic ride in the country.

Cutting through the homely edges of the Malvern Hills, the M50 is at one with its landscape. It is small enough to dodge through natural gaps and crest hills without ever feeling like it was engineered at the expense of its surroundings. Its bridges are faced with local stone. One is a handsome brick arch. Boy, they don’t make them like this any more.

For a few years, the M50 was actually the main road to South Wales, forming the only sensible route between London and Cardiff that didn’t involve putting your car on a train or a boat. The road that stole its thunder is, ironically, another quiet motorway today.

Take the M4 between Bristol and Cardiff. We all have to at some point. In 1996, the Second Severn Crossing was opened, carrying six lanes of M4 traffic over the river. To the north is the bridge that served traffic for the previous thirty years, and to use it all you have to do is keep an eye out and take the exit signposted for Chepstow and the M48.

It’s not really anything more than two incredibly impressive river crossings (the Severn Bridge and the often-overlooked Wye Bridge), a junction for Chepstow and sliproads to the M4. The whole route is just an oxbow lake of motorway.

But for twelve miles you can escape the rat race of the M4 and take in some sensational engineering on an empty road. You will of course be charged for admission to Wales, but it’s free to leave, so a very pleasant circuit for a drive can be had using the eastbound M48 and westbound M50, taking the A48 down the Wye Valley between the two.

The canny motorist will always know a few roads locally that are open and fast, where you can safely put your foot down and have some space to drive. But it takes a particular kind of highway to give you the sheer joy of the open road, the giddy pleasure of having the tarmac to yourself and a glimpse of that long-forgotten romance of the motorway.

Back in the late 1960s, when a highway authority decided it wanted to erect a new set of traffic lights, it ordered the equipment from a manufacturer and then installed it. Sometimes you’d get “tin” lanterns. Sometimes you’d get those strange ones that had three lights attached separately to the pole. Sometimes you’d get something entirely different.

This mish-mash of styles was a bit of a mess, really, so the Department of the Environment sorted it all out by comissioning David Mellor, a designer usually noted for cutlery, to provide a clean, modern, durable plastic signal head design that would be the only one accepted in future.

And lo: the Mellor Signal Head was born (like the one to the right). Dark grey, with clean lines and a simple design, it cleaned up the streets of Britain from 1970 onwards with its uniform appearance.

It’s estimated that there can’t be more than one or two installations of pre-Mellor signals left in the UK. Which makes it rather ironic that Mellor is no longer prescribed. We wouldn’t want uniformity, now, would we?

No, not a bit of it. Now Siemens signal heads look different to those made by Microsense. If they aren’t distinctive enough, the bizarre Alustar definitely stands out from the crowd. It’s a favourite of signal enthusiasts but I’m afraid it just looks like a mess to me.

It might be a little bulky compared to new signal designs, its plain plastic rear might be a little too welfare state in this age where the private sector always knows best, but even so, you can give me a Mellor any day.

On this occasion, CBRD leads the charge where the Ringways are concerned (though PM covers the on-the-ground remnants in detail), but PM has an exclusive on a related unbuilt road scheme which wasn’t part of the Ringways plan but is mentioned in the pages. That’s why I now have to sit on my hands and wait patiently until PM’s exclusive has passed and I can go ahead.

Anyway, on to the stuff you’re actually interested in. What should you expect from the new Ringways pages?

Here’s a little taste of the graphics. Unlike the existing pages, the new ones are properly illustrated with photos, newspaper clippings, scale diagrams, artists’ impressions, maps and so on. The knotted mess above is part of a plan of just one proposal for a major interchange, and one that has had its fair share of speculation as to its possible upgrade, though I’m not saying which.

More than this, you can expect:

• a basic, no-nonsense introduction to the Ringways with an interactive map, so you can point at each road to see what it is and what it does. Newcomers need no longer fear the epic scale of the plans.
• more than 40,000 words of description for the hardcore road fans. The history of the scheme as a whole is traced in detail from the seventeenth century to the present day. Each road proposal is then explored in depth, with as much information as we know about its routing, history and alternatives.
• a basic strip-map of every road so you can get to know it better, and a thumbnail map of London to show where it would have been.
• facts, facts, facts. Everything you read will be based on solid evidence, dug out of an archive facility somewhere in London. Rare bits of speculation, where we don’t have the full picture yet, are clearly marked and considered dangerous intruders whose villainous words are to be treated with mistrust and contempt.
• the map - at long last - with the junction layouts as we know them so far. For every road where we have sufficient detail, you’ll see every carriageway and every sliproad plotted as accurately as possible on Google Earth satellite mapping. Each junction is also carefully annotated within the map, with links back to the text.

Of course, once it’s online, we go back to the archives to find out more. That’s the really exciting bit: that all of this is still a work in progress and there’s a lot we still don’t know.

The UK’s first motorway car share lane was opened today by Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly, giving drivers a new opportunity to cut both their journey times and carbon footprints.
Highways Agency press release

Good work, Ruth. This new lane is a quick bodge-job linking the M606 southbound to the M62 eastbound at Chain Bar near Bradford. It’s mostly just a new traffic lane painted on the existing hard shoulder, with a little observation platform for the Police to sit on. It is open to any car, bus or taxi that has more than one person in it.

On the previous incarnation of the CBRD Blog, I had a rant about HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes, and specifically the one that had been planned for the widened M1 close to London. The argument against them is quite simple and runs like this. To take the M1 as an example, there would be four lanes on each carriageway, one of them marked as HOV.

If less than 25% of vehicles on the road have two or more people in them, then that fourth lane will be emptier than the others, leaving the other three to carry more traffic. The fourth lane, added at extravagant cost, is therefore not pulling its weight in terms of traffic capacity.

On the other hand, if 25% or more of the vehicles on the road have two or more people in them, then the HOV lane will be as full as any other lane, and the distinction will be meaningless.

So let’s take a look at how this applies to Bradford. The Highways Agency themselves provide a nice picture of it, with Ruth Kelly beaming in the foreground. There she is on the right. The HOV lane is the one on the right of the picture, complete with “2+ LANE” markings, which is completely empty.

And there’s the problem.

An HOV lane is not a device to improve a congested road. It is not something that will shorten queues and reduce problems. Instead, it peddles a political viewpoint; all stick and no carrot. If it were designed to make the situation better, that extra lane free-flowing past the roundabout would be open to everyone, it would be full of traffic of all kinds and it would therefore provide the maximum possible relief to the junction. Instead, it is under-used, providing reduced benefits to everyone else. It doesn’t even help everyone with two or more occupants: if its capacity was used to the full, the queue for the roundabout itself would be shorter, but as things stand, those wanting to travel in other directions from the M606 must sit in those elongated queues full of single-occupant vehicles who ought to be free-flowing past the roundabout.

When the HOV lane for the widened M1 was first floated, the DfT spent a lot of time talking about “locking in” the effects of widening so that the road wouldn’t fill up with traffic again. This makes my blood boil in any case, because surely the point of building or widening a road is that it will fill up with traffic - otherwise it’s not doing its job. But an HOV lane “locks in” no benefits. It locks out most road users and ensures that the extra capacity will be under-used and wasted. In terms of “locking in the benefits”, it makes sure that the new fourth lane is forever as empty as the day it opened, but that’s just something that looks good, not something that benefits anyone.

The future of the M1 HOV lane already looks shaky because local Police forces say they won’t enforce it. Good luck to them. But I suspect the M606 example will be wasting everyone’s time for many years to come.

A load of bollards. Picture by James Gray

They’re everywhere and arguably one of the most effective bits of design work on the road network. Durable, inexpensive, and all the electrics are kept underground so, if they are struck by a vehicle, a new hollow plastic bollard can be fitted over the top at minimal cost.

The trouble is that about 90% of them have a ‘keep left’ sign, like the one above. That’s fine when you stick them in the middle of a two-way road, but all too often a ‘keep left’ is used in entirely the wrong place. It’s easy to see why: the majority of bollards do require that ‘keep left’ instruction, so the chances are that a work crew being sent out to replace one will have a van full of ‘keep lefts’ and might not have spares of another kind available.

The thing is, as I understand it, that little blue roundel is a mandatory instruction. When you come to one, you have to keep left.

For at least a year (and probably more), it has been illegal to drive northbound on Waterloo Bridge in London. Every single vehicle that has done so, and there are tens of thousands of them, has broken the law by failing to observe a traffic sign. The innocent-looking bollard placed just on the exit from the Waterloo roundabout at the south end of the bridge, you see, incorrectly carries a ‘keep left’ sign, making it absolutely non-negotiable that all traffic there should be going down the little sliproad to Royal Festival Way and not passing to its right in order to cross the river.

Fortunately, in this case, there shouldn’t be very much traffic being diverted in this way, because another one on the roundabout itself orders all traffic down the York Road exit.

These are just a couple of examples that came to mind quite easily, but there are plenty of them about, and having regularly passed the Waterloo Bridge example I’ve started wondering which bollard is accidentally creating the most lawbreakers. If you have any good examples please do share them.