CBRD Blog

Red, amber, green

(I’ve been away for a while. Sorry. I’m back now.)

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.

A little Ringway preview

With a bit of luck, and Pathetic Motorways permitting, the much-anticipated new Ringways pages should be launched this coming Saturday. I say should because it really does depend on what that pesky Steven bloke over at PM is up to. We run a polite, gentlemanly system where we do a lot of joint research work and then share out the winnings. I recall one fruitful and exciting afternoon at The National Archives which ended with me laying claim to the Underways and Steven firmly planting his flag in the history of motorway numbering.

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.

HOV comes to Yorkshire

Not a new story - it was in the news a month ago now - but worth covering anyway.

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.

Keep left

You can’t travel far in the UK without coming across one of these little chaps.

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.

Welcome to the Blog

Hello there, and welcome to the new CBRD Blog!

If you’ve been visiting the site for a few years now, you might recall that this is actually the second attempt at running a blog alongside the main website. The first existed in the early months of 2006, and came to a premature and unhappy end for a range of reasons.

For a start, it wasn’t the right time for me to start running a blog - that was the end of my final year at university so I didn’t have enough time to devote to it, and CBRD was going through a bit of a slow patch. I also used some rather inferior software to run the blog, with the result that it had an enormous problem with spam comments which I simply wasn’t able to keep up with.

The future is a little brighter for Blog mk2. I have the time to deal with it properly, for one thing. And this time it’s running on Wordpress, which is a more professional piece of software and is very adept at dealing with spam. I’ve also loosened the remit a little: before, it was purely opinion pieces, whereas now I’m free to discuss the website (there’s already some of that below) and other connected interests. That should help to keep it moving along at a reasonable pace.

Here’s what I’m aiming for:

• regular posts from me on a range of topics.
  When there’s news to discuss, I’ll aim to provide some analysis and opinion of developments on the road network. At other times, I’ll be posting on more general road-related themes, transport in general, and behind-the-scenes stuff relating to CBRD itself (including the occasional sneak preview).
• some participation and discussion from you.
  I always think that the most enjoyable blogs are the ones where the readers are active and there is a range of opinion on the subjects that are raised. I hope that can happen here. You can sign up for your own account on the CBRD Blog which will allow you to post comments as a ‘regular’ if you like, or you can post anonymously. In the future I hope members will be able to do more than just post comments.
• guest writers to periodically contribute a piece of their own opinion.
  It’s all very well me getting on my soap box and setting the world to rights, but it would be much more entertaining if there were a few different voices writing on the Blog. Once some momentum has built up, I’ll start inviting people to guest-post. Some will probably become regulars.

So here we are - potentially a valuable and interesting addition to CBRD. I hope you like it - perhaps this time it will last more than a few weeks!

Those pesky Ringways again

I have a strange relationship with what have become known as the London Ringways. It’s not love-hate exactly - not nearly as polarised as that. No, it’s more love-worry.

I love them as much as ever. I love them because they are right at the very heart of my interest in roads: my favourite ‘elements’ of road enthusiasm, in no particular order, would have to be urban motorways, wild 1960s plans for roads that were never built, little stubs and empty spaces that are leftovers from road schemes that never happened, and some of that excitement and romance of the open road that seemed to die out in the early 1970s. The Ringways have all that in spades. Other things do of course: the Glasgow feature on CBRD covers the whole range listed above. But the Ringways do it on a much bigger scale. The biggest scale possible in this country, in fact.

The worry side of the relationship is there precisely because I love researching and working with the Ringways. Along with Steven Jukes and a few others, I’ve been researching London’s road plans for about four years now. It’s reaching the sort of epic proportions, as a research project, that we are in danger (or at least, I am) of becoming wrapped up in an introverted world of technical terms and historical minutiae to the extent that it becomes inaccessible to anyone else.

Already what we have researched so far - bearing in mind that it is still very much a work in progress full of unknowns and uncertainties - has produced a write-up for public consumption that now runs to more than 40,000 words, plus many illustrations and a map of the whole plan as we currently understand it. None of it’s online yet; I have more to write, would you believe. My concern is that it’s getting to the stage where there is too much for anyone who is not as deeply involved as Steven or I to be interested in reading. The trouble is that, from my point of view, I am rapidly losing the ability - in fact, I think I probably already have lost the ability - to judge what is worth telling and what is not. I think I’m too deeply involved in the minute details of the story to be able to edit my description of it. The result is that I don’t edit it at all, I just write everything down.

You can tell how deeply involved we are by the number of terms we use in conversation that are either jargon or complete invention. Take the motorway proposal that started life in the 1940s as “Parkway E”. When we first discovered it, we couldn’t find a name for it, so to us it was “MSM”, the Mystery Southern Motorway. Now we go with the name “South Cross Route to Parkway D Radial”, though the GLC very often referred to it as Parkway E and we could just as easily use that. I think partly it’s because it’s more interesting and obscure to call it SCRPDR that we choose to use that name for it.

I think Ringway 4 is the best example of all, though. It occurred to me a few days ago that I don’t recall ever having seen the name Ringway 4 in any official documentation. I have a very serious concern that we might have invented it ourselves, as shorthand to refer to the Ministry of Transport’s proposal for the North Orbital and South Orbital Roads, and then subsequently forgotten that it was only our nickname. But there it is now, all over 40,000 words of the website. I don’t believe that the GLC or the Ministry ever used the term “Ringways” like we do to refer to the whole project, either. Does it matter? Well, like I say, I don’t think I am the best person to make a judgement like that any more. My head is buried too deeply to see the bigger picture.

My final worry is that 40,000 words plus maps, diagrams, sketches, scans and pictures is just too big for a single feature in a single section of a website. It’s in danger of dwarfing the rest of CBRD. That’s definitely a worry.

I’d be interested to hear what you make of it all - is it too much information on one corner of Britain’s road network? Or are you keen to get hold of all the information possible? It would be good to know. It might even stop me worrying so much.

Here’s a test post…

…on the brand new CBRD Blog. Isn’t it exciting? I’m used to using WordPress from another (completely unrelated) group-blog I post to. In fact, that’s the reason I chose WordPress when I came to start blogging again. The previous one died off quite quickly, partly because I don’t think I was very focussed in what I wanted to write about, but mostly because it was drowning in a sea of spam comments. WordPress has excellent spam blocking, so hopefully only one of those reasons will put this one in peril.

At the moment I’m trying to work out how I want this to look. I don’t think I’ll make it public until I have a decent first post and a decent design.

Which makes you wonder why I’m writing this.

I also hope to set it up so that regular commenters can get their own login for posting comments, and get a bit of a community feel to it. I might also get contributors to post now and then. That would be nice.

Well, that’s it for this first post. See you later.