Are you sure it hasn't improved other routes through the roundabout?

I can however well believe it is just worse. I don't have to negotiate it now, but there's a big junction in Hemel Hempstead that is a real bottleneck at commuting time. When the lights fail, the queues are much shorter.

Oh great, one of the last roundabouts on my commute is now plastered with utterly pointless traffic lights. Even at rush hour it was generally easy to cross with little or no queues.

Then the lights arrived - and a week after their switching on - a half mile queue back to the previous roundabout. Seriously - who plans these things, as I'd like to whack them around the head with a sock full of marbles!

Are our councils simple hell bent on making congestion happen, so they can then somehow charge more to 'reduce' it? It seems too wilful to be accidental

Your last sentence sums it up: ours has spent years widening pavements, installing traffic islands to prevent overtaking, installing humps, cycle lanes, bus lanes etc. Traffic lights? they have put in at least 120 round the town centre and inner ring road in the last 20 years.

The council hates car owners, thinks we are all wicked top-hatted capitalists who grind down the honest working classes who ride bikes, walk or use buses. Can't think of any other reason why.

Edited by galileo on 01/02/2018 at 13:23

Quite believiable.

Traffic engineers are paid to reduce crashes on the roads not to improve traffic flow.

Have you looked up the junction on http://www.collisionmap.uk/. would be interesting to see how many collisions there have been at this junction recently

In Margate some years ago the roundabout for the clock tower in the town centre got changed to traffic lights ... endless congestion resulted ..which evaporated as soon as the lights were removed. Waste of public funds to install lights then remove them better not to have spent the money in the first place, use it to pay off the PSBR or National Debt instead.

Such thoughts could be applied to many areas of public spending, including the so called experts who think up these scemes... now that would be for benefit of all of society!

Is it as bad as the one near where I live? Drivers have taken to the 20mph back streets to try and avoid it. Can't see how that is safer.

metro.co.uk/2016/06/16/new-junction-with-42-traffi.../