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I totally agree with the comments made by TS and HJ in today's column. There are so many examples of this around that it cannot be just incompetence, can it? At junction 30 westbound on M4, where the A470 goes under the motorway they have set the traffic light sequence to accept the non motorway traffic. This has the effect of making traffic from the M4 exiting at this point back right up onto the inside lane of the M4. At this point the M4 is TWO lanes only so the stationary traffic makes this a ONE lane motorway. If you ever get bored you can always watch the through traffic performing emergency stops, tyre burning braking and swerving, caravans snaking all over the road and LGV six axle lock ups from the relative safety of the overhead.
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Yeah i could watch that all day long Charles! Road designers - where are their brains?????
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David,
This may seem obvious, but surely their brains are in their bollards !!
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Very few, if any, lights now seem to be linked to adjacent ones to give you a clear run through if you stick to a specified speed. Instead you seem to get red at every one. I wonder if this is a deliberate ploy to discourage traffic.
On the other hand, proper linking of lights could assist in keeping traffic to speed limits because there would be no point in haring off if you knew that you would be stopped at the next set, but could run through by keeping to a steady pace. However, there will alway be a few who cannot work this out for themselves, so signs to point that out are essential.
Oxford Street in London used to have that system before it became buses only, and it worked well.
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On a lighter note - I was recently e-mail a number of American bumper sticker messages, one of which was:
Don't forget, lights timed for 35 are also timed for 70
Regards
john
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Milton Keynes is famous for its roundabouts, but around the city centre there are quite a few traffic lights. In the early mornings, the sensors work very well and so long as you approach a red light slowly you hardly ever have to stop. The rest of the time though you have to wait for ages - only one line of traffic at a time gets a green light, which includes a right turners' arrow. For most of the time it seems that nothing at all is moving.
My daughter got her lifetime driving licence in Milton Keynes. All she had to do was drive round a well-rehearsed route for about half an hour. Because she had taken and passed the "Theory Test" she had never had to read the Highway Code.
It was lucky that I was with her the first time she went to Luton - when the traffic light went green she assumed that the oncoming traffic would wait for her while she turned right - and it was me sitting in the passenger seat!
People with driving licences should not assume that they are qualified to drive - the DSA driving test goes nowhere near to establishing that fact. Unless you have had a considerable amount of extra training and submit yourself regularly to a formal third party assessment of your knowledge and skills, you are almost certainly not qualified to make your own decisions about when it is safe to ignore a rule of the road. Many people make such "decisions" all the time (often without even realising it) - that's why so many people die.
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