Where would you have a new road built? - opportunity beckons

[forddeliveryboy]

The answer to less congestion is never more roads as they fill up with cretins who can't drive

 

 

Easypeasy, introduce an ever more difficult driving test and permanently ban road-rage/appalling behaviour until numbers are down to 8 million. It wouldn't need to be so awkward, and insist that you'd need a licence to be in charge of a self-driving car too. Shove the long-haul freight onto railways, return to a system where the police use their own discretion rather than BigBroCamSham and raise the motorway limit appropriately. What a joy the roads would be.

[UltraWomble]

The biggest solution to congestion would be for employers to stop this farce where they set arbitrary start/finish times so a substantial amount of people are clogging up the network at the same time. Not to mention all the jobs where there's little to no point even going to a physical workplace as you could just do it all at home.

I dream of a day where I can do a virtual PR examination of someones bum grapes from home using VR tech and a medibot.

No more double gloving.

[tooSavvy]

.... would a 'delivery bot' supply fresh, succulent 'bum grapes'?

 

TS

[Pillock]

Yeah, because nobody will ever just pick the delivery bot up, take it down to the canal, smash it open and then dump the remains. 

 

We've partially moved to a system where I can work at home for much of the time - I still need to commute for meetings with external people, but the office opens at 7am and closes at 7pm so more scope to move commuting times around. Normally it's three days a week in the office, two at home but given my distance I'm hoping to swap those numbers around. All internal meetings can be done through Skype so I can watch my colleagues sitting in their scruffs in their house, and they can watch me have to get up and answer the door and stuff.

[Lankytim]

Hey Vulg,you need to match the speed of lorries for a stress free life.. Save them trying to overtake you. I find picking a lorry and sitting behind it for miles and miles particularly relaxing

[FakeConcern]

Most of the rest of Europe get this - as soon as you are past the slower vehicle get back over to the right (or here the left). We really do not anymore widening programs, we need people to move back over straight away; us Brits are absolute morons about this - some sort of national mental issue going on.

As you say in France etc they do this and the other side of it is that when you catch something up, you know the cars behind will let you back out again wheras in UK it's easy to be trapped.

[Dick Cheeseburger]

Build more railways. I'm staggered by the amount of freight on the roads, which could easily (and has previously, including Royal Nail) be moved on the railways. Reinstate ogre on the Tamar bridge to keep Cornwall safe

[catsinthewelder]

I'm a bit of a treehugger so would generally support the view of moving freight onto the railways but also being an anorak I know that the rail system is almost as congested as the roads so will need many millions of pounds spending on improving capacity and new lines (there arn't many of the closed branches that would be much use here).

 

I would like to see some road improvements in Hereford though,  The A49 carries a lot of long distance traffic in this part of the world and goes right through the middle of the bloody place.  Apparently a bypass should be built by 2027 but I will believe it when I see it.

[captain_70s]

A dual carriageway from the end of my driveway to Aberdeen...

[tooSavvy]

Hey Vulg,you need to match the speed of lorries for a stress free life.. Save them trying to overtake you. I find picking a lorry and sitting behind it for miles and miles particularly relaxing

.... really? Knife&forking through the HGVs, on the A69, is somewhat exhilerating - when everyone cramps up and won't let you back in!!

 

If you don't do A69 then it is, of course, meh!

 

A guy in an Aldi (the 2door midengine coop) totally aced the queue - safely & cleanly - by just hitting the rev limiter every 1/4 mile... no one even knew he was passing till he was gone....

 

 

TS

[garethj]

I agree with the earlier posts that building more roads just gets the cretins to fill them up.  It's like putting a cat on the bed, no matter how big the bed, the cat takes up slightly more than 2/3 of it.  If I had a bed that was forty feet across the cat would just dislocate a leg out of spite and fill the space.

 

I would suggest that traffic planners stop with their current mantra of making everyone go slower and change to make everyone keep moving as much as possible.  There are times when traffic lights on roundabouts work, times when they don't so here's the suggestion that has a hint of real genius - change the lights to suit to keep the traffic moving.

 

Things like speed bumps and traffic calming* cause more noise, more pollution and cause more congestion.  Don't do it.  Motorway exits get blocked and that stacks up all the way down the motorway and takes ages to clear, avoid that crap too.  Teach, force or kill anyone that can't grasp the idea of smooth driving.  If you have a lane of traffic doing 90mph then hitting the brakes (like the outside lane of most motorways) it'll go no faster than lane 1 where everyone does 55mph all the time.

 

I don't buy the story about truck drivers paying heavily if they lift off the gas either, diesel prices have come down by 25% so for the good of every other road user you can just suck it up.  And what about stopping for traffic lights in town centres?  Just because they have to stop or at least slow down does that make the price of all our goods rocket?

 

I share Hirst's vision of the future, but as I've long been a fan of Derek Meddings I'd like to see freight sent by air to get it out of the way, something like a cross between an airship and Thunderbird 2 please.  Railways are rubbish if there's a slippery leaf on the line or something, anything breaks because trains are like Scalextric, not TCR.  You either need lots of tracks with lots of change points or forget the idea completely an aim higher.

[garbaldy]

Unless I'm mistaken most of the posts want new roads for faster journeys so they can sleep longer get to the shops or work quicker or just be able to drive without queuing,

I'm pretty sure that the existing roads that have high casualty rates should be looked at before even thinking of spending more money down south, yes I do mean south as even my small mind can accept that Britain doesn't end in the midlands,

how many of you have driven north as in farther north than Leeds,

[Tayne]

Leeds!l

Leeds!!

 

Bloody Leeds!

 

That's not North, that's practically France.

[Lacquer Peel]

The A96 is a trunk road of around 100 miles between a city of 200k and a small city of 50k. Some towns on its route are still not bypassed, including the one I live in which has several sets of traffic lights - it's a car park at peak times. Most of the road is single carriageway, with a couple of overtaking lanes that usually run out before you can pass anything.

There is a narrow section that's been traffic controlled for more than 20 years, they're only just bypassing it. Shittest road in the north of Scotland, for sure.

I think there are plans afoot to dual it, 'austerity tho' might see the end of the plans.

 

TL;DR - bypass my town please.

[Pillock]

Sod your bypass, I want a quarter of an hour more in bed so please octo-carriageway the M42.

[Des]

I don't want to see one inch of new road, it's just trying to extinguish a fire with petrol. As has been said, most drivers wont allow the plentiful existing roads to work, your lane hoggers are there because of an inability to drive correctly, they have no business dragging their poor observation and judgement onto a motorway but will continue to do so out of selfishness, surely it would make sense to deal with those feckless fuckers and then see if we need to churn up yet more of the country, and if that means a big heap of tarmac going spare then for Gods sake and in the name of humanity could we not use it to bury Slough and Luton? 

[Junkman]

Sorry to disagree.

There is a significant lack of infrastructure in a country that has built its last public structure in the Victorian era.

I don't know what the UK's tax money has been spent on since 1902, but most evidently, infrastructure it is not.

 

The road system in the UK is in dire need of a major overhaul. Sadly, I won't see it happen.

[Asimo]

It isn't freight that clogs up roads, it is all those pointless little tie wearers going to meetings in A4s and 3 series just to big-up each other's egos.

 

Stay in the office and do some work! There is an Internet, videoconferencing etc, telephone even.

[Junkman]

Well, pretty much all I see when I drive on the M6 to Cannock for some Autoshite In The Community®

are empty lorries with foreign numberplates heading back to some ferry.

[Uncle Jimmy]

A tunnel please, at the Birdlip end of the A 417, to connect the very good dual carriageway from the M4 at Swindon with the M5 at Gloucester. At most 2 miles long and through soft limestone it would delete a serious bottleneck and accident spot as well as improve life in two Villages. Win, Win, Win.

Tunnels are widely used for roads everywhere else I have been, but they are rarely used here.

No no no no no no no no no no. It might disturb one or two badgers and upset the tree huggers.

[Uncle Jimmy]

I wonder if it is because of driving on the left; deep down we all want to drive on the right?

I know it sounds daft but even though I have driven at least a hundred times as far on the left here in Britain than I have driven on the right in the U.S.A. or Continental Europe, there is something about driving on the right that feels more natural to me.

Yes! We should have bloody well changed over to the right, as the Swedes did in 1968.

[Uncle Jimmy]

M62. This exemplifies the kind of shit that goes on in the UK.

[Eddie Honda]

Yes! We should have bloody well changed over to the right, as the Swedes did in 1968.

Bloody well finish the job of metrication first!

[rml2345]

M62. This exemplifies the kind of shit that goes on in the UK.

I'm sure I heard somewhere that situation arose because the ground around the farm was too unstable to support the road, so pretty sensible if a little bizarre.

[Cavcraft]

A motorway from the North West (of England) to the South of Wales (via Wales) and one that goes from the M1 to the likes of Lincoln and Skegness etc would be useful I reckon, plus a better route over the Peak District, please.

As for motorways 80mps seems about the best speed to me and using the inside lane instead of hogging the middle/outer. If the police really are fining people for misuse of said lanes, they need to get more cars on the road and patrol the motorways more often if thy can. They'd make several million per day in fines from the M56 alone.

 

I'd also widen a few A-roads such as the A51 from Chester-Stoke just as an example, because if they really want more cyclists/less cars on the road, they should make it a bit safer.

[garethj]

I'd consider cycle paths next to roads, rather than separate them with a line of paint which you hope acts like a force field. However the same snipers that deal with middle lane hogging would also work on these cycle paths.

 

Any dog owners who walk on one side of the cycle path (and they should really be on the pavement anyway) with their dog on the other side and the lead stretching across the path... A swift kill is the kindest way. The person can then be turned into pig food so they're doing some good for animals.

 

The common theme on all of these posts seems to be to ban the selfish cretins, that would work at all levels I think.

[New POD]

Agreed.  This works in Europe - where they understand lane discipline - and on the A42 near Ashby-de-la-Zouch, of all places.

 

Elephant racing is the enemy of progress, in more ways than one.

 

I think that if the HGV being undertaken was forced to reduce their velocity by say 10 mph when being overtaken, then there would be no need for that sensible outside lane ban on the A42, which needs introducing on the A50 Stoke to Derby Road.

[garbaldy]

A motorway from the North West (of England) to the South of Wales (via Wales) and one that goes from the M1 to the likes of Lincoln and Skegness etc would be useful I reckon, plus a better route over the Peak District, please.

As for motorways 80mps seems about the best speed to me and using the inside lane instead of hogging the middle/outer. If the police really are fining people for misuse of said lanes, they need to get more cars on the road and patrol the motorways more often if thy can. They'd make several million per day in fines from the M56 alone.

I haven't looked at a map for a while but I'm pretty sure there's a motorway from the nw of England to wales already, better connections to it are what's required.

Agree on the policing though driving standards are well bellow par and no matter what some of the German car haters say its not just those owner's that are the problem.

[Slappy]

I'm definitely all for getting a significant chunk of freight off the roads, and I think it can be done using the railways to a degree. I've lurked for years on a railway forum, and 1 of the key frustrations about HS2 is the complete lack of PR about how there will be additional capacity to get a lot more container traffic on the West Coast Main Line once HS2 goes live, thereby allowing freight to get off the roads away from hubs. It's not all about getting passengers twixt the North and London in super duper speed, there'll be a number of positive knock on effects!

 

My other proposal would be to get a freight transport hub in Kent somewhere. There was a plan mooted near to J8 of the M20, where there is the "classic" network and HS1, which I thought was brilliant, but I think it got shot down on being too intrusive I think. Stupidly frustrating.

[Pillock]

I had two cracking ideas after a couple of beers today.

 

Firstly, use ANPR cameras to monitor lane usage. If time spent in lane 1 is more than lanes 2 and 3 combined, you get entered into a prize draw to refund your annual road tax bill (I forget what it's actually called these days).

 

Secondly, use overhead matrix signs to run a quiz. For example, one sign says "What B is a town in the north west of England, famous for a tower?". Two miles later there's a sign that says "Blackpool". Naturally, more thinking time is given the slower you're going so instead of variable speed limits, to slow the traffic down just make the questions harder.