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thehustler posted:Everytime a thread like this comes up I always post this link: Those where the first websites that showed me that I wasn't the only strange road geek in the UK. I recommend going to these websites as they do give interesting information about roads that isn't constant 
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Jul 29, 2009 20:14
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Basilson posted:
We have these ramp signals in the UK too and I agree that they are dumb. There is a notorious section of motorway near me that has this and it does the same thing during peak hours where it will let about 4 cars on regardless of how much traffic is on the road. The worse thing is they have appeared along any stretch of Motorway that is near any major town or city, so you can't avoid them either.
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Jul 31, 2009 08:39
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noblergt posted:Twyford Down curring, the main reason that motorway construction for the past 10 years has been so abysmal. (info I'm suprised they pissed and moaned about that little cutting and not this bad boy. But yeah, thanks to Twyford Down, motorway building in england now means that we are apparently raping the countryside and everyone should be forced to use the aging infrastucture we are left with! 
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Mar 12, 2010 16:38
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Lum posted:Edit2: You might have seen that first junction on the CRBD "bad junctions" section. My favourite from there is Great Barr roundabout, where the M6 (notice a theme here?) dumps traffic onto the inside of a roundabout rather than the more traditional outside. And going in the other direction you have to exit from the inside. I live near the Great Barr junction (J7 of the M6) and have used it several times. The junction is more fun during the 18 hours of traffic jams that section of the M6 has, especially when people won't move the gently caress over or let you merge I personally don't think the M6 has that many bad junctions. There is one notorious one, though, right at the start of the Motorway at it's junction with the M1 (London to Leeds/Yorkshire) and A14 (Major trunk route to the east coast). It's about here. As you can tell, it's basically a clusterfuck of 3 major routes. The M1 was first built through here in the 60's with the slip roads for the M6 waiting for the road to be extended down to it. Then, during the 90's, the A14 was being built and, because of the lack of any thought into the design of the drat thing, they just plonked down 2 dumbell roundabouts and shoehorned the road into it, leaving the abortion that you see before you! Fortunately, the Highways Agency have noticed how much of an abortion this junction is and are planning to rebuild the junction, with a plan to start as early as autumn next year. Hopefully they will get on to fixing this junction as it is hell at the best of times! Wow! I didn't think I could type so much about roads on a forum that has nothing to do with roads!
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Mar 18, 2010 12:15
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Lum posted:Anyway, lovely M6 junctions. There's this one, Great Barr, the clusterfuck that is the M6/M42/M6Toll junction, spaghetti junction, The M6/M5 junction which is woefully underspecced and too close to J9 causing weaving, the M6/M62 junction which is massively underspecced and also so close to the Thelwall viaduct that tailbacks due to crawling trucks quickly back up this junction onto the M62 in both directions. A pity really, because from the air it looks perfect, elegant and free flowing. The M6/6Toll/42 junctions is just a bodge job, and a horrible bodge job at that. It also means that the M42 becomes the size of an american urban freeway for ~3 miles whilst everyone fights it out to get in any lane possible! Spaghetti is a brilliant junction outside of rush hour! Unfortunately, most of the traffic is generally going from A38(M) to M6 West, which results in many an accident/traffic jam. Besides that it's a brilliant junction and if any amendment is made to it I will go down there and beat people up! The M6/M5 junction is an rear end in a top hat with the gridlock that inevitably happens every single day (yes, including Sundays!). The best thing to do with that junction is (besides knocking down J9 because who goes to Wednesbury?) building collecter/distributor roads and widdening it. Unfortunatly they went down the cheap rear end route of the stupid I could go on but then I'd be ranting!
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Mar 18, 2010 15:09
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Lum posted:M6 J15 Funny thing is, if they had built the M64 like they had planned then that junction wouldn't be as bad as it is today!
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Mar 18, 2010 16:19
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Lum posted:*reads that page* I live in Wolverhampton, which means it's hell for me to head east unless I like sitting in traffic jams. The best thing about the M6 is that it was never planned to go through Birmingham! Plans from the 40's (which you can find on the website I linked to upthread) show that it was supposed to follow a line similar to the M6 toll, but Birmingham lovely Council decided they wanted this cool new road so it's they're fault you get to look at the wonderful utopia of the West Midlands whilst you sit in the traffic jam! Anyway, I've shitted this thread up too much today. Back to your regularly scheduled traffic engineering poo poo!
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Mar 18, 2010 17:43
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If we are in the 1930s then we MUST do this! I was thinking maybe going bridging the Fukov between Hartshire and East Hartshire. Also, surely if the great nation of  America is to move forward we need to start building more freeways! Can't let those Germans and Italians have all their fun with their motorways now, can we! 
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Jan 4, 2013 14:35
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TinTower posted:
Except that was built in the 60s, because us Brits are very slow on the uptake! Then again there have been plans for motorways (or motor roads as they were first called) in the UK since the 1890s! As you can tell I can talk about roads all day!
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Jan 6, 2013 10:27
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Jonnty posted:...one where youhave to manually raise the barriers with a special button... I've seen that one in action. It's quite cool and unique, even if I did probably break a few laws continually pressing the button! That and I'm sure the motorists on the A9 were a bit amused to see a group of anoraks taking pictures of a level crossing and several road signs!
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Jan 23, 2013 11:21
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Crankit posted:I live in a village in the UK, it's in a 30 limit but people often speed because the road looks ok to go fast on, but it's a slight downhill slope and gradual turn which leads towards a pedestrian crossing, a few times when I crossed the road approaching traffic screeched to a halt at the red light with smoking tires. I think some kinda of traffic calming as you enter the 30mph limit would be a good idea. Would you agree and what is the best ttype of traffic calming for a situation like this? You are in a village in the UK, surely there would be about a million speed cameras running the entire length of the village! 
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Jan 29, 2013 21:40
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Baronjutter posted:http://www.copenhagenize.com/2013/03/closing-streets-to-cars-for-good.html?m=1 Wow, its so weird seeing my city (Wolverhampton, UK) being used in examples alongside San Francisco and New York City! To be fair, the ring road (which like nearly every other 60s/70s urban road project isn't finished) and subsequent pedestrianisation of the major shopping street has helped reduce traffic within the city centre. The only problem now is most of the place is run down and shops seem to be closing every other week but hey, that's the recession for ya. 
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Mar 23, 2013 18:24
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Koesj posted:More like cancelled halfway, like pretty much all other UK ring roads. Not really, no! Ok, that one was more slightly different to its planned design but its all there in its full 70s glory, and about as scary! Also the Wolverhampton Ring Road is kinda complete, just only the collector/distributor roads are done, leaving a fair amount of space in the middle for the express road to go, just like the A1/E19 between Antwerp and Brussels. Wow, that was far too for a Saturday afternoon!
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Mar 23, 2013 18:36
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It is being used in the eastern bit near the railway station, but that was to put in a bus lane for the new bus station. There is also the car park on the Western side of be ring road but that was there since the road was built. I doubt there will ever be plans for anything in the middle of the road. To be fair the road copes rather well, unless there is an accident on the road or the M6 is closed. Also, if you want a British road geek site that is more up to date than CBRD (he doesn't have time to update it anymore) then try here. It's like Wikipedia only less bickering behind the scenes and people actually know what they're on about!
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Mar 23, 2013 18:53
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Jonnty posted:And of course it'll be just great to watch as every remotely busy freeway becomes a playground of the rich, commutes for anyone else become hell and unemployment gets even worse. There's other reasons things are paid for through taxes than just being a pooled resource. Case in point (in the UK at least) the M6 Toll! Originally planned to be a free bypass of the M6 running through Birmingham and the West Midlands the project was contracted out to a local consortium to be built as a toll road. Of course the prices have rocketed so high that only professional footballers and MP's claiming on expenses use it now! In fact the traffic on the existing 'free' M6 got so bad that they are doing cheap dutch style fake widening on it by allowing the emergency lanes to be used as running lanes. It does work but can get very interesting! Basically road tolls are evil but that's because I'm British and don't want to have to pay for something I already pay for with road tax and fuel tax etc. 
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Apr 16, 2013 21:03
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Carbon dioxide posted:I think I read about a stretch of unused/unfinished freeway (or another road type) in the UK that has been used to film car chase scenes and the like. Can't seem to find it right now, though. If its the one I'm thinking of it is a Motorway, just one you wouldnt use on a general commute. It should be on the Pathetic Motorways called the M96. I could link to it but I'm on my phone now.
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Apr 19, 2013 12:15
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Presto posted:I love reading these, because every one reminds me of Eric Idle here. You need to go on the forums of SABRE then! Who needs a satnav when you could have road geeks with an unfortunate fondness for 1960s Britain and post-war new towns!
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May 4, 2013 20:56
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Bow TIE Fighter posted:A gif led me to this video of how they stop overheight vehicles at the Sydney Harbour Tunnel. Nice warning system, but despite all the engineering in the world, sometimes you can't fix stupid. I like how some of the comments ask why the tunnel can't be made bigger. Surely enlarging the tunnel is orders of magnitude more expensive than fancy signs telling the truck driver to stop, that and the safety concerns with having a huge truck barrelling down a tunnel but I don't know much about engineering so what do I know! I know stuff about buildings but that's completely different of course! I do admit the water screen does look awesome to me too! Could be useful for the Blackwell Tunnel in London which gets hit a few times a year by confused foreign truck drivers who haven't realised we also put metric heights on bridge/tunnel height warning signs.
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May 11, 2013 17:00
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Jonnty posted:I've not seen many outside of the M8, and on there they're dodgy as gently caress and on a 50mph urban motorway. Well the M8 was designed after the urban designers went to LA in the 60s so there's that! 
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May 22, 2013 16:37
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The interesting thing about Milton Keynes is that all the grid roads have their own independent numbering system based on the direction they go with V for north-south and H for east-west. They are even signed as such on the ground but they are becoming less prominent as time goes by. Another interesting thing is that Milton Keynes is home to the UKs first and (thankfully) football franchise, MK Dons. This was formally the London football club Wmbledon which was brought out then for some reason moved up to the new town because they wanted a football team or something. They are pretty much hated by everyone because of how they took a well known but financially struggling team and just hosed them over. Finally this town is one of very few new towns of the post war era that was actually fully built to plan so there's that too I guess.
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Jun 12, 2013 05:58
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Now I need to start a petition to get the UK government to do a similar video for the High Speed Rail 2 project! Even people not directly affected by the project would accept it then! 
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Dec 15, 2013 19:50
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I thought that the red/amber - green phase was far too quick in Germany, then again I was only in Cologne so I don't know what it was like elsewhere. I do know that the lights go straight from red to green in Ireland and France. To be fair I'm not that fussed about the red/amber-green thing here in the UK now that I have an automatic. 
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Feb 25, 2014 14:57
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That was the most fun I had on the most simplest of games! I managed to get up to 485 peeps before overcrowding set in. If they could make some sort of overlay that showed the city above, perhaps slowly expanding, that would be wonderful. 
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Mar 10, 2014 21:05
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The highest I got was 500.  My strategy is to start out with hub and spokes then, after the first week, put a new line in then go for a grid setup after that. They pushed out a new update for Mini Metro today. The most notable thing is there are unlimited tunnels now, but the train will go slowly through it so it's still more of a risk to go south of the river (which is true in actual London).
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Mar 12, 2014 12:24
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The UK does have some motorways that go very close to the city centre/downtown areas, most notably Glasgow (M8) Newcastle upon Tyne (A167(M)) and Leeds (I forget the numbers). These were built during the 60s when motorway building was all the rage and, especially in the case of Glasgow, they took inspiration from American urban freeways. However only Glasgow (and Birmingham to an extent) actually connected their urban motorway(s) to the wider network. The other cities, including London, tried to but either finances or political will stopped it so now in most cases you get a fancy yet visually disruptive freeway style road (in the case of Newcastle even double decker) which obruptly ends and dumps everything onto surface streets making it pointless in a way. Even London flirted with the idea of having a network of urban motorways but had to stop part of the way through the first phase of the innermost section as people noticed it would actually go through some very well to do areas (it would've plowed through Chelsea & Kensington, for example) so that made it a huge political disaster. The interesting thing is though that the UK probably latched on to the car just as much as America did, with even the government focusing more of its resources to road infrastructure by sacrificing many many rail lines (BEECHING ), but once many of the urban motorway schemes fell through they didn't really offer many alternatives after that. The only exceptions I can think of at the moment is Newcastle who invested in a metro system by converting old commuter lines and Manchester who have invested heavily in LRT since the 90s.
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Mar 22, 2014 08:16
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Install Windows posted:The UK absolutely loves to use roundabouts as a core component of interchanges for a motorway, sometimes even for motorway-motorway interchanges. You post that junction but not here, here, and here? (That's not even all of them, either)
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Mar 28, 2014 09:25
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Also relevant (and from the same bollards in Manchester, UK) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWnfeDtnuds
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Mar 30, 2014 07:27
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Are those bespoke buses those new routemaster things that somehow look more ugly than the already odd looking old ones? (As you can tell I was never a fan of the old routemaster, then again I am a dirty, thick midlander so what do I know  )
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Apr 19, 2014 19:37
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Managed lanes/highways means something completely different here in the UK. We are essentially going full tilt into the dutch way of doing things and installing infrastructure on existing motorways so the hard shoulder can be used as a live traffic lane when the road is congested. Whilst it does work and can slightly improve journey times and volume the original stretches only allowed so called "hard shoulder running" between junctions and not through them, creating a sort of bottleneck where 4 lanes merge into 3 for 1/3 miles. Of course the government are expanding it because it's a few million cheaper than actually widening the road or, I dunno, building a proper parallel road to at least provide redundancy for when the main motorway is blocked for whatever reason! Of course you could just improve public transport but, unless it's London, no one gives a poo poo about that! No, I'm not angry about roads!
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May 16, 2014 12:12
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