Traffic, traffic, everywhere!
Heavy traffic foils Cyprus congestion scheme (http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090729/tod-heavy-traffic-foils-cyprus-congestio-7f81b96.html)
I wonder how many people picked up pedestrians off the street to be able to use the HOV lane?
HOV-lanes are useless in smaller cities in my opinion. You need a significant population to set up HOV lanes that actually carry some traffic, otherwise it's just a waste of space. If you have several hundreds of thousands of people living along a 20 mile corridor, then it might make some sense.
Nicosia has only 270,000 inhabitants. It's like putting HOV lanes in the Fort Smith, AR metropolitan area.
The city has only two freeway-grade roads that are both 4-lanes only. What kind of traffic engineering is this? Narrow the freeway down to one lane for general traffic during rushhour, and they thought this was gonna improve the traffic flow?
I've just been looking at the island on Google Maps and there's a surprisingly large amount of freeway. Of interest is this (http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&ll=34.981074,33.684892&spn=0.003371,0.009012&t=k&z=18) where the freeway has been diverted to the north leaving this stub behind. The kicker arrows where two lanes merged into one can be seen. I feel like taking a flight there just to get some pictures of this :colorful:
Cyprus is actually a quite developed country, considered European, but geographically in Asia.