UK Roads Thread

[vdeane]

Weird that people would avoid the left lane with American-style markings.

That's what neither I, nor the DMRB, said. And I'm not just talking about that it would be the right lane as we drive on the left.

We said that concentric circle markings encourage people to use both lanes. Nothing was said about that not being true for spiral markings.

This attitude is anathema to you and me, but the British seem to have embraced it, probably for the same reason they have a king.

The people in London called the rebels in North America 'Royalists' because the rebels were demanding that the king exert power he didn't constitutionally have. In 1792 Washington, not Hannover, was the George with more power over his relevant people - because the American constitution sort to give them a king not constrained by the 100 years of constitutional development since 1689 (or even 1660), but hated the term. And the power held by the President has only grown since then.

But this is perhaps the same problem as the main problem in this discussion - there's no understanding of nuance or reality and everything must be spelled out explicitly - Kings are bad, President's good, purely on the word used not on the tyranny they actually hold! Diagrams must show every possibility because how else would we know what's legal! Lane markings and signage must tell you the rules of the road at every possible juncture!

The latter is especially nonsensical - the confusion about kings is in the US DNA, but the US is a Common Law jurisdiction, not a Continental Law one. It's not Germany where everything not legal is illegal. It's the US, where everything not illegal is legal.

I should note that the UK has far safer roads than the US - a lot of that is other factors, but a decent amount of the difference is education (the 3 Es of road safety: Education, Engineering, and Enforcement) - because we expect high levels of capability and decision making from our drivers so that they can deal with the unexpected. More than half of driving tests end in a fail (average pass rate is 48.5%).

British driving requires you to be aware of the road and other users (and assuming that they will stick to the rules is against the rules), to make decisions without your hand being held at every step, and to seek to avoid collisions as you make manuevers. What's wrong with any of that?

Pavement markings are supposed to define where traffic goes.  Having a situation where the legal flow of traffic and the striping of the lanes is different is nonsensical.  I agree that there are some instances where we over-sign in the US (look at every subdivision with all-way stops plastered everywhere), but roundabout/intersection signage denoting what lane goes where isn't one of them (the US approach is also more flexible in this context, as multi-lane roundabouts here don't require all approaches and exits to have the same number of lanes).

As for watching traffic, there's only so much you can do.  When I'm in a roundabout, I'm watching the car in front of me so I don't rear end it, the road so I can maneuver and exit properly, and the other entrances to make sure nobody's going to cut me off rather than yielding.  Naturally I have an awareness of nearby traffic, but closely paying attention to what everyone else is doing (including checking the mirrors) to the amount I would before a lane change is well beyond the mental bandwidth there.

[bing101]

Here is a tour of the Runcorn Busway. 

[bing101]

[Tom958]

Here is a tour of the Runcorn Busway.

I've been fascinated with Runcorn since I discovered it as a youthful planning enthusiast in the early seventies. one thing he didn't mention was that, according to one source I came across back then, one purpose of the busway network was to prevent the expressways from needing six lanes instead of four. I'd wondered how the relatively skeletal busway network was expected to accomplish that, but that's because I'd never seen the much more extensive network shown at 2:22 in the video.

While we're on the subject of Runcorn, I also appreciated Jon's video about Runcorn's road system, though I did get the pedantic pleasure of pointing out the unfortunate side effect of reworking the Southern Expressway-westion Link interchange Google Maps link.

[Tom958]

I feel a need to write about this: The essential genius of the British scheme for multilane roundabouts is that it can shepherd multiple multilane streams of traffic through the roundabout without requiring weaving. Recognizing this genius, some other (mostly English-speaking) countries, including Australia and eventually the US, adopted the same scheme themselves. Eventually, roundabouts started to proliferate in continental Europe, too. I'd assumed that this happened because the continental Europeans, had recognized the genius of the British concept and decided, wisely, to adopt it themselves.

Or so I thought. However, to my chagrin, I eventually learned (via Dull Men's Club on Facebook!) that, in fact, most of these nations striped their multilane roundabouts in the dysfunctional way shown below. You may recall that this diagram was created by Spain's highways agency to illustrate how drivers from places that understand how to sensibly stripe roundabouts will cause crashes in Spain's dysfunctionally marked roundabouts. 




Furthermore, even more recently, I learned that the genius British scheme apparently didn't appear until about thirty years ago (I'd appreciate clarification on that). That would mean that other countries went heavy into roundabouts before they were really any good! Until then, the efficient functioning of British multilane roundabouts depended on rigorous driver training and licensing. More on that later. 

For me, it's gotten to the point that it's not even about roundabouts anymore. It's about how British people think. To illustrate, check out https://www.facebook.com/groups/autoshenanigans/posts/1042475538023753/ . This post is about two multilane roundabouts that are identical in function and less than a mile apart, yet are striped completely differently. One commenter said he could see what I was talking about. The rest not only couldn't see the difference, but roundly denounced me for doing so as well as my country of origin. The really odd thing is that this Facebook page and the YouTube channel it promotes generally find fault with the authorities and poke fun at them, usually deservedly so. When I posted what I did, I expected the peanut gallery to join me in ridiculing the wankers who painted that roundabout incorrectly. What actually happened was that they took the side of the authorities.  WTF?

The only explanation I can think of for this is that UK drivers' emotional investment in their onerous driver training and licensing is strong enough to overcome their disdain for incompetent government authorities. That's pretty damn strong. Faced with an incorrectly striped multilane roundabout, they'll drive through it successfully without even noticing and denounce as an idiot anyone who does, along with their country of origin, if applicable. How very strange.

So, is this relevant to American road design authorities? I doubt it. While we, too, have a cabal of extremely hard-headed multilane roundabout drivers, their hard-headedness leads them to ignore correct signage and markings and cause crashes and near misses, not successfully negotiate badly-marked roundabouts without even noticing. We'll never achieve that, so I'm putting my hopes upon the more emphatic lane markings we're seeing lately.   
 
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Tangential to the topic, I'm not being the least bit sarcastic in calling the British scheme genius. This weekend, I made this Facebook post  about navigating Toyota Island It's a three-level roundabout interchange that serves the A50, the A38, a Toyota factory, and a services area and minor road. Unlike most such interchanges, it has no traffic signals, which means that drivers are expected to navigate at the posted speed of 40 mph. From what I see, they can do it, too. All they have to do is get into the correct lane upon entering the roundabout and stay there, pay attention to the signage (which is both unusually elaborate and doubled up, i.e., placed on both sides of the circular road), and exit at the correct point.