TORY proposals for the roads

wildmoustache

http://www.conservatives.com/pdf/ECPGcomplete.pdf

including ... "place bicycle lanes on pavements, where this will not inconvenience pedestrians"

"allow left turns on a red light..."

MattBlackBigBoysBMX

Some sensible suggestions hidden away there.

I agree with the US style turn left on red rule, it would help ease congestion at thousands of junctions up and down the country, the difficulty is educating the public so that they know the new rules without causing thousands of accidents in the honeymoon period.

Good to see that they have noticed the dangers and failure of current road design as well, such as artificial chicanes. Our local council spend a ridiculous amount of money on installing chicanes on a road near me after a kid ran in front of a car and was killed. It was entirely the childs fault, and the driver was travelling well under the (30) speed limit. The changes in parking places that were made at the same time also further reduce visibility, meaning the likelihood of spotting an errant child running into the road were further reduced.

I am not a fan of cycle lanes on paths. I would prefer to have cyclists on the road and for motorists to be better taught how to drive amongst them.

wildmoustache

MattBlackBigBoysBMX wrote:

Some sensible suggestions hidden away there.

I agree with the US style turn left on red rule, it would help ease congestion at thousands of junctions up and down the country, the difficulty is educating the public so that they know the new rules without causing thousands of accidents in the honeymoon period.

.

I agree with you in that it seems to work ok in the US, at least in small town US. I can imagine it being horrendous if introduced in London though ... SMIDSYs galore

MattBlackBigBoysBMX

wildmoustache wrote:

MattBlackBigBoysBMX wrote:

Some sensible suggestions hidden away there.

I agree with the US style turn left on red rule, it would help ease congestion at thousands of junctions up and down the country, the difficulty is educating the public so that they know the new rules without causing thousands of accidents in the honeymoon period.

.

I agree with you in that it seems to work ok in the US, at least in small town US. I can imagine it being horrendous if introduced in London though ... SMIDSYs galore

I had to google the acronym ( :oops: ) but I certainly agree. With the state of driver standards in the UK, I'm not sure it would be realistically feasible to introduce it without some very dire consequences, but we can dream.

Cunobelin

This is a ludicrous suggestion - legalise the "Left Hook"?

nwallace

Cunobelin wrote:

This is a ludicrous suggestion - legalise the "Left Hook"?

Left Hand drive may remove the A-pillar blind spot for anything approaching from the right, but is a bit impractical for left side driving.

I normally drive a car that has the "A-Pillar"s as part of the front door frame, when I get in a modern car the A-pillar is right where i am used to having vision, spend a lot of time moving my head around to see past it.

MattBlackBigBoysBMX

Cunobelin wrote:

This is a ludicrous suggestion - legalise the "Left Hook"?

Drive in the States and you'll realise that it can work very very efficiently.

Tourist Tony

MattBlackBigBoysBMX wrote:

Cunobelin wrote:

This is a ludicrous suggestion - legalise the "Left Hook"?

Drive in the States and you'll realise that it can work very very efficiently.

And the comment was specific: it may work in a small town, but in London it would be horrendous.

MattBlackBigBoysBMX

Yes, ideologically speaking, it's a great idea, but in reality I would gladly be proved wrong that it could work.

Sub3_99

Tourist Tony wrote:

MattBlackBigBoysBMX wrote:

Cunobelin wrote:

This is a ludicrous suggestion - legalise the "Left Hook"?

Drive in the States and you'll realise that it can work very very efficiently.

And the comment was specific: it may work in a small town, but in London it would be horrendous.

LTOR wouldn't be an option for drivers in London because of the amount of pedestrians crossing the roads. In Serfeffika they have a system where a red arrow flashes to signify that LTOR is applicable at that junction. This arrow only starts flashing after the pedestrian cycle has completed.

Cunobelin

That is better, at least pedestrians would have sa "fighting chance" of crossing the junction.

But we have a set of lights at "Gunwharf" in Portsmouth. There is a wide cycle path approaching an ASL at the junction.

Such is th hurry to shop that I have actually had cars overtake and park across the front of me when in the ASL! Using the cycle lane is lethal as the traffic simply sees shopping as a priority over the sfety of the legally correct cyclists.

Personally I sit mid- road, but the number of near misses I see cause palpitations.

Legalise this already impatient and poor driving and the situation can only get worse.

BigWomble

LTOR may not help that much. Imagine, if you will, a situation where you have a mixed left/ahead lane. If the front vehicle want to turn left, they can go. If the next vehicle wants to go straight ahead, any other vehicles wishing to turn left will be blocked. If the front vehicle wants to go straight on, nothing happens. Generally, each cycle will spit out half a car. The front half or the back half? - it's too early to tell.

I have visited Canada (in the winter, it's a very cold country, and therefore perfect weather for a womble). The LTOR system there relies on the cars yielding to pedestrians crossing the road. Other comments made so far about car/pedestrian conflict may turn out to be very true (although it may not provide many car movements, as above).

We already have LTOR, where a specific left-turn slip lane is provided at many junctions. This is far more effective.

"...particularly more women entering the workforce, necessitating two car families..." This is a bit of a sweeping statement. True for some families, not true for others.

They propose to increase the amount of public transport that is used to move people short distances, without regulation or diktat. Okay, so imagine you've got a car parked on the driveway - would you really pay to use a bus instead? Would anyone wait in the cold in order to make a journey of only a few km? Especially with a chaotic system of competing bus companies??? Figure 5, if anything, shows that congestion charging/flexible working should be very much on the agenda, with very little travel occurring outside peak times. This can be seen on any major urban road.

I notice that they criticise the lack of a motorway across the south of England. Clearly, they have no conception of the problems of developing in Dorset which, rightly or wrongly - probably rightly - has large areas of protected land (SSSI, NT etc.) One of the pieces of work I did was looking at upgrading a narrow lane, which was being overrun with lorries. It turned out to be infeasible for these reasons. Now, they would like to see a motorway running across the area??

"Short term guidance would focus on relatively inexpensive actions, such as re-phasing traffic lights, inserting traffic sensors at junctions, reducing conflicts between parking and traffic flows, and ensuring better (and fewer) signs. The medium term plan would concentrate on improving junction capacity by widening roads, and, wherever possible, on making available a segregated right-hand turning lane. Selected improvements to the carriageways of those roads overburdened by traffic would also be implemented."

These are sensible suggestions. I don't know what the proportion is, but in the USA is it estimated that 75% of the signalised junctions are not set up correctly. Widening junctions, however is probably an 'aspiration' in built-up areas. I notice that the threat to remove 'unnecessary red time' has been removed. Good. I wonder why transport engineers added it in the first place...

"...and have sometimes ignored the evidence that speed is not a factor in over 90% of road accidents." Speed may not start an accident off, but the reason the collision occurs and people get hurt is - witchcraft?

"Place bicycle lanes on pavements, where this will not inconvenience pedestrians." Or cyclists, presumably.

"Provide safer crossings for pedestrians, whether footbridges or underpasses." This is of very little use. Pedestrians don't like walking a long way out of their way. Underpasses, regrettably, often become sleeping areas for drunks.

"Build elevated carriageways or underpasses at main busy city junctions, to improve flows at peak times."

The Big Dig in Boston was a major undertaking for inserting only a small piece of roadway underground. Hands up who want an elevated road past their front door. No one? Okay.

All in all, therefore, it's a very mixed bag.

BW.

Tourist Tony

Just had a read through a lot of this.
I feel a Bonjian "Roads is for cars" emphasis lurking in there. So much of it is about allowing cars to move faster, and seems to mean keeping peds and cyclists away. There is mention specifically of the school run, but as a "necessary" thing rather than one of the main causes both of childhood obesity and, indeed, of the congestion complained of.
There is also a lot of emphasis on widening roads. Now, boys and girls, what has been shown to happen when that is done?

passout

Tourist Tony wrote:

Just had a read through a lot of this.
I feel a Bonjian "Roads is for cars" emphasis lurking in there. So much of it is about allowing cars to move faster, and seems to mean keeping peds and cyclists away. There is mention specifically of the school run, but as a "necessary" thing rather than one of the main causes both of childhood obesity and, indeed, of the congestion complained of.
There is also a lot of emphasis on widening roads. Now, boys and girls, what has been shown to happen when that is done?

Erm.......Less congestion? World peace? Paris? 49?

I tend to agree with your worries that this smacks of 'the roads are for motorists', especially as most people evidently believe this anyway. In fact I worry that the provision of cycle lanes, combined with such sentiments, will effectively force cyclists from the road. It would only take a couple of minor laws and Labour have been introducing new laws every week recently.

Tourist Tony

My worry indeed.
The comment about widening roads is that it has been shown simply to attract more traffic.

Titanium

"Tourist wrote:

it may work in a small town, but in London it would be horrendous.

It works fine in Belgium, from the small villages of Flanders to the cities of Antwerp and Brussels. It's hard to put in place overnight but worth exploring.

BigWomble

Titanium wrote:

"Tourist wrote:

it may work in a small town, but in London it would be horrendous.

It works fine in Belgium, from the small villages of Flanders to the cities of Antwerp and Brussels. It's hard to put in place overnight but worth exploring.

[/quote]

LTOR at the stop line still won't work as advertised - alas. In addition to my original point - that in a mixed left-ahead lane, the left turning traffic gets stuck between the cars going straight on (in the USA/Canada, they have typically wider roads at signal junctions, allowing dedicated left-turn lanes) - if there is a dedicated left-turn lane, LTOR vehicles have to give way to pedestrians and the existing traffic flows which have right-of-way at the junction, which is rather less than all the time. And if there a define period when cars can turn left from a dedicated lane, you can provide this with a filter arrow. There simply isn't masses of dead time in a well-sorted signalised junction, Mr. Redwood to the contrary. LTOR via a dedicated turning slip works better because it is more likely to serve left turners, where there isn't a dedicated left turn lane. This we already have. There is a beautiful example in Bath where I live.

There is a better way of doing junctions. In Holland, in a city called Drachten, they have removed the signalised junctions, and now allow people to just interact.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... ffic04.xml

The key appears to be a low traffic speed. At 20mph, road users start to negotiate with other road users - a positive and friendly experience - rather than competing for road space and parking spaces, as in this country - a negative experience. It also encourages cycling.

It works well. It may seem odd to a transport planner like myself brought up under the old rules, but think about it like this... in a pedestrianised area of town, there are bits of pavement which meet at junctions. But there are no traffic lights. People just move round each other. This is how it should be.

Another example - to prove it wasn't beginner's luck - is Exhibition Road in London.

The problem is that common-sense (Einstein's definition - the prejudices acquired by the age of 15) says that driving faster means you get where you're going faster. But going faster requires rights-of-way, leading to all the things like traffic lights and give-way junctions that make the journey longer.

Welcome to the Alice-through-the-looking-glass world of transport planning.

mjones

I'm not sure what depresses me the most about this: that a major political party, presumably serious about wanting to govern, would publish such uninformed drivel as a contribution to its policy making; or that the media, when reporting on the aforementioned uninformed drivel, made so little effort to obtain any informed opinions on the proposals themselves.

Reading the report it is clear that Redwood hasn't made the slightest effort to look at the vast amount of published information available on the subjects on which he was pontificating, nor has he bothered to run his proposals past anyone that knows about transport before putting them into print. Thus he puts forward naive proposals about traffic light phasing without any reference to the very sophisticated techniques currently being used to optimise traffic flow. DId it not occur to him that if it really were that simple then someone might be doing it already? He argues for rubber wheeled commuter and underground trains, citing the example of the Paris Metro, without bothering to find out that rubber wheels greatly increase energy consumption, would be impossibly expensive to retrofit and wouldn't actually increase capacity anyway. Wikipedia would have told him all he needed to know in seconds!

Again and again: subways for pedestrians, cycle routes on the pavement, impossibly expensive and impractical grade separated junctions in urban areas; he puts forward simplistic proposals without any reference at all to current practice or any acknowledgment that there might be practical objections to all his suggestions. Underlying it all is the delusion that there is plenty of spare capacity on the urban road network if only we tweaked the lights, stopped pedestrians crossing the road and made cyclists ride on pavements.
:x

ScumOfTheRoad

mjones, I could not agree with you more.

The rubber whels on trains argument was derided on the uk.railway newsgroup the day this oress release came out. As you say, if it was all so easy then experienced railway engineers would be implementing it.

As for the grade separated junctions, it is just laugable.
Take the Bricklayers Arms flyover in south London as a perfect example.
Seventies style concrete flyover for the Old Kent Road heading out of London, so the outgoing traffic doesn't get held up for one more set of lights at the Bricklayers Arms roundabout. Pedestrian tunnels underneath the roundabout.

Today? The flyover is due to be pulled down and the rubble used to infil lthe tunnels. So what does this twit Redwood propose? Digging the pieces back out and re-erecting the flyover to repeat past mistakes?
The thing was never effective - all it did during busy times was to act as a holding area as the entire road is busy further on down.

ScumOfTheRoad

Sorry - wishful thinking on my part.
No plans to remove the Bricklayers Arms flyover.
http://www.london.gov.uk/assembly/assem ... nswers.rtf

BigWomble

mjones wrote:

I'm not sure what depresses me the most about this: that a major political party, presumably serious about wanting to govern, would publish such uninformed drivel as a contribution to its policy making; or that the media, when reporting on the aforementioned uninformed drivel, made so little effort to obtain any informed opinions on the proposals themselves.

Reading the report it is clear that Redwood hasn't made the slightest effort to look at the vast amount of published information available on the subjects on which he was pontificating, nor has he bothered to run his proposals past anyone that knows about transport before putting them into print. Thus he puts forward naive proposals about traffic light phasing without any reference to the very sophisticated techniques currently being used to optimise traffic flow. DId it not occur to him that if it really were that simple then someone might be doing it already? He argues for rubber wheeled commuter and underground trains, citing the example of the Paris Metro, without bothering to find out that rubber wheels greatly increase energy consumption, would be impossibly expensive to retrofit and wouldn't actually increase capacity anyway. Wikipedia would have told him all he needed to know in seconds!

Again and again: subways for pedestrians, cycle routes on the pavement, impossibly expensive and impractical grade separated junctions in urban areas; he puts forward simplistic proposals without any reference at all to current practice or any acknowledgment that there might be practical objections to all his suggestions. Underlying it all is the delusion that there is plenty of spare capacity on the urban road network if only we tweaked the lights, stopped pedestrians crossing the road and made cyclists ride on pavements.
:x

Rubber tyred trains seem to have a mixture of pros and cons. From Wikipedia -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber-tyred_metro

His main point, that you can run rubber-tyred vehicles closer together appears to have some validity, although electro-magnetic braking works well in the wet, and there is anyway a limit to how fast a train can be accelerated and decelerated. The article does say, though, that these advantages of acceleration and deceleration disappear under inclement weather, which is precisely what Mr. Redwood is criticising the existing steel-wheel technology for (p32). It is worth noting that his examples of successful systems are all wholly/mostly underground, yet he applies these 'lessons' to surface-running railways. Something else I didn't notice the first time round - apparently 'only' 24 trains an hour can be run. That's a train every two minutes, including loading time, since with a simple line-up/line-down arrangement, the first train must leave before the next arrives. In the ex-Soviet Union, the highest-capacity underground systems were being run 1 1/2 minutes apart, where they were pushing the technology to its limits.

I am also annoyed at the way in which he has not bothered to get his views checked before publication. It appears to be part of the modern political view that spin is more important than policy, and opinion more important than facts. Margaret Thatcher, for all her faults, never went into a debate without a firm grasp of the facts.