OT: traffic lights broke

Ban traffic lights, I say.

I feel the same every time another set is installed. Most places a roundabout would do the job better. But then there wouldn't be any ongoing maintenance costs for the contractors. DaveK.

I wonder if there was a traffic jam on the other road. Often when light fail vehicles on the minor road will give way to the major road, meaning at busy times, that no one gets out. I don't know B'ham, but I've seen this happen elsewhere.

The current claimed advantage is they have a lower accident rate.

I was on the minor road, coming out onto the major road on which one set was still working. The lights here are a real pain. There are about 13 sets of lights controlling various directions in a 100 yard stretch of road. Garry

Traffic lights do seem to be a very unefficiant way of controlling traffic. Safer I suppose though.

But how do you spell unefficiant ??

i n e f f i c i e n t

I used to live round the corner from there when I was a smelly student a few years ago. I could quite understand the lights failing causing the traffic to flow much better. You essentinal have a main road (A38) being crossed with another A-road which on one side is split around the supermarket to make a little one-way system. So there isn't really any sort of 'minor' road a such, though the A38 would tend to have the main flow of traffic.

Things got far worse overnight a few years back when they introduced the bus lanes along the A38 there. A vital lane being removed made it bottleneck quite badly, and driving from Northfield to the Uni took 10 minutes longer (i.e doubling in time). The bus took longer too, so everyone was a loser with that crap idea!

Try getting an ambulance through that junction with the lights and horns on. Traffic is always s**te and the way its designed there is nowhere people can go to get out of the way. I feel a little daily sabotage coming on. ;-)

Yes. That is quite possible. I was around there then too. My usual 10 minute wait was about 30 seconds, and I even was courteous enough to let someone pull out of a side road in front. I was so relaxed because there was less traffic.

But another hypothesis, there was possibly a power failiure. Many of the shops round there were shut off, and so I was thinking that possibly people had gone home early and consequently, less traffic anyhow.

Having said that, there wasn't a power cut in the entire area of birmingham, so there would have still been lots of traffic from other areas traversing the streets of Selly Oak. So I guess my point is moot.

Cya Simon

My journey to work takes me through a set of lights that always has traffic queued up at all three roads involved. Occaisionally the lights are out and when this happens there are no queues at all, just like you experienced.

Makes you wonder doesn't it!

The message from Simon Barr contains these words:

I tried pointing this out to Hounslow's Traffic Engineers and got the impression that since I hadn't studied for years to be a traffic engineer I wasn't allowed an opinion.

What I do know is that from time to time people used to reverse over the control box at Steve Biko Way just to get some respite.

Should I ask *how* you know this ?

:-)

Twas Thu, 16 Oct 2003 15:52:58 +0100 when Guy King put finger to keyboard producing:

no traffic lights = less queing traffic, what are they studying to come to a different conclusion? economics I'm sure ;o)

-- Regards. Mark.(AKA, Mr.Nice.) ___________________________________________________________ "To know the character of a man, give him anonymity" - Mr.Nice.

The message from Simon Barr contains these words:

Saw it done at least once! Not that I ever did it. No. Not even with any of the fleet of minibuses I ran at the time. No.

Even worse when plod is on traffic duty. The whole thing grinds to an even bigger halt.

-- Malc Likewise it is interesting to consider the ecology of the artifactual world, especially the phylogeny and taxonomy of bookbinding structures.

^^^^^^ So it wasn't English you were studying then. ;-)

-- Malc Likewise it is interesting to consider the ecology of the artifactual world, especially the phylogeny and taxonomy of bookbinding structures.

Queing traffic = more polution as well?

Mark S.

In Sunderland, the Council has a policy of adding a new set of traffic lights every other week at least, to various parts of the city. Another of their favourite schemes is adding lights to roundabouts...

I am in the firm belief that they got a good deal from a company making traffic lights, so they bought loads. One particular stretch of road has had a total of 5 new sets of lights added to it, this a stretch of not even a third of a mile. 4 sets have been added in the last year (they haven't been working that length of time as it too them that bloody long to finish), 2 of the 4 used to be zebra crossings and are less than 100m from other traffic lights (an old set and one of the new set!).

I'll get off my rant box now.