At the moment, Nottingham City and County Councils are peeing me off. Big time.
Since January, roadworks have been springing up all over the place. They conform to the usual standard protocol – dig a big hole, put temporary lights up to cause severe disruption, then do virtually nothing for three months. Sometimes, put a big yellow sign up several months before to warn people that you’re going to deliberately cause severe disruption for the whole of the summer.
Road Layout Near Chalfont Drive
The area around the Chalfont Drive Test Centre (Broxtowe Borough) has always had the most ridiculous road layouts imaginable. It is primarily populated by old people in those purpose-built bungalows, but to a forward-thinking council (of which ours are two such examples) this means you need a lot of cycle lanes.
I always wondered what those old people do when I’m not there.
Basically, the main roads are (or were) split into a parking zone down the left, a cycle lane in the middle, and a narrow bit left over on the right side which cars are currently allowed to use (at the discretion of the council chieftains). The speed limit is up and down like a bloody yo-yo (and bearing in mind the area we are talking about, no one follows the 20mph ones and you always have a white van stuck up your backside), there are painted hatch markings in 1 metre wide semicircles next to the kerb at junctions, chicanes, and all kinds of other things you find right at the end of the Highway Code section on road markings you won’t see anywhere except in Nottingham. To be fair, there were a few stretches where the road layout was vaguely normal.
Of course, on the rare occasions a cyclist does travel down those roads, you can bet your last dollar that they won’t be in the cycle lane. It’ll either be the pavement, or slap in the middle of the part of the road the council forgot to do something else with and left for cars to drive in. Those idiots in Spandex are the worst offenders for not using cycle lanes.
But this arrangement wasn’t complicated enough – sorry, I mean it wasn’t safe enough – for the clowns at the council offices.
I went down there last week with a pupil, and coming up to one of the roundabouts I talked her through how to do it… and suddenly found myself in the middle of two cycle lanes! Yes, two cycle lanes. They’ve now put cycle lanes all around the roundabout covering all exits, and this means that they need to have forks in those lanes – so you end up with the most bizarre combination of white lines where one cycle lane from one entry joins the lane on the roundabout, but also branches off the first exit! There are pictures of cycles all over the bloody road!
On top of that, they have removed a lane from Beechdale Road and are doing the same all the way down. From the holes that have been dug, it seems they are putting in chicanes with parking spaces between. The roundabout at the end of Robin’s Wood Road is chaotic first thing in the morning – but at least it had two lanes for people going in other directions than towards Nottingham. Not anymore, though. It’s one lane in all round.
It’s about time these morons woke up and smelled the coffee. There are millions of cars on the road, so why keep doing things that deliberately make it difficult for the majority? Why keep catering for minorities? Hardly anyone uses the damned cycle lanes, and certainly not enough to justify keep building more of them? How many people have been injured to justify reducing road capacity in an already heavily congested area?
They are on a different planet – and should be fixing potholes properly instead of wasting money like this. It isn’t as if they work nights to get it done quickly, either.