Going nowhere fast

(Incandescent rage not pictured.)

Few things annoy me more than suddenly finding myself in an unexpected traffic jam.

True, we’re pretty lucky in much of Cumbria – miles of lovely roads with scenic views, beautiful villages and relatively light traffic. Of course, that doesn’t always apply. Every town has it’s queues, and when the tourists show up, it can get particularly frustrating.

I’m lucky enough to have a cross-county drive into Ambleside to work. Mostly, it’s a delight – Windermere glistening on my left, the mountains rising in front of me as I arrive at the office.

Heading home at night is mostly good too, but half-terms, bank holidays and the summer can easily add half an hour to my normal 50 minute drive, as I struggle to even get across Ambleside, whilst the seasonal visitors make their way back to their temporary homes after a grand day out.

When the tourists aren’t about, preparations are made to ensure everything is nice for their next arrival. This regularly includes roadworks of some variety, and the inevitable, dreaded, temporary traffic lights. Almost without fail, these appear to have been installed on a default setting, letting the same, limited, amount of vehicles through, in turns, from each direction. I’m guessing the setting has a name like “chaos” or “bedlam”.

Many main routes have a particular traffic flow, with more vehicles travelling one direction in the morning, and the opposite way home at night. Despite daily reports on the wonders of futuristic new technology, no-one appears to have figured out how to apply our genius and endless servers rammed-full of data to actually make the lights let more cars through from the busier side. Then do the same the other way at night.

We’ve all had the delight of stop-start traffic for miles, only to get through the lights and discover that no-one is waiting on the other side. Perhaps all roadworks should have a team of people at points within a sensible radius, reporting back on queues so that light phasing can be optimised. Maybe contractors could be persuaded not just fire them up and forget about them. Here’s a thought – maybe do some research first?

Or... how about we fine them big time for causing avoidable queues. All that time wasted. So much fuel needlessly burnt, adding to our pollution problems. Enough anger to power a small city for a week (and that’s just in my car).

I discovered a new type of nightmarish traffic light failure this week but luckily for me, I wasn’t affected. Many were though, as chaotic roadworks on the A590 near Ulverston saw tailbacks that stretched between Swarthmoor and Newby Bridge. Six miles of queuing traffic. Six!

Why? Because contractors, working on behalf of BT, ignored instructions from Highways England which said they could only install lights if they were manually operated during the day. And guess what? They weren’t. When Barrow and Furness MP Jon Woodcock described this as “totally unacceptable”, I have to applaud him for his restraint.

I would have been far less polite.

This post first appeared as the lead piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 9th of March 2018.

The papers ran with a traffic picture, and the caption "Issue: Unexpected traffic jams can be annoying". I presume that if you were in the six-miler, "annoying" might not be exactly the word you'd use...

(CD A-Z: Steve Wonder's "The Definitive Collection".)