Let me start with the obvious, roadworks are a pain. Whilst they are necessary, and at the best of times help improve essential services to the surrounding area, at the worst of times they are just an inconvenience and a tremendous hassle.
Looking online at social media, you are bound to find someone complaining about a particular set of roadworks or how their journey has increased drastically. One particular set of roadworks, on one of Bristol’s busiest roads, has caused a major problem to those unlucky enough to drive up and down the A-road.
The A432 was named as Bristol’s most traffic-clogged road in April. Encompassing Stapleton Road, Fishponds Road and Badminton Road, the A-road has long-caused traffic dilemmas, but recent events have meant that the situation on Fishponds Road is simply idiotic.
One anonymous Facebook user said that it takes 50 minutes to drive from Straits Parade to McDonalds on Fishponds Road, a distance of less than a mile. Others have said that it has taken up to two hours to get from Downend to Old Market.
I use the route myself mostly everyday for work purposes and I agree that it is borderline insanity. There’s roadworks in Easton, on Stapleton Road, which cause severe delays, but the roadworks near Lodge Causeway just produces chaos on a massive scale.
The roadworks in question sit on Fishponds Road, east of Lodge Causeway, near the Aldi store. The three-laned road (including the bus lane) narrows to one lane, controlled by three-way temporary traffic lights, at this point you can probably see where this is going.
At rush hour, and every other hour it seems, traffic is bottlenecked as cars, buses, lorries and cyclists battle to pass through the tightest of gaps, often blocking the way for traffic to flow the other way. This may not sound bad, but these temporary traffic lights have in some cases caused an hour of delays just to move a couple of metres.
So why is this the case? Quite simply, too many traffic lights on Fishponds Road. There are 12 sets of traffic lights, of which the temporary traffic lights are in place of a permanent set, on Fishponds Road, which is 1.6 miles in length. On average, there is a set of lights every 214 metres.
But the temporary traffic lights are sandwiched between perhaps the two busiest junctions on the road, Lodge Causeway and Channons Hill. My question is not why there are roadworks, but was it necessary to disrupt traffic as much as has happened?
One night during this past week, I took the 46 bus from the city centre into Fishponds, passing through the roadworks in question. For a journey which can be done in 25 to 30 minutes, it took me more than an hour, half of it was spent inching through the temporary traffic lights. It was like I was in one of those cheap mobile games trying to move vehicles out of the way to solve the puzzle.
And the saddest thing about all this was that as my music was shuffling, once I had reached the roadworks and grinded to a halt, ‘I’m On My Way ’ by The Proclaimers started playing. The lyrics to the song made it feel a lot worse.
“I took the road that brought me to your home town. I took the bus to streets that I could walk down. ” If I had walked that stretch of the road then it would have been faster than the lunacy that was the bus on Fishponds Road at rush hour.
But my long journey is nothing compared to those sitting in the single-laned traffic for hours trying to head towards the M32. I am lucky that I was on the bus, at the very least I could zone out, but there has to be a better way for the roadworks to have been done than to have ruined everyone’s day.
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