Some years back, I saw a wonderful cartoon in “Planning”. The planner was telling his secretary that he liked to think planning combined the best of all property professions, to which she quipped “Yes: the modesty of an architect; the dress sense of a quantity surveyor; the ethics of an estate agent; and the imagination of a highway engineer.” All the attributes seem apposite – but perhaps none more so than that attributed to the highway engineer.
About three years ago, where I live in Suffolk, we suffered a plague of road signs, particularly those advising of speed limit. We have a road sign that tells me as I leave our village I may increase my speed to 40 m.p.h. Well I can if I’m daft. The road is single track with blind bends. Thirty is pushing it, even for someone who doesn’t hang around like me. Four hundred yards and I reach another road sign telling me to slow down to thirty. Why bother at all with the forty limit?
As I drive on, I have various signs telling me that: the road is bendy; to beware of toads (or are they frogs?); and to watch out for old folk should one get under the wire from the nearby home. I don’t think I’d be able to see a small toad at night when they are supposed to come out. I have never seen one of the elderly residents near the road, let alone on it. What use these signs are, I know not.
On some roads, changes in speed limit are so frequent and arbitrary that you scarcely know what speed you should be doing. The A1 around Sandy and St Neots takes some beating - as does the A12 between Wickham Market and the outskirts of Lowestoft.
We simply have too many road signs. They are ugly; most of them have their own poles rather than share; they clutter up both urban and rural environments; and they are distracting – you can easily miss the important ones in a whole tree of irrelevant and useless information. (And they also cost a fair bit.)
But once they are up, they are there to stay, no power on earth will make the people who put it there in the first place admit they were wrong. However, no-one seems to inspect the signs to make sure they are still relevant and fulfilling their function – and many of the more important ones get hidden behind trees.
And they won’t move them, even if they are obviously in the wrong place. Where my parents live in Hertfordshire they have a flashing thirty miles an hour sign sited well into the village and beyond a notoriously dangerous junction – despite vocal complaints from residents. They even replaced the sign exactly where it was originally when a speeding car skidded off the road and demolished it.
And who is to blame for all the unnecessary, confusing and badly sited signs. Yes, you have it, the highway engineer or technician. Everywhere I go they seem to get in the way, cause endless delays and generate vast amounts of unnecessary work and bureaucracy.
Even DfT seems to despair. In their report “Increasing the Understanding of Traffic Signs” they say “….it is not surprising that traffic signing is regarded by many practitioners as needing to be improved and at worst to be a disaster area." They cite:
· lack of expertise on the part of the practitioners;
· a fear of litigation if too few signs are used in a scheme – no-one gets criticised for erecting too many signs;
· the fact that in many local authorities, a number of people in difference departments or sections can erect signs, e.g. parking signs by the parking manager or cycle signs by the cycling officer; and
· the inexperience of scheme designers.
Where I used to stay in Letchworth, they allowed parking where people had to come out of their drives unsighted into fast moving traffic, but had double yellow lines on the other side of the road which abutted open space and had no emerging traffic.
Highway engineers do everything by the book – their book. They move glacial pace. My wife was recently involved with putting a dropped kerb access to a village post office. The works cost less than £500 – but the legal agreement cost over £3,000 – and it took nearly a year to put in place before the works could start.
They refused to allow enforcement in the town centre where new public realm works have been installed, because they technically needed DfT permission to move a road sign. As a result, people were parking on the pavements and driving the wrong way up one-way streets endangering life and limb. Did the local highways people care: did common sense prevail? No, neither, provided it is done by the book, Mr Jobsworth can rest safe.
So what can we do about this? Quite frankly I don’t know – highway engineers are a law unto themselves. They always say they aren’t trying to be difficult. Perhaps it’s congenital?
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