Not again?

Which I'm sure you're all saying, yep the traffic lights on the Bridge were playing up again again. Damn this is getting a tired old refrain. I was coming up Mitton Street and joined the queue. Being a local I nipped up Severn Road and down Lichfield Street to get to York Street that way. Now here's something that may shock some locals especially newcomers, but (whisper it) York Street is two lanes. I can hear some gasps from here (along with "well yes of course it is"'s). It gets better - York Street is a merger system. Two lanes merge, one from Lion Hill and the other from Lichfield Street. That means if you're coming from Lichfield Street and want to stay in the left hand-lane you can just pull out into York Street.

So why am I making a fuss? Here's why (from 192.com):

To the bottom right we have Lichfield Street, top right Lion Hill; both feeding into York Street which extends off to the left. From the tiny red cross we have a lane divider, oh wait no we don't. In fact there are no road markings at all until we get to the end of the street. Better yet if you pretend to drive in from the left you suddenly get stopped by the new car-parking bay painted there. Here's a telling picture from Google Maps:


What you're looking for is the two side-by-side cars on the left, one is in the right-hand lane of York Street, the other is parked quite legitimately in the bay, does anyone believe you could fit another car between them?

So no lane divider and a new parking bay, why the sudden appearance of the parking bay? Because further up they built a road to service some new flats and therefore lost two spaces, so it was moved up the road, after all York Street's only one lane isn't it. If it wasn't it'd have a lane divider wouldn't it?

Anyway back to the lights, it's difficult to know the problem. My best guess would be that a bus stopped next to Harold Davies Drive to let someone on/off/on-and-off; this would cause the traffic to build up behind it as you can't overtake it (there's a queue waiting on the other side to cross the bridge), this stops the traffic on the town side and the lights go "Hey everything's stopped moving I'll change." The Areley side gets a green light but can't move because the traffic is still coming over the bridge, so the traffic lights go "Hey nobody's moving I'll change" and a new stream of traffic comes over to join the tail-end of what's already passing through.

Of course it could have been the reverse because, as already mentioned, the lights aren't linked up to the pedestrian crossing in Bridge Street and, even better, the amount of traffic let through is long enough to both reach these lights and extend back over the bridge blocking that up.

This could of course all be solved by putting up some sort of camera detection system to monitor whether the way is actually clear before switching, oh wait there's one already there... I think.

Let's make a phone call to the department in charge. Long wait before a young lady picks up, ah of the two people in the department one's on a site-visit the other's not at his desk. I'll make this clear I've called the Traffic Signal Faults division for the entire county (population: 550,900, area: 1,741 square kilometres) how many lights do they have to look after? If they're all as faulty as these they've got one heck of a job on their hands.