Safe Speed Forums

There's a junction on my route home, just north of the M4 at Wroughton. It used to look like this, where I would be approaching from the bottom left and exiting pretty much straight up.

The approach road is a 2 lane d/c with a 40mph limit and is well signed left lane straight on and right lane right or all the way round. Nice and simple. The park and ride on the right is accessable to both sides of the d/c via demand controlled traffic lights and the vets on the left is also accessible from both sides but via a central refuge area.

As far as I was concerned there wasn't much actually wrong with the junction.

It has now been significantly altered. I couldn't find a recent aerial photograph so bear with me whilst I try to explain.

The roundabout has been completely removed and replaced with a sort of t-junction, traffic light controlled all round, with the 'main' route being straight on following my original route. About 200 yards before the vet turning the 2 lanes split into 3. L1 signed for straight on or left, L2 straight on only and L3 right (and with hatching between 2 and 3.) Shortly after the extra lane begins there is a set of traffic lights which control access into the vets. Off hand I can't actually recall what's happened to the access into the park and ride...

After the vets there is ANOTHER set of traffic lights controlling traffic on the 't-junction' bit, BUT there are still 2 lanes heading straight on and 1 turning right. The major problem is about 200 yards from this second set of lights the two lanes then merge back down into 1. The natural flow of the road would be for the leftmost lane to merge to the right (there are often parked cars here), but the road markings are the oposite way round with the right hand lane merging left. This is our scene.

(This photo shows the location of the lights and the black line shows the duration of the extra straight on lane)


Last night I was stopped by the second set of lights. There was equal traffic in both straight on lanes and I chose to position myself in L2. There was a car and a LWB van in L1 and two cars in front of me. My intention was not to try to 'jump' anyone, just to merge where suitable. I think the car at the front in L1 might have missed a gear, or was just really slow in pulling away because the van accelerated hard and then braked and dropped quite a long way back, opening up a suitable place where I decided to make my merge. The two cars ahead of me in L2 passed the car in L1 and I maintained my speed as the van slowed to position myself next to the gap.

As I was passing it, the van accelerated hard again (my mistake at this point I should have backed off and dropped in behind the van). He positioned himself alongside me (his front end next to my B-pillar). I couldn't boot it because the car had already started to move over and I decided that braking would have landed me in the side of the van as he pulled accross. So I held course with the van forcing me out (thankfully the road is very wide here). There was a parked car in his way so he had to back off and allow me over thankfully.

Now. I realise that I did make mistakes in my judgement of the situation, but I strongly believe that the poor junction design played a significant part as well. I can't think for the life of me why it was designed that way.

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Science won over religion when they started installing lightning rods on churches.

I'll leave others to comment on the near miss itself, but it's as councils have a "f**k up junctions" budget or something. I'm told that this perfectly good unsignalled 3-lane roundabout in Reading has now been replaced with a traffic light crossroads. The 2 lanes of traffic going straight on has to squeeze into 1 lane, and the lights are badly phased. I've refused to even go there since I heard about it, but I hear that there are constant queues there. I used to live very close to it and I never had to wait for more than about 15 seconds before. The roundabout was absolutely perfect, and had only been built 10 years ago...an unforgiveable waste of money (but never mind, as with most councils, they can get it back through their parking regime).

The council's excuse: "We couldn't control the flow before the junction had lights, but now we can". Quite. At least the complete madman in charge of schemes like this thankfully stood down before the last council election, knowing that he would be trounced. It's not the only junction he's wrecked; he's done a very similar thing further down the same road. People like that in those sorts of positions are positively dangerous, literally in the case of things like Sixy's resultant near miss.

I wonder how long it will be before those chaining themselves to trees to stop new road schemes are pro-motorist rather than anti. Certainly the red "new road layout ahead" sign always fills me with dread, and I rather think that since it's my money they're spending, that's not right.