roadworks

Going back even further into stuff I should have blogged about at the time, I've been experiencing quite the horrible time with traffic lights.

It started about 6 months ago when they started doing some work in Farnham.

It appeared to be water works, but it was quite widespread.  Indeed, they shut off Upper Hale Road, which is a pretty major route and takes a lot of traffic - particularly at commuting time.  There are a couple of ways around, but most are fairly long-winded.  They diverted traffic around, but it sent it into the clutches of more of the same roadworks, so the roads got pretty busy for a while.

And then they got worse.

You see, at the exact same time some work was done on the house that's on the corner of that upper hale junction.  This necessitated lights as they had to block off one of the carriageways, so now you've got traffic being diverted that's also being subjected to temporary lights, and temporary lights are always a traffic snarl up.

Okay, no problem, I can take a slightly longer route along Weybourne Road that allows me to avoid that whole junction... except they then started some work at the cross-roads there that also necessitated some temporary lights.  So you've now got people who know the ways round the original lights adding to the originally busy traffic that's also subject to lights.

To get around these I had to use one of my super long cuts, which meant I still had to go through the lights, but I was coming at them from a direction with a lot fewer cars, so I had one long wait, rather than 3 or 4.  However, it was a good 10 minutes plus longer journey time anyway, so I wasn't really saving anything.

And then things got even more fun, as they started some work on the roads near Farnham station and suddenly we've got temporary lights on the A31 and a load of displaced traffic as well.

Honestly, it felt like they were attempting to block me in with roadwork's - it eventually got to the stage that I couldn't even contemplate a super-bonkers "drive in the opposite direction" route to get avoid roadworks as they had some in the other direction as well.

I copied the following pic from a website that shows works. I'm not sure it's 100% clear, but you can see all the roadworks in what is a very small area so you get the point.

The thing is, though, once they'd finished all that in Farnham, they've decided to dig up Alton as well.  It's water works again, so I'm guessing they're doing the same sort of thing.  They're certainly slowly making their way up a road, but with these Alton works they're doing them across one of the main routes in from the A31.

Indeed, while there are some rat-runs you can use, they're huge extra distance.  Plus they're on quite minor roads, and it can be quite painful if cars are coming the other way.  I actually swore off using one of them some time ago for these reasons.

With how early I come in in the morning, it usually only adds about 5 minutes to my journey, but in the evenings if I'm not hanging round it can be a good 10 to 15 minutes.  On a half hour journey that's pretty significant.

At least with these they're not really doubling them up.