There are a couple of things that I find rather baffling.



First of all, on the outskirts of Coventry they're redeveloping a site. 
Apparently there was once a factory there. Ever since I've known it, 
it's been a wasteland. But now it's a housing estate. Nothing unusual or 
surprising about that.

So they're building a new housing estate, right? That means that they 
can basically choose to put the roads, the houses, and so forth 
absolutely *anywhere* within that space. (Although the location of any 
existing underground services might make it more or less expensive to 
put things in certain places.)

As part of this development, they've build a small roundabout. Which 
also isn't surprising.

What is utterly beyond my powers of comprehension is that EVERY SINGLE 
EXIT of this roundabout has a pedestrian crossing across it. O_O

Why in the name of all that is sweet and pure would you do something so 
obviously stupid? I mean, I can understand that if you've build a road 
network and it becomes evident that you need a crossing, you might be 
forced to put one in a less then optimal location. But this is a BRAND 
NEW ESTATE! You can design the crossings to be ANYWHERE! So WHY the hell 
have you put them in the most stupid location available? Virtually any 
other location on the entire road would be less hazardous then just 
here. WHY, DAMN IT!?! >_<



A little further along the road, we come to another curious perversion. 
I've seen it in several other cities (most notably on my way to and from 
Manchester).

What they've done is to build a huge 4-lane dual-carriageway. Then 
they've put 30-foot high vertical walls on either side of it. This thing 
slices through the middle of the city, keeping the traffic away from all 
the hazards of the people trying to get from one side to the other. 
(They now do that via one of the numerous bridges high above the road.)

All of which makes perfect sense. The thing that makes absolutely no 
semblance of sense at all is that THEY'VE SET A 30 MPH SPEED LIMIT!

Now when you're driving down a road with houses on one side and shop 
fronts on the other side, and there are so many cars parked on either 
side that it's practically a one-way street, you can understand it 
having a low speed limit. But why, WHY would you go to the exorbitant 
expense of building this 4-lane juggernaut of a road, channelling the 
traffic away from all the hazards and allowing it to swiftly code from A 
to B, and then give it actually the same speed limit, utterly defeating 
almost all of its advantages?

Seriously, why the hell would you build a high-speed traffic link and 
then set a stupendously low speed limit on it?



I can just hear Terry Wogan now crying "is it me?!"

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