Crazy Intersections of our time: #31

This week — the stretch of Ade­laide Road where it inter­sects with Brit­o­mart Street/Herald Street, and then, a lit­tle fur­ther up the road, with Lux­ford Street.

As you can see on our hasti­ly assem­bled lit­tle map on the right there, North-flow­ing traf­fic splits into two lanes once it gets past the Britomart/Herald inter­sec­tion, so right-turn­ing traf­fic gets its own turn­ing lane into Lux­ford.

Now, this would work fine if there weren’t a cou­ple of 5 minute park­ing spots (out­side a dairy) in the straight-ahead lane (pho­to 2). Cars parked in that 5 minute spot (indi­cat­ed by blue in the graph­ic) act as a road­block, so once the turn­ing lane hits a red light, traf­fic quick­ly backs up to the point where no-one can actu­al­ly get into the straight-ahead lane (pho­to 3).

And because the turn­ing lane only gets a short green once every cycle, the result is grid­lock back down Ade­laide Road, as all the traf­fic want­i­ng to go straight (into town) can’t get into the required lane (pho­tos 1 and 4, the lat­ter look­ing South back towards the inter­sec­tion).

It’s even more frus­trat­ing dur­ing the morn­ing rush hour, as there’s vir­tu­al­ly no south­bound traf­fic any­way. All those cars sit­ting at the red turn­ing light are invari­ably stopped for no-one.

Mad­ness.

To make mat­ters worse, the turn­ing red light was the result of anoth­er prob­lem that used to occur at this inter­sec­tion.

Back in the day, it was just a nor­mal old red/green light — you could take the turn if the way was clear. Prob­lem with that was that peo­ple head­ed south and turn­ing left into Lux­ford, would have to give way to traf­fic turn­ing across them from their right.Nat­u­ral­ly, south­bound straight-ahead dri­vers who could­n’t bear wait­ing behind a car giv­ing way would swerve out and around — the car turn­ing right into Lux­ford was now run­ning the risk of get­ting T‑boned by the impa­tient straight-ahead dri­ver.

And hence the turn­ing light for turn­ing traf­fic com­ing from the South. But the thing is — dri­vers com­ing from the North who are turn­ing left have no way of know­ing they don’t have to give way!There’s no free turn sign or green light to guide them around the cor­ner (pho­to 4), so cars still reg­u­lar­ly give way to the long line of traf­fic oppo­site them wait­ing to make their right hand turn, halt­ing all south­bound traf­fic (in exact­ly the way that used to hap­pen).

(Solu­tion: a big bloody round­about).