Crazy Intersections of our time: #31

the madnessThis 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).