Maybe it’s like this everywhere but wow there is a shed load of roadworks right now. A few weeks back a motorway trip from here to London was like a Chris Rea, Road to Hell video. On this weekday, the 200 miles we travelled was for over half of them within roadworks. 3 lanes down to 2 or 1. Most of that done at crawling speed. Usually you can divert down the other possible motorway but that was basically a car park due to its own road work hell. A 4 hour journey ended up being double that. We even had traffic jams on the way back, at 2am…
It’s not just the motorways sadly….. Around our little bit of the Yorkshire countryside, the road work plague has gone into overdrive. We don’t have many roads here and at this time of year they should be muddy but quiet. They are definitely quiet as a good proportion of them are closed, partially blocked or about to be hit..
Mr Saddo got his map out and counted. I really need a life….
Our village has basically one road which then eventually branches out into 10 smaller roads heading out in various directions. Of those 10 branches 6 currently have road works badly effecting them, 2 more are closed for months and one of the last untouched roads is about to be hit for weeks…
Here when a road closes down the diversion takes you miles and miles in completely the wrong direction. So much worse when the diversion has to avoid other diversions. Deep sigh.
But there is a scary underlying thought here. All these roadworks around the world need lots and lots of signs, cones, barriers, speed cameras, portacabins, trucks, lighting, diggers, steamrollers and traffic lights. A mind boggling amount of stuff. For that motorway I mentioned at the start, apparently someone worked out that in the last 5 years it’s had over 100,000 different road works…. Imagine that spread across all the roads. Now imagine road utopia and there are no roadworks anywhere. WHERE DO THEY STORE ALL THE SIGNS and BARRIERS and EVERYTHING.
They can’t store it, we don’t have the storage capacity anywhere. There won’t be anywhere we can put this stuff except on the roads and motorways. Put the stuff on a road and it becomes a road works…. So we have to have roadworks and lots of them just to put stuff somewhere never mind if we actually need to fix a bit of tarmac.
We have created a Frankenstein Invasion, the Roadwork Monsters are among us permanently. All those dystopian movies about AI being the biggest threat to humanity and actually we end up losing control to ROAD CLOSED signs. I guess we had better just get used to being controlled and diverted in wrong directions.
A Dad trying to cope with the loss of his Partner and becoming a single parent. 
Same right across Canada. Summer here is often called road repair/construction/upgrade season. It doesn’t end.
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This is indeed a disturbing and scary thought
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There is a deep miscommunication and disorientation in the intentions of these kind of works, I am afraid
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It’s the same in New Zealand. Roadcones everywhere, it’s like they breed like rabbits and feed off the roads themselves.
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I had a friend who got caught in a circle of road construction where, inless you knew the area well, detours led to other detours. It took him an hour to find his way out of what was normally a 2-mile drive at 60+mph.
I once drove home from Hollywood and literally every freeway had construction and closures. I was eventually so furious that I started intentionally running over the traffic cones (in a crawling traffic jam). Not my most adult moment, but it felt good!
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I never thought of roadworks that way but it’s true. There is more than only a few people working on a road and getting the traffic to a standstill. However, it is the time of the year where constructions are appearing like mushrooms. Hopefully in November they are all gone again… until spring.
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This past summer we finally got to see significant updating of local roads which have all been neglected far too long. Luckily we never experienced long delays. It boggles the mind to think of how they will repair the roads in the states affected by that last hurricane. I should think your supply of cones and signs could find a home. Well, the cones anyway. I don’t know why maintenance has to wait until it’s a major problem everywhere. What do we pay tax for. Never mind, don’t answer that!
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We have had three way lights at the end of our road for TWO MONTHS and they have done nothing, other than make pretty patterns on the road where the potholes and mini sinkholes are, and move the barriers twice. Today they started digging up the road four roads away with no traffic warning, cones, barriers or anything else.
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The bane of my driving existence!!! 😆
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yes, it’s been one of those summers in Nottingham too. We had one about twenty years ago too – hit roadworks, try another route, hit more roadworks, repeat. It took me an hour to do a 20 minute journey last month – no queues because it was night time, but I think someone had moved some signs as I got locked into a massive circle of blockages and diversions and ended up retracing my steps and trying a dfferent route. madness!
Your theory that they store signs by opening new roadworks would make a great film . . . 🙂
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same here/ think they must be using up their roads budge…..
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I had to ignore a sign saying [ Access Only ] t’other day. I’d already been diverted all over the shop and realised it was bonkers. Local knowledge made me realise that those in charge had cocked up (as usual). Still, at least this last time, I wasn’t in a hurry with some old fella who’d flagged me down, covering the back seat in blood. Sometimes these things happen when old people play at cutting hedges with a machete. Not a good idea to then put your other hand up to pull a twig. Anyways, he was alright, I got him sorted with me makeshift First Aid and got him to hospital in time to get a meccano set fitted into his hand. It does piss me off though, that some farmers still find it funny to turn signposts round the wrong way in these here parts.
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Sounds like a global road construction pandemic. Same here in New York. I think the road workers are enjoying playing with our lives, keeping us on our toes trying to find our way home!
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I know I often urge you to come to Canada, but if you hate roadwork that much, stay in England. We have two seasons here in Canada, Winter, and Roadwork! Our roads get so beat up in winter we spend Spring, Summer, and Fall fixing them, only to get them beat up the following Winter.
But I will say this: late fall and early winter it is like driving in Road Heaven, if there were such a place. I know there isn’t, because once the snow flies, they are soon enough Hell again!
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These days I only drive about 2 miles per week — to the local Kroger store and back home — so I haven’t had to deal with road work at all in several years now! But yes, I do remember those days … and not with fondness!
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🤣🤣🤣🤣 It’s the SIGNS! Maybe all those extra signs can be recycled or repurposed. Then they won’t need to do so much slow “work”😂
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Those signs are speaking to me. But what are they saying?
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Oh yeah, so many roads are up in a heap, its awful, it is the same here in cork in Ireland, traffic is up in a heap too because of it!
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