Chaos, more than usual, in Newton Abbot.

The Team arrived from ISCA Scaffolding (the best Scaffolding Firm I know) on Thursday . As there is not much room in the bus station it will cause problems. Not on the same scale as Global Warming true, but as you can see in the left hand picture there are a lot of people using the 79 bus stop. This is a local stop and not very big. Up where the barriers are in place is the stop used by the 85A, the 39 and the X64 which go to such far flung places like Teighmouth, Dawlish, Chudliegh and Exeter. So now 5 or 6 buses will be trying to get into the one small local bus stop. Where are they all going to go?

In the past if the bus station got a little full we could always drive round the block, took about two minutes. Unfortunatly the are now roadworks at the exit to the bus station and driving round the block would take 15 minutes if you were lucky. As you can see from the picture below the temporary traffic lights at the road works have been really well though out. The zebra crossing is the first problem. The lights change to green and you drive forward and some one walks on to the crossing. While you are there the lights change and traffic appears from the other direction. They can not get out because you are now blocking the road. Gridlock. A couple of other problems, one is something that every erector of temporary traffic light should know but seems to ignore. Car drivers can not or will not read the sign that says, "When red light shows wait here." A few do but most drive up to the lights and stop. This does not leave room for buses to get past them and they end up having to reverse out of the way. By the time they have done this the lights have changed and they end up waiting twice as long. When will they ever learn. 'They' in this case is not just the car drivers but the people who put the lights up. Why not put the lights up next to the notice instead of 10 feet past the notice. Then the car drivers will stop in the right place and not in the way. Maybe!

An other problem at the road works if once you get through the lights there are a set of traffic lights and some idiot in the Department of Traffic Lights decided that being on Green for 5 seconds was quite long enough thank you very much. Well it bloody well isn't. Take a drive out one day at lunch time and see for your self. It's called testing. Try it now and then. Get out of the office, there are plenty of examples in history where testing was neglected with not good results. If the builders of the Titanic had put 3500 people on the ship while it was still in Belfast and said,"Right, everyone get in a lifeboat." we might not have had two good films and hundreds of documentries and 1500 dead people.