On 2017-02-14 23:01:46 +0000, Richard J. said:

Ealing have been doing that for several years, e.g. the traffic lights
at the T-junction outside Acton Town station (opposite the entrance to
the LT Museum Depot) were replaced by a mini-roundabout and a zebra
crossing about 5 years ago.

Luton airport for years had a terrible congestion problem on a Monday
morning. This started happening soon after a set of traffic lights was
installed at the approach roundabout.

"Get rid of them" said us regulars.

"No" said the airport.

And on it went.

Eventually they did get rid of them, and the problem went away.

The problem with traffic lights, of course, is that they block traffic
movement during the "overlap" between two phases - replace with
something else e.g. a roundabout and traffic can move all of the time.
What you replace it with does require some thought as roundabouts don't
cope well with unbalanced flows, but lights on all approaches to a
junction basically waste time. If lights are needed to balance flows,
not having lights on one branch of the roundabout works quite well -
during the "overlap" time, traffic can then flow from that branch.

Neil
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Neil Williams
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