Neil Williams wrote:

On Mon, 25 Jul 2005 21:45:35 +0100, steve
wrote:

One the penalises the selfish. Box junction blocking causes congestion.

It does. *But*, often, the box junctions are poorly-designed such
that it is easy, by a slight misjudgement, to end up being stuck in
the box inadvertently. That needs the junction to be redesigned, not
for lots of people to be fined.

I disagree. Most of the prats that go out into box junctions with their
exit blocked know exactly what they are doing and just don't give a
damn. Ditto for the ones that run red lights (and I would like to see
very much tougher penalties for that offence which endangers life).

Ideally the cameras should cover both if they are installed.

My personal view is that I am against traffic enforcement cameras, and
would rather see more police officers out enforcing the law, and using
discretion as appropriate. An increase in the level of fines would go
some way to funding this.

Box junctions help make traffic flow freely and prevent congestion.

I have lived in countries where they do not have this concept at all.
Traffic utterly ignores traffic lights at rush hour and a solid
herringbone of interlocked vehicles develops. They needed 2 or 3
policemen on every junction in the city for 2 hours morning and evening
to try and prevent complete gridlock. They spend most of their time
flailing arms uselessly in the air and blowing whistles. It is funny to
watch...

Regards,
Martin Brown

Often caused by a bad junction, usually one with 2 traffic lights close
together. The second light is red far too long, and so traffic from one
phase of the first light fills up all the available space and traffic
from the second phase can never move.

In message .com, at
04:18:50 on Tue, 26 Jul 2005, Earl Purple
remarked:
Often caused by a bad junction, usually one with 2 traffic lights close
together. The second light is red far too long, and so traffic from one
phase of the first light fills up all the available space and traffic
from the second phase can never move.

I've seen that in Central London.

A junction on a one-way street where a road joins from the left.

The road ahead fills up with traffic emerging from your left, and
there's no gap between the rear of the last car to emerge, and the box.

The traffic then sits there, stationary, all the time your light is
green.

Just as it starts to move, and leave you a gap to escape into across the
box, your light goes red.

The gap then fills up with traffic emerging from your left.

Rinse and repeat.
--
Roland Perry