Road closures and signage

[Lockwood]

There is a small bit of road closed near Bordon. The signed diversion is long - through Liphook, down the A3, round the side of Bordon, and back to where you came from.

I understand the point of this route. Need to divert on similar qualities of road, locals will use shortcuts and HGVs cannot use those.

In Liphook, there is a sign on one of the main roads in the village. Road ahead closed. Sort of. It is a retro reflective ROAD CLOSED sign, with a small AHEAD in plain white stuck on, and the electricity company's logo in the corner (actually useful as their diversion signs also have it, so effectively a branded black triangle, and there have been a few simultaneous diversions)

At night, you see the ROAD CLOSED sign. For a closure 3 miles up the road.

This caused fun when that road was closed a little way up the road for some water works. Road closed? Yeah, I don't care. Oh wait, it's actually closed.


Is there a better option here?
Part of me says that a Road Closed at Lindford, or Road Closed after Mill Lane sign would help.
However, I also find those signs quite useless as an outsider. Road Closed after Mill Lane? Cool. Don't know if Tills Lane is before that or after that, so I'll just go for it and see what happens.

I guess ROAD AHEAD CLOSED 3 miles could work, but I don't know if I've ever actually seen that, so there is probably a reason why it isn't used?

[Conekicker]

There is a small bit of road closed near Bordon. The signed diversion is long - through Liphook, down the A3, round the side of Bordon, and back to where you came from.

I understand the point of this route. Need to divert on similar qualities of road, locals will use shortcuts and HGVs cannot use those.

In Liphook, there is a sign on one of the main roads in the village. Road ahead closed. Sort of. It is a retro reflective ROAD CLOSED sign, with a small AHEAD in plain white stuck on, and the electricity company's logo in the corner (actually useful as their diversion signs also have it, so effectively a branded black triangle, and there have been a few simultaneous diversions)

At night, you see the ROAD CLOSED sign. For a closure 3 miles up the road.

This caused fun when that road was closed a little way up the road for some water works. Road closed? Yeah, I don't care. Oh wait, it's actually closed.


Is there a better option here?
Part of me says that a Road Closed at Lindford, or Road Closed after Mill Lane sign would help.
However, I also find those signs quite useless as an outsider. Road Closed after Mill Lane? Cool. Don't know if Tills Lane is before that or after that, so I'll just go for it and see what happens.

I guess ROAD AHEAD CLOSED 3 miles could work, but I don't know if I've ever actually seen that, so there is probably a reason why it isn't used?

Yes, the likes of "Lindford" and "Mill Lane" are useless to strangers and often to locals as well - do you know the name of every side road you pass on your regular journeys? Often quoting a route number can be equally meaningless.

The relative openness of TSRGD Schedule 13, Part 9 would allow "RAC 3 miles", although "ROAD CLOSED 3 miles AHEAD" might read better.

How could you be certain that the place you wanted to get to wasn't over 3 miles ahead, particularly if you are a stranger? So you'd probably be better off following the signed diversion as you come to it, unless you were certain the closure wouldn't affect you.

[Lockwood]

Though there are 3 miles of properties, businesses and turnings to other villages before the closure, so you do not want to follow the diversion.

Locals should know where the closure is, we all got a letter from SSEN about it. Visitors and people newly moved in, not so much.


It is a balance between too much and too little information with closures. There was a closure info sign just past the village that I never actually read all of. I did try to read the top on one journey, the middle on another, and the bottom on a third, but I kept getting drawn to the top so never read the whole thing.

[Chris5156]

This is all complicated because there’s more than one long term closure in the area right now, and the same utility company keeps making long term closures of local roads in the same sort of area and using the same diversion symbol for both directions on every diversion they set up. It makes for a lot of visual noise and invites you to ignore it all.

[FosseWay]

No way of signing these is going to be 100% meaningful to people who don't know the area. If you're driving on local roads in an area you don't know, you have to accept that occasionally you may not get 100% confirmation that the route you want to use is blocked until you reach the actual closure and have to turn round. But heck, you can always find somewhere safe to pull over after the first advance warning sign and take a look at Google...

Nevertheless, these things can be better signed, and even as a local you may not know the street name of the roads concerned. Perhaps it would be better to say "Road ahead closed. No through route to Anyvillage" rather than "Road closed after Mill Lane" or whatever. Sure, it's not perfect, as someone heading to Anytown that is beyond Anyvillage may not know the village name, and signing "No through road to Anytown" may catch people out whose destination is Anyvillage and think the closure's beyond that. But the chances are considerably greater that a non-local will know the names of the settlements they drive through than the names of the individual roads they drive along. Apart from anything else, road signage aimed at drivers specifically gives the former information, even if you're not particularly interested in it, while the latter information is not normally legible while driving unless you're specifically looking for it, and driving at a commensurate speed.

[Lockwood]

No through road to ThisTown
or
No through road to ThisTown Road Closed at ThatVillage

Would be great.

I find it funny on gantries where you get M3 closed A335 and then the next one might say M3 closed Eastleigh...
Because you get A27 closed A259. Then have to wait for one to tell you where the closure actually is. Emsworth? Chichester?


Diversion and closure signage has a lot of scope for improvement, somehow

[Bryn666]

The problem is any specific instructions require bespoke signs and TTM contractors charge extra for those. They're also harder to replace immediately if someone wrecks one, and the information might be of little value to non-locals to begin with.

Where the situation Chris has described with multiple roadworks causing multiple diversions - we need to start being more sensible and make better use of symbols or easily understandable legends that aren't just the generic "diverted traffic". The French have numbered diversion routes for motorway closures, we could probably do similar - "follow D1" etc.

[AAndy]

'ROAD CLOSED AHEAD'.............. If I'm familiar or not that familiar to the area then I would have already looked on live traffic maps to know when these signs appear out of the blue, 99 times out of 100 they are misleading or plain wrong and have learnt to ignore them.

.............Because I know from live traffic that vehicles ARE moving.

......Usually the reason is a deliberate attempt to influence non-locals, a side road closed, or an inconsequential to me road blocked miles ahead.....or just left out there to deter traffic, deliberately put out to deter traffic by locals or night time only?

Here is an example...and its a good one.

The A479 heading out of Boughrood towards Crickhowell was shut for weeks and this diversion sent drivers over a miles further than traveling via the superior quality A4079 A438 and A4078... All high quality wide and NSL apart from the 1/2 mile 40mph A4038.......And to frustrate drivers who took the signed route the council slaps a 40mph limit on several miles of NSL and you also have a further 1/2 mile of 20mph into talgarth to make the journey even more protracted.

The signage.....Imagine most drivers trying to read the signs ...this is the first time anybody is notified of a closure ahead .

[Chris5156]

Because I know from live traffic that vehicles ARE moving.

Beware of that. Google Maps will sometimes assume an absence of all vehicles means the road is clear and will mark it as green on the traffic layer. I've seen closed roads shown in green several times before.

[jnty]

Because I know from live traffic that vehicles ARE moving.

Beware of that. Google Maps will sometimes assume an absence of all vehicles means the road is clear and will mark it as green on the traffic layer. I've seen closed roads shown in green several times before.

Yep, seen this too. Very frustrating when you are trying to divert and Google keeps desperately trying to drag you back to the lovely empty road (except for the massive car crash completely blocking it.)

[AAndy]

Because I know from live traffic that vehicles ARE moving.

Beware of that. Google Maps will sometimes assume an absence of all vehicles means the road is clear and will mark it as green on the traffic layer. I've seen closed roads shown in green several times before.

Yep, seen this too. Very frustrating when you are trying to divert and Google keeps desperately trying to drag you back to the lovely empty road (except for the massive car crash completely blocking it.)

Thanks both but I don't use google maps at all for live traffic info, what I do use depends on what I'm driving, I have a back up paid subscription to a traffic monitoring site which I can't recommend but the generally available and free AA is very quick to update and probably over 80% accurate though it does fall short like when it comes to night time closures showing for daytime. Toyota live is very good as is mercedesme, and I also like range rover/land rovers live status updates but they take a bit longer to implement incidents.

When I was at Great Yarmouth a few weeks ago the live traffic showed the traffic flow over the new third bridge..... but when I got there I had to turn around cause it was vertical and yet to be opened!!!

[Chris5156]

Thanks both but I don't use google maps at all for live traffic info, what I do use depends on what I'm driving, I have a back up paid subscription to a traffic monitoring site which I can't recommend but the generally available and free AA is very quick to update and probably over 80% accurate though it does fall short like when it comes to night time closures showing for daytime. Toyota live is very good as is mercedesme, and I also like range rover/land rovers live status updates but they take a bit longer to implement incidents.

You may know this, but the base map used by AA here, with red/green indications on roads, is just the Google Maps traffic layer.

Toyota and Mercedes use the same data, which is from TomTom - same principle as Google, tracking the movement of TomTom devices instead of Android ones.

[Lockwood]

For context to the initial scenario. The closure is roughly in the red blob.
The blue line is the officially signed diversion. The silver line is just a figment of your imagination and not me drawing along the old A325.
The house icon isn't my house, so I'm not doxxing myself.

The orange line in the bottom right is where the ROAD (ahead) CLOSED sign is. There is no indication on there of just how far away the closure is

Green on closed roads on Google Maps... Yep. Can't have a traffic jam if there's no traffic.

[Big L]

I’ve had it the other way round, when google said a road (the M6 past Hilton Park) was shut when it was very much open, and very quiet. My satnav ETA went up to sometime the next evening, then counted down quite rapidly as I drove towards junction 10.

[AAndy]

Thanks both but I don't use google maps at all for live traffic info, what I do use depends on what I'm driving, I have a back up paid subscription to a traffic monitoring site which I can't recommend but the generally available and free AA is very quick to update and probably over 80% accurate though it does fall short like when it comes to night time closures showing for daytime. Toyota live is very good as is mercedesme, and I also like range rover/land rovers live status updates but they take a bit longer to implement incidents.

You may know this, but the base map used by AA here, with red/green indications on roads, is just the Google Maps traffic layer.

Toyota and Mercedes use the same data, which is from TomTom - same principle as Google, tracking the movement of TomTom devices instead of Android ones.

I do not think its clear cut like that Chris.

I was of the understanding that the AA get its live traffic from different sources including some vehicles and then uses its own AI to provide the live traffic which is not available eleswhere. One of its main sources being INRIX.

Mercedesme uses its and its sisters vehicles live data exporting ability as a cornerpin to its output I understood, but way back before vehicles were 'live' it did use tomtom in the main.

Toyota does not use the same data as Mercedes I can assure you!

[jnty]

I’ve had it the other way round, when google said a road (the M6 past Hilton Park) was shut when it was very much open, and very quiet. My satnav ETA went up to sometime the next evening, then counted down quite rapidly as I drove towards junction 10.

It sometimes forgets sections of road exist completely in my experience! For quite a while it would try to send me via Inverness to avoid an apparently missing section of the A86, and recently forgot a section of local road existed and was trying to send me on diversions and u turns until I passed it. The roads in both cases were fine with no reported incidents, though quieter than expected in the latter case - perhaps as a direct result of the error!

It also thought a local road was closed in both directions for a long time, when in fact it's only ever been closed in one direction.

[Chris5156]

I was of the understanding that the AA get its live traffic from different sources including some vehicles and then uses its own AI to provide the live traffic which is not available eleswhere. One of its main sources being INRIX.

They do, I don't doubt it, and the AA put annotations on the map where they have information about incidents. But what I said is still true - the base map on their website, underneath all their symbols and notes, is just the Google Maps traffic layer! The AA aren't generating their own live traffic map of every road and street in the UK with colour coded speed indications.

Mercedesme uses its and its sisters vehicles live data exporting ability as a cornerpin to its output I understood, but way back before vehicles were 'live' it did use tomtom in the main.

The data produced by a system like that surely isn't even nearly as comprehensive as Google, simply because the sample size will be much, much smaller. Google can tap in to data from about half the mobile phones in the UK; there simply aren't comparable numbers of Mercedes vehicles with active data connections to report back. They must be augmenting their results with data from another supplier.

[wallmeerkat]

"142-mile diversion through Aberdeenshire to last nearly a month due to A93 roadworks

Just one mile of the road will be closed during the resurfacing project."

https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/ne ... diversion/

[traffic-light-man]

Toyota and Mercedes use the same data, which is from TomTom - same principle as Google, tracking the movement of TomTom devices instead of Android ones.

I recently learned that TomTom actually only use a small percentage of data from 'proper' TomTom devices to derive the outputs for its traffic information services these days. I can't quite remember the figure, but it was surprisingly small (to me, anyway). The rest is acquired through other sources and all mashed together to paint a bigger picture.

[SteelCamel]

"142-mile diversion through Aberdeenshire to last nearly a month due to A93 roadworks

Just one mile of the road will be closed during the resurfacing project."

https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/ne ... diversion/

It's not closed for a month - it's a series of overnight closures. And it's only 142 miles if you want to go literally from one side of the closure to the other - if you're travelling in or out of the area, it probably doesn't add more than a few tens of miles to most journeys. There isn't really a lot of choice - the A93 cuts through the Cairngorms here, the nearest parallel routes are the A9 or the B974, both about 30 miles away. It's shorter via the B974 than the official diversion via the A90, but possibly not quicker.

We've had longer diversions - earlier this year both the Stromeferry Bypass and A82 were closed due to storms, and the diversion from Lochcarron to Plockton was via Inverness and Kingussie (or more practically, stay home until the roads are cleared). And a few years back the A9 was closed for overnight works north of Perth, and there was no official diversion - the official advice was not to travel at all on that night.