please empty your brain below
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Some of those rising bollards like they have in Manchester and Cambridge, the ones that impale errant cars, would bring this more publicity.
Lorenzo | 14.11.19 - 7:13 a.m. | #
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Would people really expect a bus gate to be a physical gate? I’m pretty sure that anyone who heard of the project knows what’s being talked about.
If they haven’t heard of it, than they’re just normal road signs.
Theo | 14.11.19 - 7:22 a.m. | #
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Listening to, and speaking with, people in Wapping yesterday, they were indeed expecting the bus gate to be something physical.
Even adding the words BUS GATE to the signs at the bus gate would have helped.
diamond geezer | Homepage | 14.11.19 - 7:32 a.m. | #
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Before Hammersmith Bridge broke, it had bus gates, and they were indeed physical gates. Unlike Wapping, their purpose was to restrict buses so that there would only be one on the bridge at any time. Other traffic below the weight limit was unrestricted. No wonder drivers get confused.
Liz | 14.11.19 - 7:37 a.m. | #
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The cars (motor vehicles) prohibited sign looks pretty prominent to me. And, as you said, regular users will also get warning letters if they are habituated.
I used to do this route from time to time in the past and learnt it by following taxi drivers. It never struck me as a pedestrian paradise.
Ken | 14.11.19 - 7:39 a.m. | #
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Video evidence of vehicles completely ignoring the bus gate yesterday morning (2m 13s).
diamond geezer | Homepage | 14.11.19 - 7:48 a.m. | #
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To coin a phrase, absence-of-bus-gate-gate?
Waterhouse | 14.11.19 - 7:54 a.m. | #
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Rising bollards are magnificent in destroying the cars of miscreants. A physical barrier is the only way to immediately stop people. Fines will take longer to work as people learn.
Andrew | Homepage | 14.11.19 - 9:03 a.m. | #
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I was personally caught in something similar elsewhere. There should be physical gates and much better signs. Its just a way of raising revenue from unsuspecting visitors who coming to a new place are easily confused by unusual signs.
Kevin Roche | 14.11.19 - 9:18 a.m. | #
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It seems a bit bizarre to me to have the signs in front of the roundabout. Those red circular signs are supposed to mean no vehicles beyond here. So legally, aren't all drivers other than those of local buses supposed to be doing a turn in the road before getting to the roundabout?
Tim W | 14.11.19 - 9:24 a.m. | #
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They did something similar recently where I live laughingly called 'Liveable Crouch End' where for two weeks they physically blocked off certain roads. Car wise, I wasn't bothered because I very rarely drive, however, it had the effect of causing traffic chaos at peak times meaning the main roads (including the centre) that were still open became jammed with traffic and horribly polluted. How is that better for anyone?
Johnny Topaz | 14.11.19 - 9:24 a.m. | #
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Possibly needs to rebranded as a Bus Gateway
Anon | 14.11.19 - 9:39 a.m. | #
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There used to be a car / lorry gate near the Leisure Centre in Putney. A council worker would close it first thing and come back at 10am to re-open it.
The barrier has gone, replaced by a camera and plenty of signs including electronic ones that say if it's currently legal to go through the "gate".
Plenty of drivers ignore it, including delivery vans from well known supermarkets, so I assume there's a high chance you don't get caught on camera. Despite local protests the physical gates have not returned.
ap | 14.11.19 - 9:44 a.m. | #
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Around here they used to have physical bus gates (Rising bollards, etc) Eventually they got rid of the physical infrastructure as it kept on breaking down so blocking all traffic. Now we just have signs & automatic cameras to fine you.
The problem with the removal of the physical barrier is that the bus gates around here have a complex pattern of when they are & aren't operational. With the physical barrier, it was easy to see if you were allowed to go through. Now you can't tell if you're going to get fined or not.
Jon Jones | 14.11.19 - 9:54 a.m. | #
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think there is an actual bus gate on great tower street. also Walthamstow has gone to great lengths to block rat runs to the lee bridge road at various points. The result?gridlock on the few routes left to take. problem not solved.
iain | 14.11.19 - 10:41 a.m. | #
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Not sure what happened in my town centre over the summer but I noticed from the bus that one section of the road suddenly had BUS ONLY painted on it.
As we'd driven through it as normal just a day or two before without noticing we were expecting a fine, and had a look around online.
Apparently it was a 'consultation' and a couple of months later the road marks vanished again. But from my daily vantage point on the bus, I saw that while a few did stop and maneuver to go the other way, a lot of people continued to use that section as normal during the trial.
Mind you, the first thing we knew about resurfacing right outside our house the other month was when lines were painted all over the pavement and we stopped one of the crew to ask. The promised leaflet drop never happened!
Cornish Cockney | 14.11.19 - 10:55 a.m. | #
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If I were an authority I would think virtual gates with speed-camera-like device to catch unauthorised vehicles would be a very good way to make money. That is, if the camera is not too costly to operate...
Patrickov | 14.11.19 - 11:12 a.m. | #
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I am constantly amazed at non-car owning Londoners willingness to be held hostage by motorists. There's a tiny minority of Londoners who insist on driving everywhere, and the people who face the consequences of that (danger, air pollution, slow buses, traffic noise, etc) somehow end up defending them.
I know a lot of these schemes are half-arsed, but that's usually because anything more radical is politically a non-starter.
Graham | 14.11.19 - 11:24 a.m. | #
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"Now you can't tell if you're going to get fined or not." Then don't risk it?
"The result?gridlock on the few routes left to take. problem not solved." Time for a congestion charge?
JohnC | 14.11.19 - 11:24 a.m. | #
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A search for "bus gate" on Google images shows that hardly any bus gates have any physical barrier. Those that do have a rising bollard.
The No Motor Vehicles signs are clear enough. If motorists don't pay attention to signage, what else aren't they paying attention to? I am personally more concerned about that.
No need for council officers to be there either, no one is getting fined to start with, it's not a big deal. Good to see they're not there wasting their time helping out those that don't pay attention to road signs or bother to read distributed information. (They probably also had no interest in risking being on the receiving end of the kind of abuse dished out during the ill-fated Bow trial.)
O | 14.11.19 - 11:31 a.m. | #
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There should be an exemption for all private hire and licensed taxis and of course vehicles registered to disabled tax class.
Andrew Jarman | 14.11.19 - 1:05 p.m. | #
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There is also a time limited camera enforced prohibited turn in North London, close to where the A41 turns into Finchley Road, to discourage traffic ratrunning through Hampstead to bypass the Finchley Road going southbound.
The signage there is a cluttered mess, easy to miss because there are too many things to look at when trying to navigate in that area.
It would be interesting to get a breakdown of where the offending cars live for these types of schemes (locals vs. further away) as those further away would are less like to see written launch publicity.
And no, taxis/licensed hire should not be given a free pass in such schemes. Disabled only by exception (lives local and assessed as severely disabled, cannot use bus). Emergency services allowed to quash tickets on appeal (avoiding the "false ambulance" tax class dodge which I think still is possible for congestion charge exemption)
MilesT | 14.11.19 - 1:27 p.m. | #
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Although traffic signs in the UK are usually very good, this points out one of the main problems we have. Most people see the "Flying Motorbike" sign as an access-only sign, because that's how it's been used for the last umpteen years. You can see in the artists design drawing that they used a different, blue sign. What would work best is a "No Entry" sign with an exception for buses and bikes and for non-peak times. But highways departments like No Entry to always mean no entry, so we end up with bad signs.
Philip | 14.11.19 - 2:07 p.m. | #
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I reckon painting the road in the gate area red (just like a part time bus lane) would help.
David | Homepage | 14.11.19 - 2:23 p.m. | #
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What exasperates me is the (mis)use of the word "liveable". I would have thought liveable would mean easier or more desirable to live there. My local half-baked initiative of "Liveable Crouch End" ended up generating no increase in liveable-ness, only the opposite. Guess we have the marketing guys to thank for this.
Caz | 14.11.19 - 2:29 p.m. | #
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"Liveable" comes from TfL's Liveable Neighbourhood funding scheme, which is what the Mini Holland programme evolved into.
Pro-car campaigners successfully poisoned the Mini Holland name, not that it was great to begin with, and neither is its replacement.
Graham | 14.11.19 - 5:15 p.m. | #
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I'd expect a "gate" to be physical too. For more than you'd ever want to know about a similar initiative outside London, stick "boots corner" into your favourite search engine.
Nick | Homepage | 14.11.19 - 6:45 p.m. | #
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The rising bollard bus gates in Cambridge have been replaced with camera enforcement recently. This was because the bollards were mechanically unreliable and the manufacturer of the tags to operate the gates (fixed to the front grill of vehicles) had gone bust, with no-one making compatible ones. The stock of those was almost finished.
Al__S | 14.11.19 - 7:42 p.m. | #
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I encountered a similar ‘timed gate’ in Hackney recently. I was following other cars and honestly wasn’t looking at signs on lamp posts on what was supposedly a normal road.
Fortunately, I received a warning letter rather than a fine as it was my first ‘offence’ and this was a newish cash cow.
After reading your post, I think more needs to be done to pre-warn people. If you live in the vicinity chances are you’ll be well-aware of the timings but to the occasional driver, you won’t necessarily know unless you either look at lamp posts (rather than the road / roundabout / junction - or receive a fine.
Rob Healy | Homepage | 14.11.19 - 9:17 p.m. | #
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On the pre-warning suggestions. There are several advanced warning signs on The Highway, as well as on the approach roads in Wapping. If someone fails to see all those signs, and goes through the restriction, I would be worried about their standard of driving.
Unfortunately, some people will chance it until the fines start coming through, especially if they know there is a 2 week grace period.
It could be made even clearer, perhaps different coloured road surface for the threshold, but it's definitely still pretty clear at the moment.
Robert | 14.11.19 - 10:12 p.m. | #
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The advance signs only say that there's a bus gate on Wapping High Street, a road which is over a mile long.
It doesn't mean drivers will notice the bus gate when they reach it. It could be a lot clearer.
diamond geezer | Homepage | 14.11.19 - 10:16 p.m. | #
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If the bus gate (or a speed camera, or parking ban) is making lots of money, it's not achieving the stated aims of preventing people doing what they shouldn't.
The signs seem to suggest the invisible "gate" is just before the roundabout, so effectively it's a cul de sac for everything except buses, so it's convenient there's space to turn where the taxi is doing so.
timbo | 14.11.19 - 10:46 p.m. | #
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They introduced bus gates like these in Huddersfield recently. Concerns that restricting traffic access with bus gates would lead to Huddersfield becoming a ghost town seem to be coming to fruition, and those who see the bus gates as a means to fill council coffers will feel vindicated by the amount of fines being handed out.
[news 1] [news 2]
TheLupineOne | 15.11.19 - 8:05 a.m. | #
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Just call it a "bus-only lane"
John | 15.11.19 - 5:58 p.m. | #
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There are bus gates in Manchester and Sheffield, the latter for many years. They make sence but I agree you need plenty of signs on the outskirts of them to avoid people driving through in error.
Rick | 17.11.19 - 10:37 p.m. | #
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There are now three dark red stripes across the road at the bus gate, possibly visible to approaching traffic, but no sign of anything even vaguely gatey.
diamond geezer | Homepage | 10.12.19 - 10:33 a.m. | #
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