THIS country has developed a serious problem to go with all the others. This one borders on obsessional.
We cannot resist tinkering with our roads, adding this, putting in that. Usually, it is in the name of safety, but sometimes I do wonder.
Our relationship with roadways seems to be one of gardens and gardeners.
It all starts simply enough with a strip of tarmac linking two places; a few cats’ eyes and some white lines were then added.
At some point kerbs went in, not just for footpaths, but to keep the tarmac from spreading outwards. They act like a French corset, although in France they just drop another dollop of tarmac when the surface is getting thin.
We beat them for neatness, a sense of order.
The road now had a bit of muscle when it would otherwise be merely a lane.
Up went road signs – basic speed restrictions, pictures of hump back bridges and so on – that you can read about in the Highway Code.
All well and good. Then up went more road signs – and more and more.
They are even into thinking of new types now, the latest being to announce how many people have been killed on the very road you are tootling along.
Will they be updated, like some kind of grim scoreboard, I wonder.
They’re warnings, though I have found what works best is the shredded tyres you see on the motorway hard shoulder. It’s like stumbling across a skull in the desert.
More and more signs appear like slalom poles and they often carry dire messages such as “Tiredness Kills�, which it doesn’t. Now, driving while you’re asleep, that’s a different matter.
But it’s not just the signs, it’s the carriageways. Not content with shiny tarmac, we have to make them prettier.
On go lots of nice chevrons and criss-crosses and zig-zags; fawn oblongs where buses stop, clusters of little red stripes that make your car go drrrrrrr and the striking orangey bits, which can crop up anywhere for any reason.
We like orange. Orange is the colour of cycle lanes and to make sure we know what they are, a white cycle is painted upon them. At junctions there can be as many as eight cycles, in case you have forgotten in the time it took to cross the road what it’s all about.
Having coloured the roads in we set about getting rid of the flatness, introducing humps and bumps to slow traffic down so that you might admire how enchanting and informative everywhere now is. Where’s it all going to end?
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