fini said:
My major change to the system? In the style of bus lanes, I'd create lanes for key workers and tradesmen only - the kind of people that everyone says it would be impossible for them to not go by car - electricians, plumbers and hospital, police and firemen staff. I realise that most roads don't have room for three lanes (bus, normal and my new one), but you could always merge the bus lane into my new lane on major routes into London.
fini
That's not possible, as you would need to somehow tag car registration plates as trade at DVLA (so the bus lanes cameras could tell a difference).
There are few very simple ways of improving traffic though.
1. City shoudl encourage offices to change time tables from 9 to 5 and 10 to 6. Of course there are plenty of trades that need to work in bank hours but let's not be silly, many would beneit from work in 6 to 2pm or 7 to 3pm and would have long afternoons off to stay home with kids etc. People would actually have a life and traffic both on motorways and public transport would spread across more hours.
2. We should stop encouraging trades to use full size commercial vehicles. Every sparkie, kebab man and his dog nowadays rolls around in high roof van because there is very little financial advantage for him to buy small estate or something of a size of corsa van, which would carry his two toolboxes just as well as transit high roof does. My neighbour had a combi boiler fitted, first to arrive was a plumber meister with LWB transit, then he called second plumber, which arrived with pipes on the roof of second LWB transit, then plumbers mate arrived in another LWB transit with nothing but two can blow torches and few boxes of elbows at the back of it. They needed Southern Water to close stop **** for the property so they called them and two engineers arrived both in their own high roof vans to close off the water. And then they started massive manouvers all over the road as plumbers parked on stop **** cover and they all had to let each other through. And they could do just as much with two large estates.
3. Bus lanes should be either mandatory for buses to use (as in, if there is a bus lane buses can't drift all over the road) or abandoned all together as there is always more than statistical average of 8 people with cars queueing next to empty bus lanes and thus majority is inconvenienced for the good of minority. If you want I can actually show you series of pictures of how bus drivers cleverly cheat the system to their advantage jumping through the lanes in such manner that they singlehandedly force traffic from Canary Wharf to Blackwall Approach into standstill in peak hours.
4. There should be as many parking spaces made as possible to avoid tradesmen or drop off deliveries parking on red routes, bus stops or middle areas.
