The Road to Nowhere

My usual commute to work isn’t that bad. Mainly because I work on Saturdays and any sensible person is still in bed at 8:00am of a Saturday, but other than that it’s a fairly easy drive with only one speed camera to negotiate.

Until of course, I get to the Inner Ring Road and encounter a huge bright yellow sign informing me that Phase 842 of the A58(M) finishing-off is currently underway, and then it’s traffic cones for as far as the eye can see.
It was one of those big “Sorry for the delay” signs, although judging by the amount of work that was actually going on, a more apt wording should have been; “We don’t give a monkeys about the delay and couldn’t give a rats arse if you are late or not, now stop whinging and drive on.” I trust they enjoyed their tea-break.

Leeds is a weird city when it comes to roads. The main reason being that the whole transport infrastructure of the city depends on this very motorway running straight through the city centre. If the Inner Ring Road is closed for any reason, the whole of Leeds grinds to a halt. Having said that, it doesn’t help that the road has remained unfinished for the past 25 years.
Ring Roads are usually just that, a ring. However this road is, well, straight. It was supposed to be a ring, but then they suddenly stopped building it. Probably because London said it needed something pointless, late and over budget, so Leeds wasn’t allowed any money to finish it and the Cockneys got their expensive useless project. The A58M isn't exactly a road to nowhere, it does go somewhere, but that somewhere just happens to be a different road that then goes somewhere.

The same happened at the end of last year. Leeds was supposed to get a brand spanking new Supertram system, so that we could actually get somewhere without the car, seeing as First Leeds are absolutely clueless when it comes to running buses. OK, the whole scheme went over budget by a fair bit and the bloke in charge of transport, Alistair Darling, wasn’t that keen on spending £355m on a fancy train set.
But then the Londoners were complaining that they needed a new ticket office so they could tootle off the Belgium for the weekend. Of course, as with anything, the Londoners needs suddenly became public priority number one, so us Northerners had to put up with queuing on Kirkstall Road for 3 days just to get to work.

Anyway, looks like I’ll be able to slalom in between the cones for the next few months. Might make the morning commute a bit more interesting