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Great Britain road numbering scheme
- jamespwilliams 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalously_numbered_roads_in_Great_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalously_numbered_roads_in_... amazing
- robga 6y agoThe radial numbering can be a useful ‘signpost’. As an anti-invasion tactic during World War II, a civil defence measure was to remove many road signs. That’d stop those nazis in their tracks. So to this day, I find the UK a difficult country to navigate by signs alone as they are often absent at important local junctions. In many other parts of the world, you can trace your way from a major destination by signs at forks/exits. In the UK, this often only works on ‘M’otorway routes. With satnav now ubiquitous, much local signposting tends to deplete over time, unless it is to control traffic flow.
- tokamak-teapot 6y agoThis is the opposite of my experience. I often navigate by road signs alone in the UK. Maybe your experience is from a particular part of the UK where this depletion has happened, but I thought things like direction signage were centrally managed.
- prennert 6y agoAre you native to the UK? (I.e. do you have a good knowledge of the cities and areas you are driving to and passing by?) Is there a system you are using to navigate / prepare when driving to areas that are new to you? Particularly off motorways?
- djaychela 6y agoI'm native to the UK, but I've not found any of the difficulties that you mention in your previous post. I'm 49, so I'm from the pre-sat-nav generation, and I will generally not use one [x] until I get to the city in question, or traffic/isues necessitate it, so I'll navigate from major town to major town to get where I'm going. I don't find that they will generally disappear from signs (unless you're past them), and I find the system used in the UK very logical. Also, I don't find the lack of reflectors at the edge of country roads to be an issue - most are delineated by white lines, which means it's easy to see the edges at night. This is not the case in most African countries, and I found driving through Africa at night a challenging, tiring experience because of this, but maybe if you're used to reflectors, it's the same situation just at a different level. x - I don't think it's good to be babied and feel you need a sat nav for every journey. Since ditching mine (I was a keen user until maybe 3-4 years ago), I've felt much more independent and capable, and happy to drive wherever. I'm sure I'll be in the minority in this opinion, though.
- Nexxxeh 6y agoI try to remember to sat nav as much as possible, for the live traffic updates. I also follow the local police force on Facebook as they post road closures due to RTC etc on there.
- nicky0 6y agoIn the pre-satnav days I would consult a road atlas before the trip, and note the roads, turnings and principal destinations on a piece of paper. e.g. M1 North to J21 for M69 South M69 South to J2 onto A5 North A5 North for 11 miles to Tamworth turning etc.
- tokamak-teapot 6y agoNative to the UK and I’ll use signs for navigation both in areas I’m familiar with and those I’m not. Some examples: 1. I want to go to a show at a popular venue (arena or theatre sized) in an area I know. If I know vaguely where it is, I’ll drive into the city centre and probably meet a one way system and follow the signs for the venue. 2. I want to visit a National Trust property. Head for a major road that runs past it and there will be brown signs that give you the best route to it. 3. Travelling somewhere and decide there is a problem with traffic / the weather and look for a detour. Signs are often perfect for choosing the best roads to head for another waypoint and then the best way from there to where you were originally heading. I’m not some kind of crazy person who will only navigate by signs - I check things out on maps and put sat nav on, but I know the limitations of all and often the signs send me on the best route. The people who figure these out and keep them updated are amazing at their job.
- detritus 6y agoI'm with you here - I find the UK much easier to drive around than Spain or Italy, at least. Before I set out somewhere, I look at a map and scrawl on a piece of paper a list of the roads and junctions I need to use and after a brief familiarisaiton with the route visually, I rely thereafter solely on road signs. Britain's got great (and beautiful) signage, in my opinion.
- prennert 6y agoI completely agree. Without savnat it would be very hard to navigate in the UK for me. Even with preparation ahead of time. The only useful feature in the UK vs other EU countries I have driven in are compass directions: NORTH, SOUTH, EAST, WEST. Some motorways also have reflectors on the lanes to guide you, which is great and I don't remember from Germany at least. Everything else is weird. Starting from the typography which looks clumsy, to inconsistent signage (which city am I tracking at the moment? Why is it not on the sign anymore?), junction numbers which are sometimes missing, abbreviations of places on signs, directions painted on the tarmac at junctions without signs. A lot of those A roads go through cities, but are rarely labelled as such. Fully consistent with the patchy signs of street names in cities at junctions and house numbers only present on about 30% of houses, particularly shopfronts. Not using the E numbers is just the icing on the cake. Further, driving on the country side is dangerous at night as there are no reflectors on either side of the road. So I guess you are right. Non-locals are still being kept at bay by the leaky signage traditions of the UK.
- jmkd 6y agoJust like within British cities, I enjoy having occasionally quirky, inconsistent and unusual routing and signage. On the whole, modern British road signage is of excellent quality and was globally influential. Little history here: http://www.britishroadsignproject.co.uk/jock-kinneir-margaret-calvert/ http://www.britishroadsignproject.co.uk/jock-kinneir-margare... For me, where there are small gaps or occasional quirks it adds to the flavour. I really don't want a rigid grid of apparent perfection imposed over anything. It may be helpful but it is of no cultural value.
- berkut 6y agoIf you think driving at night in the UK in the countryside (middle of nowhere) is dangerous, you don't want to do it in Australia or NZ... At least the UK (on the non-minor roads) has decent "cat's eyes" that reflect light back very well from the car's headlights, as they have actual mirrors in them. Oz and NZ instead have blocks of plastic embedded in the road instead with a reflective strip on, which in terms of visibility distance is very noticeably poorer (i.e. the reflective power is much less).
- donalhunt 6y agoIn Ireland we just chose to use pubs as landmarks... Made things much simpler. =)
- mikhailfranco 6y agoIreland didn't even have post codes until 2015 leave the package for Paddy behind the bar at The Village Inn :)
- berkut 6y agoI'm pretty certain the road signs were replaced after WW2 - it's not like there's no road signs any more. This is the opposite of my experience as well - I've driven in many countries (currently live in NZ), and despite its quirks (not saying it's perfect), I've found using UK road numbers for directions very easy in general compared to other countries that have highways that re-use road numbers in multiple states or something, which has at times caused confusion.
- bullen 6y agoAlso trains: https://twitter.com/CalumS1991/status/860906439656824833 https://twitter.com/CalumS1991/status/860906439656824833
- mikhailfranco 6y agoThe ultimate origin is obviously geographic and topographical, as first laid out by the Romans. The region 4-5 boundary along the A5 is just Watling Street. It originates in London today as Edgware Road, which preserves its distinctive Roman straightness (it even has the faux-Roman Marble Arch at the start in Hyde Park): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watling_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watling_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgware_Road https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgware_Road The obvious exception is the boundary of the phased Roman invasion, which cuts diagonally from south-west to north-east: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosse_Way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosse_Way The Fosse Way was originally a military road to support the eponymous barrier 'ditch' and rampart. Now it is mostly (near) the course of the A38 which does not follow the radial region 3 and does not fork from the A3 to the SW of London. The regions are also approximately the division of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: Sussex ( South Saxons, region 2), Wessex ( West Saxons, region 3), Essex ( East Saxons, region 1) and Mercia (er... midlands, for all-the-other-Saxons, regions 3~4): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heptarchy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heptarchy Watling Street later became the border between Viking and Anglo-Saxon sectors of the island (hence the radical divergence in accents and place names on opposite sides of the road): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danelaw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danelaw Also note that because it is essentially topographical, it was also followed by the private railways, giving LNER (region 1), SR (region 2), GWR (region 3) and LMS (aforementioned Mercia and west coast line, ~ regions 4,5,6), hence the originating stations in London: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_and_North_Eastern_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_and_North_Eastern_Railw... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Railway_(UK) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Railway_(UK) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Western_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Western_Railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Railway_(UK) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Railway_(UK) P.S. Direct links to Wikipedia should be banned from HN submissions.
- macintux 6y ago> P.S. Direct links to Wikipedia should be banned from HN submissions. Why? Surely, like every other post, they can be ignored if uninteresting, but they’re usually information many of us haven’t been exposed to and can generate useful additional content...like yours.
- cooperadymas 6y agoWhile are are not on the topic, anyone want to help me petition our senators to get all U.S. Interstate exits to be numbered by their mile marker rather than sequentially? Know that exit 32 is at mile marker 32 provides me so much more information than knowing that exit 8 is immediately after exit 7, which could be 1/4 mile past it or 40 miles past it.
- mikhailfranco 6y agoNote that linear markers on roads become incorrect when the road is diverted, re-routed or interrupted by new roads. For example, consider a new ring-road constructed to by-pass a town. However, US Interstates have special 3-digit numbering for ring-roads and other connectors. Luckily for you, America is not building any new infrastructure, so mileposts should be stable for some time.
- paledot 6y agoNo new highways is lucky for all of us. Not maintaining the infrastructure you have is a problem, though.
- masklinn 6y ago> Know that exit 32 is at mile marker 32 provides me so much more information than knowing that exit 8 is immediately after exit 7, which could be 1/4 mile past it or 40 miles past it. OTOH you know that exit 8 is the exit which follows exit 7[0], whereas you have no clue whatsoever whether there are other exits between 15 and 32. [0] except for exit 7B.
- cooperadymas 6y agoThat's not any more useful, though, is it, since you don't know the distance between exits 7 and 8? If you're running low on fuel, and you know you need exit 32, and you come up on exit 15, you don't know if there are any exists between 15 and 32 but you can at least judge whether your car can make it 17 more miles on its fuel. If you're low on fuel, and you know you need exit 8, and you come up on exit 7, you know it's the last exit before you need to get off the Interstate, but you don't know the distance between exits 7 and 8, so you can't make an informed decision on whether the fuel you have remaining is sufficient to get to your exit. To be fair, your point is the argument my SO has been battling me with for the past decade :-)
- melonkidney 6y agoSlightly off topic... UK road signs have a very clear and consistent color scheme based on the category of road. E.g., blue background for motorways, green background for A roads. This scheme was (maybe still is) reflected in the color of roads on printed maps. Google Maps also used this scheme some years ago. I understand their reasoning, but the day Google standardized on the current yellow & white scheme was a sad day for this UK Maps user.
- chrisseaton 6y agoThis is another good reason to use Apple Maps.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Paianni 6y agoIt's an okay system but apathy has resulted in abnormalities, such as the A5-M1 Link Road leaving a bunch of routes in Dunstable out of zone. The A14, as conceived in the 90s, has always started out of zone because that was the easiest two-digit number to steal from another route. Many old A-roads have been chopped into pieces because of motorway replacements or to encourage heavy traffic to use more suitable routes, the end result is a bit of a mess nowadays.
- ldite 6y agoThere is, of course, a wikipedia page for this as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalously_numbered_roads_in_Great_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalously_numbered_roads_in_...
- MandieD 6y agoThe Isle of Skye is where I learned that an A road was likely the most significant road in the area, not necessarily a large, well-developed one. A855 is single lane around most of the island. Not a single lane each way, but a single lane with little pullouts every so often to let oncoming traffic past. We drove extremely defensively. However, the scenery was top notch.
- edjw 6y agoLong stretches of the A1 in Northumberland is a single lane each way.
- teleforce 6y agoProbably the most useful numbering scheme in the UK is the postcodes. It is very accurate and simple to use. For example, if you are looking for any house you can just use the postcode instead of the actual house's address, and 99% of the times you will arrive very close to the house by using the GPS based navigation [1]. It is also very easy to remember and I still remember my former school's postcode despite have not been there for more than 20 years. It is quite an achievement given that I sometimes even forget my current car's registration number. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcodes_in_the_United_King...
- OJFord 6y agoPost codes are sometimes totally unique for an address; they're always unique in combination with the street (or flat) number. E.g. a short form address (useful for scribbling a return address on the back of an envelope/parcel for example) could be '123/AB4 5CD' instead of '123 St George Crescent // Upper Bockingbrook // Froimington // Froimingtonshire // AB4 5CD'.
- paledot 6y agoI'd never thought of that. It would be technically feasible in Canada, but I'm not confident that a recipient or the postal service would recognize it as a complete address.
- jjp 6y agoYep, many years ago had several thousand pieces of testing mail delivered. Names and address text had been scrubbed, but house number and post code was enough to get them delivered. All of the letters were watermarked Test, but somebody just put them through the envelope stuffer and out they went. Next test all the house numbers and post codes were changed to the bosses address!
- IanCal 6y agoIt's a shame it's a closed thing now.
- dash2 6y agoI'm trying to think if there are any iconic roads in Britain, the way that Route 66 is in America. Ireland has the N17 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32-WdYOeJLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32-WdYOeJLk). The M1 is pretty famous - it runs up and down the country like a spinal column - but I can't think of any songs. The M25, which goes round London, is known for its traffic jams and gave Orbital their name (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV-hSgL1R74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV-hSgL1R74).
- jfk13 6y agoLook back a little, and before the M1 we had the Great North Road https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_North_Road_(Great_Britain) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_North_Road_(Great_Britai..., which I think comes much closer to "iconic" status. And yes, it appears in songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH1buq3Ks0I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH1buq3Ks0I
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dash2 6y agoGOOD GOD, Sting! This is even worse than Kula Shaker. Hmm, OK, that's quite a decent song.
- ironicman 6y agoHow about the A303 ( https://youtu.be/I5g8qlIDUVI https://youtu.be/I5g8qlIDUVI )
- mrwh 6y agoThe zone diagram at the top of the article makes London's importance pretty clear. All roads (in England and Wales) lead to London.