On Trains & Buses

November traffic toil

Posted on November 6, 2009

Reading time: 2 minutes.

It’s an oft discussed topic but you do get to wondering how things might be if we didn’t bother with winter time and stuck with its summer counterpart all of the year around. I am led to believe that summer time continued into the winter months during WW2 with double summer time coming into force when BST usually would hold sway. By all accounts, everyone got along and it looks as if it would have been the least of the troubles that anyone faced.

However, I have noticed that November evening traffic is blighted with disruption from time to time and wonder if not putting back the clocks would help. There was an occasion when an overturned lorry between Alderley Edge and Wilmslow severely disrupted my journey home from work, delaying it by next to 90 minutes. We may have satellite tracking of buses (Cheshire East Timeline) these times so you can stay indoors until the bus is near but it is too easy to let disbelief take over when buses don’t seem to be moving at all and go outside to make sure of getting home; the onset of darkness concentrates the mind. That’s how it appeared on Tuesday night and the tracker hadn’t packed in as suspected but traffic had backed up to an horrendous level because of road works due to the construction of the Alderley Edge bypass and some work on the B5087 within that village itself.

That bypass should help avoid instances like those described above but you can get closures on the M6 too so I wonder how it would cope with the motorway traffic. It goes without saying that the village of Alderley Edge cannot take the onslaught with its pedestrian lights, junctions and school and such a situation had me keeping an eye on the Highways England website for a while (the BBC’s Travel News website is a useful port of call too). Cheshire East Council’s bus tracker easily dispatches that habit to history and things do seem to calm down in December. Nevertheless, it is striking how traffic chaos still occurs from time to time during an economic recession.