Inner Ring Road

Driving LHD anywhere in the UK is setting one's self up for disaster. The question still remains as to what the planners could have done differently on the basis that Coventry was a city that was seen to become a very busy place. The RR could have been pushed further out, but there would have been greater elevation changes than there are, and a lot more good buildings would have had to be cleared to split the junctions up and lengthen the collectors at each one.

It was a brave move, however you look at it, that in hindsight and the effects of recession, has proved to be less than perfect in some ways. But the RR exists and one has to make the best of it. It takes a little while to get fully used to it.

Yep, but just hope it ain't my granddaughter in the other driving seat. Why is it that our road signs are still marked in miles when our children are not taught imperial measures and haven't been for around 30 years. My younger daughter, now 40, was taught nothing but metric.

Dual controls = committee = disaster pending, not a good idea

A good time was had by all, looking at the enlarged picture I can see I was mistaken and that its not an Mgb at all

Longford Lad. That is just what headmaster Fred West used to tell us regularly in assembly at Junior Tech!

Mike H, Coventry is the only city in the UK to have a totally *grade separated* inner ring road. I have lived in Sheffield and the ring road there is mainly surface level, with surface crossings and only one section of it is dual carriageway. There was a strange dual carriageway in the city centre that was grade separated, and it had created a similar awful townscape to Coventry, but I can't recall if that was part of the ring road or not as it didn't go anywhere. It certainly didn't have any traffic on it, and I wouldn't be surprised if it had been demolished by now. The rest of the 'ring road' was just normal roads through industrial/inner city areas. Luckily Sheffield didn't decide to destroy its inner city and replace it with a bleak series of large junctions that take up vast amounts of space. Arterial routes and the inner urban areas of a city are hugely important for economic activity. Coventry replaced that with a terribly over-engineered road system that takes up too much space.

Pixrobin in shops we have gone metric because the shops have to pay to alter their equipment and signs. While on the road it would be the government thst would have to pay to alter all the road signs which would be a great cost to the tax payer so that's the reason we are still miles not kilometres.

You don't give up, do you. Coventry has the best access in, out and around of anywhere in the land. It is the only city where you can cross the centre to get to somewhere on the other side and do it quickly. You say that the RR is a way to avoid the city but, with respect, anybody wanting to avoid Coventry city centre has been able to do that for years by using the A45 and subsequently the A46, M6, M42 and M40. You say that nowhere else has anything like it and the reason is that it didn't work, but history shows that it did and does work. Nowhere else has one because they can't decide what to knock down to allow for it. Coventry lost out because it was a one trick pony, and when the pony died, so did Coventry, but it will come back, RR and all.

Mike H., you are reinforcing Flapdoodle's point. As a road system it may very well be wonderful (like you, I haven't lived in Coventry for many years) but it has added very little to the vibrancy of the centre of the city whether the economy has been good or bad. When I was a teenager in the 70s, I was always afraid to pass under the Ring Road. Grim, isolated and intimidating, it was not a place to linger.

And Hillfields/Primrose Hill street was never a place to linger and probably still isn't. It was never a good idea to linger around where the 'Forty Thieves' was, or West Orchard car park or down by the Silver Sword in the evenings, or around the Coventry Cross in the evenings or the Parson's Nose late evening.

For the record, I didn't leave the UK until 2000, so it hasn't been that long since I last saw Coventry. There would be a lot less activity in the centre had it not been for the RR. I would also question the amount of people walking into the city. I just can't see that many doing it.

The dicey nature of other locations have no bearing on this topic. The ring road is effectively a bypass ("It is the only city where you can cross the centre to get to somewhere on the other side and do it quickly.") that has walled in the city centre. In the 70s it was much more frightening to walk under the ring road near the Swanswell, all concrete, rocks, barriers, road noise and not many people, than it was to walk along Primrose Hill Street.

It is quick access to all sides of the city and to the centre. It is NOT a bypass. Those who want to go into the city can, those who want to cross it can. Where is the law that one HAS to go into the centre. I don't get it and neither would thousands of others, locals and visitors.

The city centre doesn't need to enlarge. It just needs a bit of redevelopment which is happening now.

I think the subject of city centres and road systems are always difficult to resolve. We all have our own ideas of how we would like them to be, for a whole variety of reasons, one of which will clearly be nostalgia. Having left Coventry to get married in the 60's, and never having been a driver at that time, I would only have been familiar with my parts of town, i.e,Wyken, Stoke, Bell Green etc. Then in the late 90's I had a job as a mobile engineer with sites in a couple of sites around the city, not really being familiar with the Ring Road, I used it, and found it was brilliant for getting me from sites in one side of town to suppliers on a different part of town. Someone earlier on this topic mentioned Sheffield. Having just spent a weekend in the city, I didn't find the road system very user friendly at all. Where I now live, in Northampton, and where my wife came from, Kettering, despite the best efforts of the councils, they seem to have changed both town centres not to good effect. Seems to me that you often get the effect of "unintended consequences". Things that may well be difficult to predict.

I'm unsure which members are old enough to have driven a haulage truck from one side of the city to the other prior to the the inner ring road. How many remember what it was like crossing the city by bus? Even if you allowed plenty of time to get to work you were never sure you'd get there on time. Rush hour journeys to work have probably quadrupled in the past 50 years due to increases in car ownership. Yes, there were ways of avoiding the town centre in the 1950s but the roads used couldn't cope with the traffic levels of today.