There is nothing more boring than potholes. I remember that from my own days as a parish councillor. It saps the spirit every time the subject comes up, makes you wish you could be anywhere other than this damned meeting.
How much more exciting it must have felt to have been the councillors in Cambridge who in 2020 gave Britain its first Dutch-style roundabout – a £2.3 million remodelling of an existing city roundabout with three concentric colour-coded circles. On the inside there is the road, outside of which stands a reddish cycle path, flanked by a footway with dashes of pink. It is an object of municipal beauty, if you like that sort of thing: a ground-breaking experiment in how to manage and merge three very different types of traffic.
Trouble is, it also seems to be a good deal less safe than the bog standard roundabout that preceded it.
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