BINO: Bypasses In Name Only

[pwa]

Pray tell why a bypass needs to involve blocking the original route. Surely that's re routing? A bypass is a route that goes around something not through it. Status of the original is irrelevant.

A bypass is a rerouting. An alternative route added to an unchanged one is a relief road, but UK politicians call them bypasses fraudulently because that's easier to get support for.

I have been familiar with the phrase "bypass" for most of my life and have never heard it defined that way.

[thirdcrank]

I'm familiar with Wetherby which was once both a market town and an important coach stop on the Great North Road. It was bypassed in 1959 and that bypass was upgraded several times until it was in turn bypassed when the A1 was uprated to motorway. What is now a small shopping centre with more housing in the town itself has been freed of nearly all the trunk road traffic and can be entered and left using several roundabouts on the original bypass, but traffic there seems as great as ever and where it was once only on North Street (the local name of the Great North Road) it's now everywhere.

[mjr]

Pray tell why a bypass needs to involve blocking the original route. Surely that's re routing? A bypass is a route that goes around something not through it. Status of the original is irrelevant.

A bypass is a rerouting. An alternative route added to an unchanged one is a relief road, but UK politicians call them bypasses fraudulently because that's easier to get support for.

I have been familiar with the phrase "bypass" for most of my life and have never heard it defined that way.

Politicians have been pulling this trick in this country for at least eighty years. It's only once I looked at certain other country's traffic planning, compared with relief roads and considered surgical bypasses that I realised why UK road bypasses rarely work: because most aren't really bypasses.

[pwa]

From a driver's perspective, a "bypass" as I understand the term is an option (usually a welcome one) to pass by a town or village with less delay and more ease than would be the case if I went through the centre, and I generally see that as dovetailing nicely with the desire of the local community to not have through traffic going through the centre. That leaves the centre to traffic with more interest in visiting the centre, for shops, schools, the surgery or to get to residential streets.

The word "bypass" is English, so I would look to English speaking countries for a definition.

[Vorpal]

What's best: humps, bumps and chicanes or cameras? The cost of cameras could be slashed if their presence did not have to be advertised.

Bumps or chicanes are better than cameras in 20mph zones because they can be deployed more densely and once installed require little or no maintenance for years to come.

Humps are ok, if correctly designed. Raised pedestrian crossings seem to do the trick pretty well. Chicanes are only good if they include a cycle bypass, preferably wide enough for a child trailer or trike.