"Buttoneer" wrote in message
om...
I'm getting really quite fed up with the different crazy bus lane
rules all over even small parts of London.

On the same road it is quite easy to move from a permanent 24hr bus
lane to a Monday-Friday (7:30-10:00 and 16:00-19:00) part time lane
and then turn the corner into a Monday-Saturday 8:00-18:00) lane and
various versions and mutations thereof.

To compound this, many times you pop out of a side road across a bus
lane which doesn't have a sign for another couple of hundred yards and
can easily do all the wrong things.

There are a few problems with this as I see it.

1. Roads are not used efficiently by drivers when bus lanes are not
operational leading to undertaking by those who know or outside lane
crawling by those who don't.
2. The potential to be caught out on the same road having read the
first sign (part time) and then run along that bus lane correctly only
to be caught out when in goes permanent.
3. Complicated signs which are impossible to read at even nominal
speeds, let along 30mph because you are past them before you got to
the bit that relates to you and your time.
4. All that thought processing (am I legal/not legal/what's the
time/day?) distracts the driver from what he should be doing - driving
safely.

Is it not possible to simply call the bus lanes either full time or
part time and have full times ones painted red and part times ones
painted green and have only one possible part time option?

A very good idea to distinguish full-time and part-time bus lanes by the
colour of the road surface: nice and clear and unambiguous.

I'd like to see the same applied to parking restrictions: to distinguish
between public spaces ("anyone may park here for all or part of the day")
and residents-only spaces ("unless you have a permit you may not park here
at any time"). I got a ticket because there were numerous bays of parking
spaces along a road near Magdalin Bridge in Oxford; most of these were
public spaces with a one-hour limit, but a few here and there were for
residents only. The only way to distinguish between them was the
plate-on-a-pole. IF only the residents' bays had been marked with a
different coloured surface and "Residents Only" road markings.