Having posted the article about the A30/A303, I'm now reminded of other occasions where, for no discernible reason, a continuous trunk road does not have a continuous number:
(1) The road from Swindon to Cheltenham. This originally followed the line of a Roman road and was almost completely straight. A large section of it has now been
replaced with dual carriageway bypasses, but it's still a pretty direct route. So why is the Swindon-Cirencester section numbered A419 and the Cirencester-Cheltenham section numbered A417? To make matters worse, the A419 and A417 numbers are both used for subsidiary A roads out of Cheltenham, in roughly opposite directions, so it would make far more sense for those two to have the same number as well. Why not renumber the Cirencester-Stroud road as the A417 and the Cirencester-Cheltenham road as the A419?
(2) The trunk roadclose to the south coast, which is numbered as the A27 from Southampton to Pevensey in Sussex, while the parallel A259 runs along the coast from Chichester onwards. Then when the two roads join, the trunk road becomes the A259, and the A27 vanishes. Why not call the whole thing the A27?
(3) A little local problem in Bath. If you come in on the A4 from Bristol you'll see that the road forks in two just before the city boundary. The right fork takes the through traffic, and is called the A36. The left fork takes local traffic, and is called the A4 (although they don't put that on the road sign). The A36 then skirts the south of the city centre until it reaches Sydney Gardens, where it splits in two: the right turn is the 'real' A36 towards Warminster, and the left turn is a spur of the A36 which shortly rejoins the A4 towards Chippenham. It would be far simpler to call the wholetrunk road the A4, and give the road through the city some other number.
(A golden opportunity was missed recently when the council put up a load of new signs, which are mostly more confusing than the old ones. Scandalously, all the new signs wrongly identify the Wells road as the A37 -- it's actually the A39!)
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples that people will wish to contribute. Can anyone shed any light on the origins of such anomalies? In the Bath case, I suppose that the road through the city was the original A4, and somehow they never got round to renumbering it when the new route was created, preferring to resort to silly tricks like leaving numbers off signs (hardly the most helpful approach). But I can't see any sensible reason for the other two. It's as though transport planners went out of their way to make the system as confusing as possible.
Guy
More numbering anomalies
Moderator: Site Management Team
Re: A417 & A419.
The A419 goesnorth-west from Swindon and then turns left at Cirencester going west towards Cinderford. A417 runs from Faringdon through Lechlade and Fairford to Cirencester where it then turns right on to the new bypass and goes north-west toBirdlip (which has to be the busiest roundabout in Gloucestershire). That's as it always has been. So the main line of the road is half A419 and half A417. That's not confusing, but it is perhaps not as neat as having a continuously numbered road. What IS confusing is why the Cirencester bypass section is numerbed A417 (A419) AFTER the A419 has left for the west and BEFORE the A417 joins it. That orphaned section should have a new, unique number. Howeverthat would run counter to your argument of keeping the numbering simple. http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dl ... w=N&zoom=5
The A419 goesnorth-west from Swindon and then turns left at Cirencester going west towards Cinderford. A417 runs from Faringdon through Lechlade and Fairford to Cirencester where it then turns right on to the new bypass and goes north-west toBirdlip (which has to be the busiest roundabout in Gloucestershire). That's as it always has been. So the main line of the road is half A419 and half A417. That's not confusing, but it is perhaps not as neat as having a continuously numbered road. What IS confusing is why the Cirencester bypass section is numerbed A417 (A419) AFTER the A419 has left for the west and BEFORE the A417 joins it. That orphaned section should have a new, unique number. Howeverthat would run counter to your argument of keeping the numbering simple. http://www.streetmap.co.uk/streetmap.dl ... w=N&zoom=5
Regards,
Paul
Paul
<< So the main line of the road is half A419 and half A417. That's not confusing, but it is perhaps not as neat as having a continuously numbered road. What IS confusing is why the Cirencester bypass section is numerbed A417 (A419) AFTER the A419 has left for the west and BEFORE the A417 joins it. >>
This rather confirms my point: if the road had originally had a continuous number, there would have been no problems when the bypass was built. I think they should have used the building of the bypass as an excuse to renumber the whole thing as the A419, and either turn the Cirencester-Stroud road into the A417 or give it a completely new number. I still can't imagine how the original numbering ever came about.
Guy
This rather confirms my point: if the road had originally had a continuous number, there would have been no problems when the bypass was built. I think they should have used the building of the bypass as an excuse to renumber the whole thing as the A419, and either turn the Cirencester-Stroud road into the A417 or give it a completely new number. I still can't imagine how the original numbering ever came about.
Guy