City Centre Loop
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Does your town or city need some way to unclog its streets? Do the routes of its thoroughfares make no sense at all? Are your one way streets at odds and your traffic patterns a mess? But at the same time, do you find there's not nearly enough pennies in the bank to build an expensive and controversial inner ring road?
If so, why not take a leaf out of Leeds's book. Despite having built an urban motorway, the Inner Ring Road, in the late 1960s and early 70s, the traffic patterns on Leeds's streets were atrocious. Its streets were laid out in a fairly illogical way, and through traffic was using shopping streets that needed pedestrianising.
The solution was the City Centre Loop Road (or the Loop, if you prefer). It is a fairly simple idea - a one-way circuit of the city centre built by rearranging one-way streets and tinkering with junctions around the edge of the central area. The idea is that traffic travels around the central area until the nearest point to its destination, encouraged to do so by traffic light timings making the Loop a fairly fast route, and by altering other streets so that it's virtually impossible to get across the city any other way.
Let's see how it works by taking a quick tour - picking up on what parts of the plan work, and what parts don't. Click an image to view a larger version.
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J1 City Square
The advance signing for City Square. Each junction of note on the route is numbered motorway-style, like this. The artistic diagrammatics seen here are also as-standard.
After the first sign, we turn sharp left onto City Square itself, which lies to the right of the road here. There's a lot happening - can you remember where you need to go for the Loop?
The four-lane road splits just before the white building visible in the last photo (yes, this is still J1). These only become legible in time to confirm your route in heavy traffic. Notice the prominence given to "All Loop Traffic" (it's at the top of the right hand sign).
J2 Bank of England
Here comes J2, at which we are required to turn right at a crossroads. The sign tries to dress this up a bit, but the fact is that it's just a right turn. This shot shows the Loop "branding" very well.
The junction seen from the left hand side of Quebec Street which carries the Loop. Traffic comes in from behind us and leaves to the right. Both lanes are marked out for right turns.
After J2, we are travelling north on East Parade, which offers three roomy lanes. Quite a luxury. To the right here is Infirmary Street - typically, it looks like a way into the city centre, but will actually deposit you back on the Loop at City Square.
J3 Town Hall
This sign is interesting - a motorway patch with no numbers, a mysterious "Service Zone", and the road that crosses us is actually a dual carriageway, though this isn't acknowledged.
The junction itself, with the Town Hall in the background. It's a fairly ordinary crossroads, but the dual-carriageway Headrow gets about a third of the green-light time that the Loop gets.
J4 Civic Hall
J4 comes soon after, at the bottom corner of Millennium Square. Again, this is a glorified right turn. The plate below the sign is obscured - the main signs on the Loop are very chunky affairs. Law Courts? Where are the Law Courts?
Oh, there they are - Law Courts straight ahead. Clever.
Here's the junction itself - a right turn, with a pelican crossing straight afterwards that's not at all apparent from here. The Civic Hall is behind; note that Leeds' two main civic buildings, this and the Town Hall, are outside the Loop.
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