They chose highway engineers

From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 90.

This year for various reasons we could only get together for three days, so we decided to meet at a hotel in Lyndhurst, in the heart of the New Forest, which pleased me very much. I lived for two years on the edge of the New Forest near Christchurch when I worked in Bournemouth, and have spent many a happy Saturday tramping around there. It’s a lovely area. If you are from another country, you may need to be told that the New Forest isn’t in fact new and not even altogether a forest. It hasn’t been new since the time of the Norman Conquest and, though much of it is wooded, a great deal of it is open heathland and nothing like a forest as we normally think of it. ‘Forest’ originally signified any area set aside for hunting. It could be wooded but didn’t have to be. Nearly all of Britain’s once-great forests – Sherwood Forest, Charnwood, Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden – have gone altogether or are much reduced. Only the New Forest retains something of its ancient dimensions.

Throughout much of its history, the New Forest has been famous for its wild ponies, which graze wherever they like and wander picturesquely through the villages. Nowadays it is also celebrated for its traffic at Lyndhurst, the unofficial capital of the forest. People come from all over Britain to experience Lyndhurst’s famous traffic jams, often without intending to. Perhaps no other town in Britain has been more comprehensively overwhelmed by the motor car over a longer period with less imaginative attempts at amelioration. On a typical summer’s day, some fourteen thousand vehicles are funnelled through a constricted T-junction on Lyndhurst’s High Street, governed by a single set of traffic lights.

Unfortunately, out of all the people in the world to whom the authorities might have turned to solve the problem, they chose highway engineers. In my experience, the last people you want trying to solve any problem, but especially those involving roads, are highway engineers. They operate from the principle that while no traffic problem can ever truly be solved, it can be spread over a much larger area. At Lyndhurst some years ago they introduced an astoundingly circuitous one-way system, which appears to have been designed to take vehicles through as many formerly peaceful residential districts as could be packed into a single visit. The system ensures that anyone getting in the wrong lane, which is almost inevitable for newcomers, will have to go round twice more – once to discover that, oops, we’re still in the wrong lane, and once to get into the right one. It has occurred to me that Lyndhurst may not receive fourteen thousand different vehicles a day, but just a couple of thousand going round and round again.

It used to be that people who knew the area would turn off on to back roads before reaching Lyndhurst and detour around the town altogether, thus arriving at their destination sooner and helpfully removing themselves from the town’s congestion. That is what I tried to do now. At a place called Pikes Hill, I shot down a side lane towards Emery Down, but discovered at once that the highway engineers, cunning souls, had narrowed the back roads to a single lane with occasional passing places to discourage freelance orienteering, with the result that traffic jams back there were as bad as any in Lyndhurst. I am serious when I say that this is how these halfwits operate – by endeavouring to make everywhere as bad as the part that caused the original problem. It took me an hour and a quarter to get the last mile and a half to my hotel on the High Street.