- When using transport, the normal rule of thumb is that the underground will be quicker than a bus or even a taxi on many journeys, but sometimes walking beats even that. TfL has a tube map that helps you figure that out (check out Covent Garden to Leicester Square - a 90 second tube journey that takes at least 8-10 minutes due to the depth of the line): https://content.tfl.gov.uk/walking-tube-map.pdf
London traffic lights are all equipped with PCATS — pedestrian countdown at traffic signal. It’s the timeout signal that shows how many seconds you have left to cross the road.
The implementation is very hacker friendly. The PCATS counter is literally bolted onto the side of the existing lights and learns the pattern of the system to which it is attached by monitoring its behavior. There is basically all but an air gap between the counter and the lights themselves, and the counter is making an informed guess. They start their installation-lives having no idea how much time will be left.
As such, each counter is equipped with a 4 bit error display to indicate its status — out of sync, could not sync, faulty lights, etc. Keep your eyes peeled for little LEDs telling you something about the internal status of the system.
Another cool feature of of pedestrian crossings (and I think this applies to the whole UK) is the accessibility aids. We're all used to beeping traffic signals, but did you know that on the underside of the control box there is a tactile cone that rotates when the green signal is active?
I don't know why this scene is so memorable. My older brother and I last saw this movie 30 years ago and we still remember and laugh about this scene when we think of London.
Chevy Chase's laugh/cry moments of utter hysteria and derangement have always made me laugh at/with those scenes even more so as I've gotten older as I can totally relate.
Context for our American friends. This isn't specific to London. Everywhere I've lived in Europe is more roundabout-heavy than the USA. Because, you know, they're objectively superior ;-)
They are also spreading in the USA. New Jersey has had them for quite a long time, and is building more. I've been surprised to see them as an apparent new default for new intersections in central Wisconsin where my wife's family is from. There are even some new ones being added around Santa Fe where I live.
The ones I've seen are really more of a half-hearted traffic-calming measure than proper roundabouts. The intersections I can think of, they're in residential neighborhoods and there's just some new island in the middle of a four-way stop. It might be impossible to widen these into proper roundabouts due to the houses up to the property lines?
Placing new STOP signs in the UK required written permission from the secretary of state until some years ago. They're still quite uncommon here, typically reserved for more risky junctions.
We most commonly use the "Give Way" sign at junctions instead, indicating that other traffic has priority.
*Given that the roundabout is fed by single-lane streets with low traffic and excellent visibility and no stop signs before entry, which would otherwise negate the advantage of quicker entry.
Single-lane roundabouts aren't very uncommon in America. Maybe not as common as in the UK, but they're definitely around and virtually every driver in America should be familiar with them. There will always be a few fools who don't grok them, but the same can be said for any aspect of driving.
I think when Americans say they're baffled by UK roundabouts, they're almost always talking about the huge multi-lane roundabouts. Those, to me, are nightmare fuel.
My French relatives are always impressed with the (mostly) civil behavior at 4 way stop signs in California and claim they would never work in France. It’s funny to me because every time they visit, they comment on them.
I left France too young to know if they are right though.
I think what your relatives mean is that if everyone has a stop then it'll be messy because everyone will try to go first after they have stopped...
Here in the UK they have installed 2 stops and 2 give ways at a nearby crossing and it's already quite dangerous because no-one is sure what to do: those with give-ways think they should go before those with stops, those with stops think they should go first if they arrived first... honking ensues very often. If you're lucky it ends in a very British "you go first, no you go first" contest, which is not very practical, either.
That sounds dangerous. It’s not uncommon for different people to order events differently, I can see two cars crossing at the same time, each driver convinced to be first.
It does lead to quite a few 'what the f.. arms up.. stares' when there is a perceived violation but it works. Probably because the cars within the stop signs are going relatively slow.
given that people generally don't spin their tires off the line from a stop sign, it's fairly safe. If it's obvious that two people are going at the same time then one that has advanced less far in that time will generally ease off the throttle and let the more advanced party continue.
there are accidents, of course, but i'm not sure of any 4 way traffic junction that's infallible.
and as others stated, right-of-way rules are observed atop the social norms.
Specification unclear. If two or more entries to the intersection have at stopped vehicle waiting to cross, a waiting vehicle is somewhere "on the right" of each waiting vehicle. If only two vehicles are present, and are across from each other, and at least one of them wants to turn across the path of the other, each vehicle is _equally_ "on the right". A relative reference is not sufficient.
Some people try clock-relative turns, but that only works if the vehicles arrived while an existing rotation (of prior vehicles) was in progress.
I think most people obey 4-way stop-sign intersections because they're afraid of getting T-boned by another car, not because they obey signs for the sake of obeying signs. People ignore signs when they can get away with it, but a 4-way stop-sign intersection is not such a case to anybody but the suicidally reckless.
The ~dozen or so roundabouts near where I live (northern suburb of Atlanta, Georgia) have all been 4-way stop retrofits. And all in the last 10 years or so.
In Savoy Court, vehicles are required to drive on the right. This is said to date from the days of the hackney carriage when a cab driver would reach his arm out of the driver's door window to open the passenger's door (which opened backwards and had the handle at the front), without having to get out of the cab himself. Additionally, the hotel entrance's small roundabout meant that vehicles needed a turning circle of 25 feet (7.6 m) to navigate it. This is still the legally required turning circle for all London cabs.[1]
> That's just another name for car for hire or taxi.
There's a legal distinction between taxis and hackneys. Taxis can be taken from a taxi rank or flagged down, but hackneys must be called to collect you. I'm sure there was a reason for the distinction at some point, but it remains.
Oh yes, I've seen those labyrinths! There's one right next to the elevator at Holloway road station, and I just end up ogling at while waiting for the lift to arrive. It's great!
The 'Wood-block paving' I know of as wooden cobbles. Iron-shod horses apparently made a lot of noise on stone and IIRC experiments were done to reduce this, the best results being from using wood not stone for cobbling. So it was a noise reduction thing in essence.
One of my locals is a coaching inn that goes back centuries. Where the coaches would have entered is covered by the building above and under that, where people now sit and drink, there are still wooden cobbles. I doubt they're from the original horse-time (which is only a century ago, or less), but there they are.
Many of them must have been replaced with a different brand since then as I noticed fewer had the Stanton Warrior brand when I was last in London in 2019.
(Also, at adds with the old Google interview brain-teaser, "Why are manhole covers round?" - they're rectangular. So I guess it they don't care so much if these ones fall in the hole, probably because they're not holes that workers go down into).
> Manhole covers are round if they cover a pipe and square if they cover a brick built manhole
This is inaccurate as a generalization - in the three jurisdictions I've worked in, they're round if they're newer than ~1990, and mix of round and square (or two triangles that go together to make a square) if they're older than that. The frame and cover are replaced independently from the MH structure itself so the cover doesn't tell you anything about the makeup of the structure.
Not quite true. The cover itself has to be supported by a structure. The frame itself is insufficient. If you put a round cover on a square hole it would cave in if a truck ran over it.
> Your note about them not falling in makes me wonder if Google had a different answer?
It's the kind of question that's asked in interviews because it has several answers and a good candidate should be able to think it through and suggest a reasonable number of them and demonstrate their ability to creatively think through a problem. That round covers can't fall in seems one of the simplest and most important, given that a cover that falls in could kill or seriously injure a worker.
Great artwork and interesting stuff with many remaining ones effectively unique as they were put in by a particular locality for a time and then others have been removed.
People from Berlin are used to look down all the time in order to avoid dog shit on the pavement.
When I was looking for an appartment in Berlin, at one viewing appointment there were about 20 other people interested in the same appartment. It was quite nice, but there was an insufferable stink everywhere inside that appartment. After we left I noticed that I had stepped into dog poop before and the reason for the smell was the dog shit stuck to my shoe. I applied and surprisingly there were almost no other applications, so I got accepted. The appartment never smelled that bad again :)
The hydraulic power utility is fascinating - the sheer amount of water lost via leaks from water piping in this century is huge, and so keeping a high pressure system running back then must have been tremendously difficult. Especially given a similar sized leak will have a much larger impact in a higher pressure system.
My wife did some work at a municipal water utility and they did find some wooden pipes in service in the early 2000s. The active ones are all gone, but they still find buried ones, especially around an old reservoir that was in the downtown area.
On the other hand, a leaking high-pressure pipe is extremely noticeable [1], so any damage was probably fixed asap instead of being neglected for ages.
Thought it was going to say because the councils have no funding and our roads/pavements are so battered that you’ll likely fall over and break your ankle if you’re not careful.
Victory against fatbergs is impossible in the near term. As cities mature, and the use of flushable wipes becomes more accepted, fatbergs will appear in UK and the colonies.
It's trivial to stop the fatbergs caused due to flushable wipes if city administrations spend a few minutes thinking about why people use flushable wipes instead of spending time and money in celebrity campaigns [1] against them.
The conclusion is obvious – wiping with dry toilet paper is an inefficient, unhygienic, and sometimes painful way of cleaning yourself after defecation. Hence, people use wet wipes to "feel fresher", as the advertisements euphemistically put it.
The solution is also quite straightforward – go all the way and replace most uses of toilet paper with bidets or washlets, following the lead of smart nations like Japan. Wet wipe usage will automatically plummet. City planners all over the world should be running campaigns promoting bidet usage and partnering with washlet companies instead of sternly wagging their fingers at wet wipe users.
We’re way past talking anuses; we’re in class-action lawsuit territory against being able to market the term “flushable”.
The buyers and users of wipes are changing diapers on little kids and old people, not on-the-go busy professionals. The immense concentrations in sewers are not correlated with office worker productivity. Wipes are convenient to do that in public. Only a few countries have enough trash cans nearby for the occasion.
So, if someone is going to market the term flushable, I want them to be responsible for plumbing fiascos when it is.
A very easy, reasonable step would be to heavily tax wipes which made claims like "flushable", but failed to disintegrate (as toilet paper does) in the sewer.
Barnmead Road ( https://goo.gl/maps/uGXKSum8azGJLbU29 ) has particularly terrible roads and pavements. It's actually deliberate, because it's a conservation area.
This isn't about being in a conservation area but rather the road being unadopted and therefore not maintained by the council. Beckenham is full of them.
> Some 19th century street furniture also remains, enabling the road to present an excellent understanding of the appearance of many residential areas in the era of horse transport. The council will promote the retention of the original street surfacing and furniture in the conservation area.
I stand corrected. There are still various other roads in Beckenham that are not inside a conservation area that are unadopted (and consequently in an absolute state).
Croydon has a bunch too. A friend was showing me around there a while ago and at one point we were walking down a wide road with no pavements, large-ish semi-detached houses on each side with decent front gardens.
Was something I normally expected in upmarket rural areas and traditional villages.
For those interested, for Bucharest there's this [1] blog-post with a few photos of some old manholes. In here [2] there's a list of links from the same project to posts that present some old stuff from and around Bucharest (the text is in Romanian, but there are lots and lots of photos that are self-explanatory).
I've been taking pictures of manhole covers for around 10 years now. Well, manhole covers, drainage gates, square access covers, and so on.
Locally, the challenge is an interesting, somewhat artistic, usually (but not always) urban picture. I've already taken a picture of most designs I see, after all. In any other city, I'm catching the design first. (Tromsø, Norway has a reindeer!)
I'm not all that surprised there is a website to catalogue them and am always kind of happy to be reminded that others have the same fascination.
I genuinely read the title as "always look down on London" and my French mind was as vindicated as it was puzzled by it. The article however is much more interesting and full of those little things that make living in old and beautiful cities worth it. In Paris I found that looking at walls (and decorations), street layouts and names, could offer similar journeys.
In Athens, Greece my favorite example of this is where you walk over the ancient city walls.
There is a section of wall revealed by a dig in Kotzia square[1]. The nearby paving traces the walls, and further on the National Bank is raised up so you can see the wall continuing on.[2]
Originally to push any HGV trailers back onto the road if they cut the corner [0].
They also work really well at beaching drivers looking at their phones who would have otherwise mounted the pavement.
Bell bollards- they aren’t just more handsome - they are also what’s used when normal bollards aren’t enough, they are able to stop heavier vehicles and far more resistant to damage.
They are especially good at stopping trucks cutting corners and enforcing width restrictions.
One could accompany this with the track "Looking Down on London" by the perfect pop band Komputer from their 90s album The World Of Tomorrow, if one liked Kraftwerk inspired electronica.
It's not really about the same thing, just similar sounding titles, and a nice excuse to mention one of my old favorite albums!
This is awesome! Didn't make it to London this past year, but everywhere from Paris to Barcelona to Istanbul had space invaders painted on houses. But i guess it doesn't count as "look down"
The "<--LOOK RIGHT" painting is genius. For person who only had one job, they took it to 11. Could be shocked if most people who see that note don't look both ways...
- Every tube station has a "labyrinth" to find. https://art.tfl.gov.uk/labyrinth/about/
- Vehicles drive on the left hand side in the UK. Except at the entrance to the Savoy, where road markings make it clear they must drive on the right.
- We love roundabouts. Londonist has a nice article on some of the weird things you can find on some of them here: https://londonist.com/london/secret/the-strange-things-you-c...
- When using transport, the normal rule of thumb is that the underground will be quicker than a bus or even a taxi on many journeys, but sometimes walking beats even that. TfL has a tube map that helps you figure that out (check out Covent Garden to Leicester Square - a 90 second tube journey that takes at least 8-10 minutes due to the depth of the line): https://content.tfl.gov.uk/walking-tube-map.pdf