The urban motorway with no central barrier
A trip both ways on the A38(M) Aston Expressway, taking in bits of the M6 and the amazing Spaghetti Junction.
Filmed on 11 October 2003, the sights of Birmingham two decades ago are familiar but oddly different: there's no M6 Smart Motorway, and the Aston Expressway is full of original fittings and signs that have been swept away in the years since then.
Map extract from OS Opendata 1:250,000 Scale Colour Raster under the Open Government Licence 3.0.
With thanks to Steven Jukes for driving!
What's new
The forever bottleneck, part 2
The second part of the story, where we learn why exactly the M4 gets narrower on the final approach to Europe’s biggest city.
The forever bottleneck, part 1
The M4 into London was one of the UK's earliest and most ambitious motorway projects. It was bold, pioneering... and almost instantly regretted.
Hello, here's my ridiculous side project
An introduction to what I write, and why I write it, and where my strange new road sign simulator fits in to all this.
