Off in the distance

After 50 years, the M10 will stop being a motorway.

Which means that the road number will now be freed up, and eventually may be assigned to a totally different road (as per the A14, which used to terminate 400 metres behind me, and which is now 20 minutes drive away).

The rationale is to permit non-motorway traffic to be able to travel between St Albs and Hemel. But the M10 currently merges directly into the M1, so they're going to have to do something at that end.

(Given the recent roadworks in the area, I suspect they're going to run some separated lanes parallel to the M1 for a mile or two, until it reaches the next junction.)

As we were about to join the A1 on the way up to Bradford for Eastercon, bellinghwoman commented that although the A1 is probably a less saturated transport link than the M1, it does have a number of roundabouts on it.

We then proceeded to encounter a grand total of one roundabout between there and the southern outskirts of Bradford, and that one was being swarmed by traffic cones. In two places, our SmartNav asked us to negotiate now-non-existent roundabouts, and there were two other places that roundabouts had disappeared since I last drove that way about two years ago. That's an 80% reduction in the 110 miles that we covered.

However, you should not take that as indicating an imminent death of the species. Oh no, far from it, for as roundabouts have been disappearing from some places, they've been appearing in others. On the A1198, we crossed 15 roundabouts on our way home, 75% of the count for the entire journey in a mere 20 or so miles. The bypasses for Papworth and Caxton each add three previously non-existent rotary interchanges.

I suspect that although roundabouts are being taken off the longer, faster routes, they're being added in large numbers elsewhere with the creation of village bypasses. Since such a bypass usually has a roundabout at each end, and with many villages being effectively based on crossroads, I would guess that the modal number of roundabouts per such bypass is three. (Towns tend to have more roads meeting, so for a town bypass, I'd guess four.)