The "bank holiday getaway" started pretty much on time yesterday, and quickly turned in to a horror show on the bypass and in much of South Edinburgh. A crash* on the bypass at about 1pm westbound near Straiton triggered huge tailbacks, and the usual mass dive for what used to be designated as the "ring road" (I don't know whether such a thing officially exists any more, although I'm sure I remember seeing "R" signs at random points along the route through GIlmerton, Kaimes, Fairmilehead, Dreghorn and Colinton).
https://twitter.com/trafficscotland/status/1520012322319880193
Unfortunately for those thinking that they had cleverly avoided the problem on the bypass, there are three-way TTLs at the Hunters Tryst mini roundabout, so Oxgangs Road quickly became a parking lot as well. Google Maps was showing another crash on the bypass a short while later, which seemed to cause eastbound traffic to bail on to the ring road as well. At one point the dark red lines on Frogston Road West and East were overlapping for several hundred metres around the area of the Mortonhall garden centre. What fun everyone must have been having, going nowhere in their cars on a warm sunny day, but not wanting to turn on the aircon in their mobile sitting rooms in order as to avoid using too much increasingly expensive petrol.
AFAICS from Google Maps the bypass was running reasonably freely again by late afternoon, but there was still traffic trying to find its way around the "ring road". When I popped out to B&Q on the bike at 5pm I was a tad gobsmacked to find traffic tailed back along Caiystane Terrace. Most of the drivers were then turning up Caiystane Drive to rejoin Oxgangs Road - presumably aiming to slyly slide past the tailback on Oxgangs Road, but apparently unaware that they would be trying to rejoin the queue before the actual bottleneck at Hunters Tryst. Unsurprisingly this manoeuvre looked to be taking them longer than waiting patiently on Oxgangs Road would have done.
I've never before seen traffic tailed back along Caiystane Terrace, and frankly I hope never to see it again. Few if any seemed to have the gumption to carry straight on and brave the speed bumps on Oxgangs Brae to access the ring road via Oxgangs Path (though on the flip side it wouldn't have been particularly pleasant for the residents of that otherwise fairly quiet street to have a queue of frustrated drivists crawling past their front doors).
I have to say that a degree of schadenfreude had started to kick in at this point.
It's not the first time that I've observed traffic displaced by holdups on the bypass taking longer to clear than the bypass itself. I'm sure someone somewhere must have done an academic study to model this phenomenon, whereby drivers seeking to circumvent a delay of some kind end up getting stuck in worse congestion on the secondary route. On the other hand, it could just be common sense that that would be likely to happen - if such a thing were ever deployed in such situations...
* Google Maps seems to be marking such incidents simply as "crashes" now - similar to the way that police now refer to them as "collisions" or "incidents" rather than "accidents", since most of the time such comings-together most certainly are not accidental, having been caused by deliberate poor choices/idiocy on the part of at least one of those involved. (Says he who is, of course, a perfect road user who never makes mistakes or does stupid things...)
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