Right. So. There are some big road works happening around here, whole new main road put in with tunnels and bridges and other roads are becoming one way, yet others are being completely replaced with parks and such.
Obviously, not every change is a great success. Obviously, some of these things will only make sense or be a positive after everything is finished. And some things may get worse - some specific trajectories might be longer or more troublesome.
Now, the local Facebook* group is quite political and driven by the opposition. (For clarity's sake: the ruling body of our city is a mixed list of the Green and the Liberal party, with assistance from the Socialist-democratic party and the Christian-conservative party. The only opposition is the extreme-right-wing-fascist party. Y'know, the type who adored Putin, wants all people darker then #D7897E sent back to their own country, and thinks gay people are OK as long as there's Muslims around to oppose, but shouldn't bother normal folks. Yeah, we didn't beat Hitler hard enough last time. Anyway.) Fair enough. So, as you can imagine, lots of people there hate all the new changes, and are spewing venom. Me, I'm....a bit ambivalent, in that I like most of the ideas behind 'm but think some bad choices were made and, of course, lots of things are going wrong in the first few phases.
One road that's now been finished and is open, has these lights:
View attachment 42027
Yes, that's a green and a red arrow, both pointing forwards, for two different lanes.
Now, the reason is, that on the other side of the crossroads, there's only one lane. Having both green at the same time would have people try to merge on the crossroads, or cut each other off, etc. A better solution would have been to have two lanes at the other end and merge 'm 100m further down, sure, but I guess there wasn't enough space for that.(Also, I'm not commenting on the "red and green for the same lane in different directions" bit -that's just plain stupid). Now there's a whole movement that this is too unclear, that this is illegal, that this is dangerous, that this is confusing, that this is wrong, that the city council is really incompetent if they think this is ok, etc etc.
I've been fighting all day about this. It's legal, it's possible, it's in the Belgian road code, it's not all that confusing if you just think for 1 second, and it's a much safer option than having people merge in the middle of a crossroads.
And man, the reactions...Half of these people need to have their driver's license stripped away. And I sincerely hope some of these are paid trolls, because, sheesh. The amount of doublethink and rhetorical BS they use is...impressive.
*Since when does spellcheck only recognize Facebook with a capital letter? It USED to be a company name, now it's a website - the company is Meta. A website address does NOT merit a capital letter, it's not a name.