It's the A4380, and you may know it better as Gloucester Place.
Gloucester Place and Baker Street run parallel through Marylebone, from just north of Oxford Street to the edge of Regent's Park. Since the 1960s they've formed the spine of a one-way system - northbound only on Gloucester Place and southbound only on Baker Street. Over the weekend that was changed, and traffic on both roads now runs in two directions. Removing one-way systems and gyratories is very much the current planning zeitgeist - see also Tottenham Court Road, Aldgate, Stratford, Wandsworth, etc etc etc. [background detail]
This is the very southern end of the road to Birkenhead, the A41. Both Gloucester Place and Baker Street previously enjoyed the A41 designation because both of them were one-way streets. But now they're two-way, so only one of them can take the A41 crown, and officially that's Baker Street. Meanwhile Gloucester Place has been designated the A4380 by the Department of Transport, unsurprisingly because "there are no two digit numbers available", making it the capital's newest A-road. I've been to check it out.
Two-way roads aren't especially special, or inherently difficult to use. What's awkward is the switch from one- to two-, and how to re-engineer the available roadspace. Previously Gloucester Place had three lanes along most of its length, which probably encouraged some vehicles to drive faster than they should. Now it has one lane north and one lane south, plus cycle lanes to either side (unsegregated, and intermittently merged with bus stops). Baker Street is similar, making for less vehicle space overall but safer conditions for bikes.
I'm not familiar with the precise busyness of these roads previously, plus Weekday One is never the best day to judge how a new road system has bedded in. What I can say is that Gloucester Place was much busier northbound than southbound and Baker Street much busier southbound than northbound, as many drivers continued to use them exactly as before. That'll change. I also watched a white van drive the wrong way up a switched sidestreet, ignoring the honks of a council lorry and diverting onto the pavement to pass traffic going in the correct direction. That'd better change.
To keep an eye on initial behaviour, and to nudge those breaking the new rules, an army of traffic marshals has been despatched. Four staff in hi-vis were standing at every significant junction on both roads, one at each corner, marshalling pedestrians and assisting vehicles attempting to go the wrong way. That's a lot of contractors - I counted 88 in total - but important if years of engrained behaviour is to be unlearned and the switchover completed without major incident.
At the top of Baker Street I watched a taxi drive nonchalantly into what had been a southbound lane only to be stopped and told it now very much wasn't. On Gloucester Place one marshal was being paid to scream "Please look both ways before crossing for your own safety" at approximately 30-second intervals. Another gestured urgently with his hand whenever another pedestrian ignored the lights and crossed anyway, then gave up when everyone surged across ten seconds early. My favourite overheard marshal conversation went like this: "What's da business here?" "2-way! 2-way! 2-way!" "Why?" "Dunno."
One thing about switching from one-way to two-way traffic is that lights stay red for longer. Additional movements create additional conflicts, so several road junctions now have to include an all-stop pedestrian crossing phase. There are also a few junctions where certain turns are barred, most notably heading north on Baker Street where everything that isn't a bike, bus or taxi has to turn off before reaching the Marylebone Road. That makes the northbound section of Baker Street outside the tube station very quiet, and means car drivers can't actually head north on the A41 without diverting to the A4380 after all.
Some of the biggest impacts have been on buses. TfL could have left them all alone, keeping all northbound bus stops on Gloucester Place and all southbound bus stops on Baker Street, but have chosen not to do this. Instead they've made several switches, and summarised the changes in a none-too-helpful map posted up at every bus stop. It shows where to catch your bus at one of twenty-three local stops (including two Bus Stop Ls, two Bus Stop Rs and two Bus Stops Ws, so they've had to use two colours). It's a masterpiece of being quite useful for one task and completely opaque for all the others.
I've decoded the underlying pattern, which took a while, and can confirm the following. All southbound buses use Baker Street and none follow Gloucester Place. Meanwhile three northbound daytime buses do follow Gloucester Place (2, 30 and 74) but all the others use Baker Street. The 2 and the 74 aren't particularly useful routes because they're just about to terminate, so the only true anomaly is the 30 which has to use Gloucester Place to be allowed a right turn onto Marylebone Road. In short, if you want the northbound 30 go to Gloucester Place and if you want any other bus route, north or south, go to Baker Street. Why are these things always dressed up so complicatedly?
The realignment of local bus services means that several new bus stops are required, while other bus stops are being taken away. It may not surprise you to hear that this process has been carried out badly, and that bus passengers are far more likely to be confused than car drivers, pedestrians or cyclists. Several bus stops are showing incorrect route numbers on their tiles. Some are wrongly-lettered. Most of the new bus stops have no timetables. No bus stop is showing an up-to-date spider map, because none have been produced. The Bus Stop Goblins have simply stuck up their summary 23-blob maps and left it at that.
In Gloucester Place, Bus Stop K still displays the numbers of six bus routes that no longer stop here. One of these is the N13, a route which ceased to exist 22 months ago. Bus Stop R doesn't have an N13 tile but does include the other five routes that no longer serve Gloucester Place. Bus Stop S is no longer the penultimate stop on route 2, but the tiles still say it is. Bus Stops T and U are discontinued because no buses serve the top end of Gloucester Place any more, whereas last week five routes did. There are no southbound bus stops because there are no southbound buses.
Baker Street has gained four new northbound bus stops because there are now northbound buses. Bus Stop BA displays the numbers of eight bus routes, five of which don't stop here, and omits two routes that do. There are no timetables. Bus Stop F doesn't have an F on top, so it's hard to match up with the list provided on the map. It also manages to display the numbers of two bus routes which don't stop here. Again there are no timetables. Baker Street northbound is particularly rubbish. But here's the worst one.
This is Bus Stop C, the new bus stop opposite Baker Street station. Six bus routes stop here, none of which are displayed on the tiles. The two bus routes displayed - the 94 and N207 - do not stop here nor anywhere nearby. It seems the Bus Stop Goblins have nicked a former bus stop pole from Oxford Street, now surplus to requirements, and implanted it here without changing anything. That's why it says BY on top, not C, and that's also why it says Selfridges, not Baker Street, because that's where the stop used to be. Unsurprisingly the timetables are incorrect too.
As a further demonstration of lack of foresight, the next northbound bus stop (on Park Road) was closed yesterday because of an overhanging tree. Nobody noticed how overhanging the tree was until Sunday, because that was the first day of two-way traffic, so buses have had to be diverted via Gloucester Place while contractors move in and make things safe. Also this particular bus stop ought to be labelled X, according to the map, but the red circle on the top says U because it's been recycled from round the corner in Gloucester Place.
I took a ride up Baker Street on a northbound bus, and was surprised to see that the iBus system thought we were on diversion because nobody's entered the new routes into the database. Nobody's changed the routes over on the website either, so for example the northbound 13 is still shown going up Gloucester Place which it doesn't (apart from the short bit it did because of the overhanging tree). It also means all the datafeeds are wrong, so even Citymapper can't tell you what's stopping where and when. Repainting the road and reorganising the street furniture seems to have worked flawlessly, but attempting to relocate a few bus stops has proved an utter organisational shambles.
