The major roadworks at the Bow Roundabout are complete and traffic is flowing freely again. Hoo-bloody-rah.
All the holes people were threading cables through were covered over. The last patches of tarmac that needed redoing were redone. The last overnight closure took place, ending on Saturday morning. Stacks of orange barriers were piled onto the backs of trucks and driven away. Most crucially the new traffic lights were finally switched on, and when everyone was happy they were working OK the spider's web of temporary traffic lights was removed. It's a relief not to have to step around the temporary traffic lights into the cycle lane any more, and this must be even better news if you're a cyclist.
It took longer than strictly necessary for all the cones to be removed. They lingered mysteriously on a couple of arms of the roundabout, so for example traffic on Bow Road was still being unnecessarily funnelled into one lane even when traffic arriving from the A12 had the full two lanes available. But with all the cones gone six months of disruption have finally ended, so if traffic snarls up now it's because of rush hours and normal congestion rather than anything self-imposed.
This was also the signal for buses to return to their normal line of route and stop swanning over the flyover. Bus Stop P finally reopened over the weekend having been closed since September 30th, even though quite frankly it could have reopened on Friday because all the cones had gone. That said I have since seen a bus on route 108 still using the flyover, which might be because the driver didn't get the message or because they weren't particularly interested in picking up passengers. By my calculations disruption to bus services as a result of these works lasted from 7th September to 9th March, i.e. almost exactly six months, with eastbound passengers particularly inconvenienced and westbound passengers perhaps now missing the aerial shortcut.
Also when I said the roadworks were complete I was lying, they're still working on the expansion joints. This is because the Bow Interchange isn't just a roundabout/flyover/underpass combo, it's also a bridge over the River Lea. The current bridge is now 55 years old so it made sense to use this opportunity to give the metal joints a good once-over, and for practical reasons most of that renovation is being done at the end of the works. A team from a company called BridgeCare turned up with two huge vehicles called Bridge Expansion Joint Units and used shovels, blowtorches and specialist equipment along the length of a curved groove, measuring out the gaps between the two joints with wooden blocks.
Further twiddling to the expansion joints is ongoing so there are still orange barriers under the flyover and cones along the edge of Stratford High Street, mainly to keep people out of the way. Most importantly this means the new contraflow lane hasn't been opened yet, not quite, and only when those barriers are whisked away will the remodelled junction finally be operating as planned. I'll thus save my final overall report on the final configuration until that's finally happened, and then we can finally put six months of reportage to bed, finally.
