My route to work a few years back passed through a roundabout which had traffic lights at every place roads joined. The average queue length was 1/3 mile - that's 2 miles of standing traffic at any time.
Except when the lights failed. Then, despite the presence of a van used by the repair man half-blocking one of the routes, the MAXIMUM length of any queue was 3 vehicles.
We managed to scare away one repair engineer, though it was not a nice feeling being awful to someone in a closely related profession.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
