Automotive

The best ring road in the world? Possibly. The most frightening? Yes.

A century ago, one short memorandum issued by the Ministry of Transport laid the groundwork for a system of standardised, uniform road signs and a great deal more.

What sound at first like a pair of forgotten country lanes turn out to have had a major part to play in the history of Scotland's roads.

One of the world's biggest and most controversial schemes to manage traffic by charging for roadspace. You can drive in to London if you like, guv, but it'll cost you.

Motorways used to be really simple. Now they have electronic signals, variable speed limits, emergency lay-bys, part-time hard shoulders... Just what is so smart about Smart Motorways?

If there's trouble crossing the Channel, you'll see the lorries queuing on the M20. What is Operation Stack? Why does it cause so much trouble? And why, more than twenty years after it started, are we still using it?

The A465 Heads of the Valleys Road is one of the most spectacular trunk roads in the UK, and building it required some of the most remarkable civil engineering. This is the story of how the road was built in the 1960s, and how it's being rebuilt today.

Road signs use a recurring set of standard symbols to make them faster and easier to read. Recognising them is key to understanding the signs.

Did you know that the shape of a road sign will tell you what kind of sign it is? The six basic shapes, and their meanings, are here.

All UK road signs are made using a palette of just ten basic colours, and each has meaning.

Free-flowing, resizeable and also quite pretty.

The simplest free-flowing three-way connector.

Three levels of road, three roads connected, three ways to build it.

A cheap and cheerful way to fully grade separate two intersecting roads.

The true British interchange.

A clever improvement on the cloverleaf.

A junction with no bridges and not much choice if you're on the side road.

It is big, and it is clever.

It might be the simplest type of interchange there is. One way on and one way off: a fork in the road.

Halfway between a diamond and a roundabout interchange.

A conventional, basic motorway-to-road connection.

Four symmetrical loops — it's impossible to miss a cloverleaf. If you can find one, that is.