Never walk through the Rotherhithe tunnel

Fair point.

Busier than the old Elbe tunnel of similar age

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Great, isn’t it? /s

It’s been like this ever since i can remember, i’m conditioned to think in mph and distance in miles because our damn street signs all use them. Anything less than miles then i’m fully metric and baking for me is definitely all metric but the UK has some really fucking weird traditional hangups if you care to look. Visit the continent if you want a fuller metric experience.

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I wonder if it would be worse with no traffic, completely silent?

I live in Canada, I looked at the “yards”, did a quick mental calc and said’ " Oh, a bit over 1.5km.

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Originally a 3inch curb separated road from pedestrian traffic. No more, the cars systematicly veer into the pedestrian space. Oncoming traffic could kill them, but pedestrians are no threat. Might makes right (of way).

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UK got an exemption from the EU re keeping miles etc, IIRC, and largely (I suspect) because the UK govt did not want the expense of changing all the road signs among other things. Plus pints in pubs because, well, alcohol and tradition.

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Actually, no pedestrian access. Peds were banned in 1969. Vehicles only!

I mean they still measure body weight in stones and pounds.

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Reminds me of the Posey Tube between Alameda and Oakland, CA:

Saves you about 6 miles round trip to the nearest bridge, but you have to put up with deafening traffic noise, suffocating exhaust fumes, and squeezing past anyone who happens to be going the other way on the extremely narrow sidewalk (as happens at 2:40 in the video).

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A gas mask would not help. Carbon monoxide goes through any filter. You need oxygen in a tank.

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I´ve seen this video before. The entire channel is actually very interesting and fun.

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I try to avoid riding (motorbike) through it too, far prefer the ferry (if it is running).

Officially (medical, police, etc., etc.) we use kilograms, in private we often still use stones and pounds.

@theophrastus I/we think in miles and metres and, less frequently, yards. Rarely gallons, sometimes in acres (and rarer furlongs, chains and perches/rods), pints only for beer.

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I’ve always found the excuse of not wanting the expense of replacing road signs to be a cop-out.
Our government should have opened up a policy of dual measurements on all new signs with miles first then KM.
At a certain point in time new signs switch to still being dual but KM becomes the prominent measurement. Then another point in time can be when all new signs simply drop the miles and you’re left with KM. If the UK had started doing this in the 80s or 90s the vast majority of our signs would be in KM or have KM on them by now.

All it takes is to actually set out a policy and let natural replacement rates take over. You would be left with the odd sign here and there that somehow doesn’t get replaced for 30 or 40 years, but without incurring any additional cost it could have been accomplished.
I’d say it wasn’t expense that was the reason, but simple stubbornness and aversion to change.

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And milk. The milkman only delivers in pints. (Yes, we do have a milkman.)

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Yep.

Don’t touch the stuff.

Yes. 

20+ years ago, living in that part of London, I once made the mistake of walking through the Rotherhithe tunnel.

On the map it looked straightforward. A gentle 2 mile wander home vs. trying to find (and pay for - this part was imporant) a taxi, how could I lose?

I made things worse by starting down the tunnel on the side i first came to. Unfortunately this was the same side (left) as the traffic. Back then the the speed limit was 30mph and there were no namby-pamby speed cameras to enforce compliance. As this was late at night traffic was lighter and correspondingly faster, much, much faster.

The following 15 minutes or so were terrifying. Cars and lorries flying past with inches to spare, some at serious speed. The traffic coming in the other direction meant that drivers couldn’t give any room even if they wanted to and that pavement is not wide. Looking over my shoulder all the time wasn’t practical but the acoustics of the tunnel meant it was impossible to tell if the roar you could hear coming from behind was a cement truck 200m back down the road or a car that was almost on top of you.

The volume of traffic was high enough, especially with the curve of the tunnel restricting sight-lines (and because I was slightly drunk), that I wasn’t brave enough to try and cross over to the other side of the tunnel where I would at least have been able to see my vehicular doom mounting the pavement to come and crush me. Instead I had to just rely on imagining my squishy death.

It was an utterly miserable experience and I was pathetically grateful when I made it to the end of the tunnel and escaped. Watching the video it looks like the 20mph limit and some actual enforcement has downgraded the experience from pant-wettingly scary to merely deeply, deeply unpleasant (though you still couldn’t pay me enough to put that to the test).

In my defense the next nearest option to cross the river was Tower Bridge, which would have added about 3 miles to my journey, which wasn’t as a pedestrian wasn’t a very appealing option.

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The algorithm popped this guy up for me a couple of weeks ago. He deserves to be better known, his stuff is entertaining and informative, the jokes terrible but the videos themselves rather well made. He’s near 100k subscribers and deserves more. Which is an irony just now considering he can’t travel anywhere to record new footage. Hopefully that will resolve itself.