This is in Cartagena (Murcia), Spain; specifically, Av. del Cantón (apparently now renamed “carretera de la Rambla” according to the newfound video below).
The funny thing is that until recently, the road actually circumvented the corner of that particular land, as seen here:
See also: the Road to Hana. Lots of hundred year old one lane bridges that are all grandfathered in under ‘historical road’ or whateverthefuck. Traditionally, cars alternate if >2 meet up at a one lane bridge, first one proceeding, then the one on the opposite side goes. Acknowledgement and thanks signaled by a ‘shaka’.
eta: Actually, it looks like that may be for a really badly placed culvert.
Haha I could see how this would happen. I am a construction estimator and through the various phases of design development these mistakes are supposed to be eliminated as all the design consultants and engineers coordinate with one another. If no one is paying attention the last person to fix these is the general contractor’s superintendent who should be the boots on the ground fixing mistakes.
To be fair, every little pueblo Blanco de la frontera up the mountains in arid Andalusia is well served by modern smooth roads twisting through swiitchbacks and over gorge spanning bridges and blasted through mountains in tunnels where needed. With regular buses running on them.
Somebody is pulling the piss here and this road is not open. I notice that it is related to the storm drain and Spain has a funny set of laws around water, which the western US has too. See Chinatown.
heh – though looking closer, the new road is much wider, so they probably didn’t have space to do that again. My guess is they’ll just slap up a sign (maybe even with a blinky light or reflector) and everyone will get used to it. The roads in Spain are actually generally quite good, I find, but I’m never really surprised to come across weird situations like this that meet at the intersection of mismanagement, poor planning and historical limitations.
(I love driving north american visitors around on some roads where I live, and casually pointing out that despite appearances, this winding road that we are zipping along is a two-way affair, and there is every likelihood of meeting a large bus coming the other way.)
Situations like that crop up often in the US as well, especially in the Midwest, where a great many roads are laid out in a one-mile-square grid. However, since the world isn’t flat in spite of some folks’ wishes, these grids don’t always line up perfectly from county to county, or state to state. On the back roads that can lead to abrupt zigzags, while more important roads will have S-curves instead, sometimes for no seeming reason.
Near me, the big problem is that the roads in northeast Illinois don’t mesh up well with those in northwest Indiana, and there are few good east-west corridors thanks to that big lake. I-80/94 can be a solid traffic jam at just about any time.
Okay, yes, twice as wide as before; but on the video it is clear that there is enough room on the other side of the road. That is, all that is needed is to deviate the road by about ⅔ of a lane and clearly there is enough room. Unless of course, the other side is owned by another uncooperative citizen.
If you look very closely there are some faint dots on the right of the road that do taper.
Apparently Spanish drivers are renowned for seeing faint dots in their peripheral vision.
