The Motorway

As I'm sure you are all aware, in lieu of 'interstate freeways', there are motorways in this country. Perhaps the most well-known is the M25, which acts as a ring road around greater London and is seriously just a circle that is apparently always slowed to a crawl. It is also one of the 3 motorways that I have been on, the other two being the M3, which goes north out of Southampton and eventually gets you to the M25, and the M27, which is an east-west road that would eventually take you to Brighton and such. And it is the M27 that can be seen here on the right.

While the premise is the same as I-5, there are many things that, as a transportation professional/student, I find rather bizarre. Getting over the fact that you are driving on the left, there is the fact that all of the freeway signs are blue (and not green). I don't know how much detail can be gotten out of the smaller version of this photo, but it contains all sorts of interesting things. The big black bit below the big blue sign is a VMS sign, conveniently not on at the time. The big blue sign is really two big blue signs, simply indicating that there is a split in the road ahead (additional note, there are also A roads, which are more like highways or state routes). Other things of interest that may be difficult to see are the signs on the off-ramp on the left there, one of which indicates that the ramp ends in a giant roundabout (it may not be a normal roundabout, but sort of like a one-way road that is in a big circle, which sounds odd, but go with it). And there are signal ahead signs, so it's apparently signalized. Past the gore on the left, underneath the big overhead signs, is what I suppose is called a lane use sign, which all involve unnaturally long, skinny arrows, and in this case just shows that an additional lane will be added on the left with the upcoming on-ramp. You also often find signs (but not in this photo) regarding the 'hard shoulder'.

And my personal favorite just says 'queues likely'.