UK vs. Turkey

Let's start with the major roads. This is part of D-400 where it bypasses the large town of Alanya. It is an at-grade dual carriageway and, quite obviously, has now pretty much been engulfed by the urban area. This bypass is the third such road to have been overtaken by the town - two more dual carriageway bypasses lie further in towards the centre. The plan seems to be to add a new at-grade dual carriageway around the edge every so often. It is not particularly elegant but does provide the town with a good road system, something not easy to plan in a country with no planning system.

In the foreground is a distance marker, found on most numbered roads.

Out of the towns and into the open country, D-400 is a coast road running east from the major city of Antalya, dual carriageway at least as far as Alanya and thus serving a major tourist area. It is probably not a typical inter-urban route, then, its traffic counts inflated with tourist buses.

Rural dual carriageways have opposing directions split with a drainage ditch. This section is unsurfaced but improvements being gradually made along the full length of the road turn it into a V-shaped concrete gully. Untensioned crash barriers are provided along one side only, facing the nearest carriageway, though there never seems to be anything inherently more dangerous about one side falling in than the other.

Some Turkish grade separation here - the loop of a trumpet interchange just outside Antalya, serving its airport spur road. The loop is as tight as it looks - its one lane is very wide to accomodate the length of coaches as they turn the sharp corner. In the foreground is a pedestrian - proof that this is not in any way a motorway. Horses and carts could also be seen on this road from time to time. In the foreground is a half-complete water feature in the central reservation.

This (unfortunately sun-washed) picture shows one of the many gantry signs along the dual carriageway. They were frequent but the price for this standard of signage is paid in its flimsy construction. Note the height warning mounted on its right support. The left hand sign is a standard white-on-blue direction sign; to the right is a white-on-brown tourist sign. It includes an English translation in parentheses.

All this gives the impression of a fast grade-separated road. It is not. There are three grade separated junctions on the two hour drive between Antalya and Alanya, all near one end. Elsewhere, roundabouts prevail.

Note the British-style signage - if I'm not mistaken the roundabout graphic here is a straight copy from British sign guidelines. The road number appears on diagrammatic signs and route confirmations but not on any other direction signage.

However, the kind of junction symbolised by the sign above actually looks like this - what might better be called a Turkish roundabout. It is not the circulatory junction we know and love; rather a small circular island formed where two dual carriageways cross. They are actually laid out to make driving through as smooth and straight as possible.

This was far and away the most common junction layout, found in towns, cities and rural areas alike. Most are signal controlled (usually just two phases) and they interrupted what was otherwise a fast rural dual carriageway every two or three miles.

Turkey relies heavily on traffic signals for urban and rural traffic control, to the extent that they are often installed at junctions where they are simply not needed. Perhaps as a result of this, red lights are commonly ignored at very high speed.

The signals themselves are always surprisingly new and well maintained - at the time of writing LED signals (like the one pictured) seem to be more commonly found than in Britain.

Traffic lights are routinely painted orange or yellow, though occasional sets have black and white backing boards. They run an unusual sequence of red-amber-green-flashing green-amber-red.

A newly realigned section of D-400 leaving Alanya to the west - the right-hand carriageway and tunnel are not yet open. The road is now a good standard with hard shoulders and two lanes each way, but Turkish lane discipline is shaky at best and many drivers will use the middle of the road at quiet times. Some prefer to drive in the hard shoulder or, occasionally, on the wrong carriageway.

Attempts are being made at basic access control along this dual carriageway. Where development hasn't yet made it to the kerbside, frontage roads are provided to prevent property accesses from the main carriageways, and the central reservation is being reconstructed to prevent informal turns being made across it. There is simply no legislative framework in place to do it any other way. One purpose of the frequent Turkish roundabouts is to allow U-turns to reach properties at the other side.

Some Turkish roadworks - this is the start of the contraflow in the picture above. This unruly parade of signs is the only indication that one carriageway is closed, and is the traffic sign equivalent of waving your arms about and screaming "Oh my God, quick, over there!".

This is what appears to be the remnants of completed roadworks. One thing evident after upgrades are finished is the reluctance to clean up what was there before. here, the central reservation has been widened to create a broad, green boulevard into the city, but the grassed-over carriageway shows in a row of older streetlights that were never removed. The sign to the rear has also seemingly been sawn off, its other panel no longer in the right place to point traffic into the city (and yes, this is an exit off another Turkish roundabout).

On inter-urban routes, one inescapable part of the landscape is the forest of billboards and enormous advertising hoardings that litter the verges and adjacent fields. This petrol station sign is far from unusual - compare its size to the coach next to it. While this would be a planning official's nightmare in the UK, there is nothing to stop them being put up anywhere and everywhere.

Some Turkish direction signage. This is generally good, with organised control cities appearing consistently on major routes. Off the main roads the system is much more patchy. European conventions are used - as with the rest of the road signing system - but the signs have a distinctive font that was presumably developed specially for Turkish roads.

One unusual form of signage that appears in urban areas are these - they look rather like old-fashioned inn signs. These two are mounted on a lighting column, and the problem of wind resistance is tackled by simply letting them swing about like a cat flap.

The use of arrows and chevrons on direction signs does not appear to have the meaning that it carries in Britain and much of Europe (arrows in advance of the junction, chevrons at the actual turning) - they are used interchangeably at and before the junction.

Turkish signs are much better at being produced to the correct designs and specifications than many other countries (see Spain!). However, here and there the system breaks down quite spectacularly, such as here. This small sign contains a motley collection of directions: the top is a major control city; the next three are urban destinations (including the municipal tip); the last is a street name, Ataturk Boulevard.

Turkey uses stripey signs to highlight traffic islands and decision points (such as roundabout exits) in much the same way that we use illuminated bollards. They are black and yellow and, as pictured, point downwards towards the direction of travel - diagonal stripes for places where you must go a certain way, chevrons for where you can go either side.

The standard STOP sign is prevalent in Turkey, but without the four-letter word we are familiar with. This particular one serves to indicate that traffic does not have priority when the traffic lights are switched off.

Another roundabout exit with more stripes and a blue sign to make your choices at this point perfectly clear. Behind is an unusual pair of black and white signs warning of police speed checks. The top is a simple written sign in Turkish, but for some reason it always appears with another separate sign with a symbol and English translation. Police speed checks took place on main roads close to settlements for the most part, and the Police's traffic division had a visible presence on main roads such as D-400.

This urban dual-carriageway is far from unusual: in any large settlement a good proportion of all streets seem to be laid out this way from the outset, including unsurfaced dual carriageways running through the shanty towns in the urban fringe. Central reservation landscaping prevents them being an eyesore and it seems a smart way of anticipating future growth.

Some Turkish streetlighting. In many places this is entirely concrete, much like the UK. Often electricity poles are concrete and the light bracket mounted on to them is concrete too - these always look rather precarious. While the Mediterranean climate is not as unkind to concrete as the British weather, many of these installations are showing their age and there seems to be some effort to replace them with metal poles. All the same, even those columns that have taken some damage are left in situ, with a couple further down this road visibly bowed and cracked.

Urban areas employ some black-on-white signage to indicate destinations within the built-up area. This example in the centre of Antalya includes some patching for white-on-brown tourist destinations. Note also the stripey painted kerbs, often found on urban roads.

Some less successful urban signage in the centre of Alanya. The roundabout simply has a diagram of itself mounted on the central island and it was actually quite tricky to line it up with the roads leading away. This was only the indication of the direction of the one-way streets that converge here: two of the arms on this sign have a tiny "no entry" sign on them.

As in many European countries, Turkey is picking up on the countdown lights at pedestrian crossings. I have encountered these before in Dublin, where they gave the pedestrian hope by counting down from about 25 seconds. This one was a very busy crossing but pedestrians could only look on and sigh as the green man went out and the countdown began at 59. The green man light below has two LED states so that he appears to walk.

A street name sign - mounted in the central reservation where it must be extremely useful. Below is a wonderful sign prohibiting a maneouvre that few people would be inclined to carry out - whoever produced it obviously wasn't paying much attention to which side of the road people drive on in Turkey!