Thanks a lot. Has "ring road" got a different meaning in BrE? Thanks again.
No ;-) - our meaning is just the same as the one Ouisch gave, though more like the 'beltway/loop' meaning. The other sort - which relieves congested traffic - can be called 'a relief road'; that is, a ring-road has to form a ring around a town or village.
To give local (to me) examples:
- Oxford has a ring-road. As wheeled traffic - apart from bicycles - is severely restricted in the town itself, it can be quicker to avoid driving through the town; instead, you can drive out to the ring-road, drive round, and drive in on the other side.
- The A33 joins Basingstoke to Reading. Until about 20 years ago it passed through many little villages on the way, one of which was Swallowfield. Eventually, they built 'the Swallowfield Bypass - which does indeed bypass Swallowfield, but also bypasses several other villages.
- One of those villages is called Three Mile Cross. As its name suggests, it grew from a small cluster of buildings at a cross-roads three miles outside the centre of Reading. Once the Bypass was built, traffic raced from Basingstoke to just outside Reading at 50-60 mph and then crawled the last three miles at average speeds of 10-20 mph. A big new road was built 5-10 years ago, called 'the A33 Relief Road'.
In the nature of things, given that traffic improvements (through road-building) tend to be phased, a number of individual bits of bypass may in time be joined to make a ring-road.
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