{{Unreferenced, date=December 2009
The Watford Ring Road is a road located in
Watford
Watford () is a town and borough in Hertfordshire, England, 15 miles northwest of Central London, on the River Colne.
Initially a small market town, the Grand Junction Canal encouraged the construction of paper-making mills, print works, a ...
,
Hertfordshire
Hertfordshire ( or ; often abbreviated Herts) is one of the home counties in southern England. It borders Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire to the north, Essex to the east, Greater London to the south, and Buckinghamshire to the west. For govern ...
,
UK. It is numbered A411, and serves as a one way system around the town centre. It has decreased traffic through the town centre, and now provides links to every part of Watford, as well as the
M1 motorway (by way of the
A4008 road).
The ring road essentially acts as one big roundabout around the town centre, whilst also having bus stops and roads in towards the centre. There are numerous
multi-storey car park
A multistorey car park (British and Singapore English) or parking garage (American English), also called a multistory, parking building, parking structure, parkade (mainly Canadian), parking ramp, parking deck or indoor parking, is a build ...
s that can be reached from the ring road: Palace, Queens, Kings, Church, Gade and Sutton. These are connected to the
Harlequin Shopping Centre and Watford Town Centre.
The road is a typical example of 1960s town planning:
grade separation
In civil engineering (more specifically highway engineering), grade separation is a method of aligning a junction of two or more surface transport axes at different heights (grades) so that they will not disrupt the traffic flow on other tran ...
is used on three occasions to separate the traffic from pedestrians and cycles. The most notable of these is the large bridge which takes the road across Watford's High Street. Another example is the short branch from the ring road to the
A412 road, which crosses an underpass before joining with the latter at a full-blown
grade separated junction.
Roads in Hertfordshire