"English masons on opium"

There's a part in Warren Ellis's marvellous 'Night on Earth' when Elijah Snow describes Gotham City as being designed by "stone masons on opium" and "absinthe-fiend local architects".

I doubt that Cumbria County Council's Highways Department is fuelled by anything quite so exotic but the results of its planning repeatedly suggest that it runs on something wilder than tea or coffee. 

That said, there is some evidence of genius in its past, for there was surely some grand plan to Kendal's one-way system and one can only imagine that the great mind behind it resigned before the job was complete, leaving us with the equivalent of a incomplete Rubik's cube that is just four deft moves from triumphant completion if only someone knew how to finish it. 

Today's mishap was on a less grand scale: two sets of traffic lights on the A65, which would have been bad enough even if the Romney Road Bridge wasn't closed, too. Infuriating, though, when you're on your way to collect your kids :-/