What are your experiences of driving in and around Leeds in 2025? Drivers spoke to us about congestion, potholes and busy junctions in the city.
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00:00I think driving on the whole in Leeds at the moment, it's wherever you go, whatever time, day or evening, the roads are always really busy, really clogged up.
00:11Your journeys tend to take a lot longer than they used to do.
00:15The state of the roads at the moment in general, I think, are quite poor.
00:20I think the main example would be standing the road as you're coming up towards Bramley.
00:26The potholes on the left-hand lane are quite bad.
00:30The bike lanes down Headingley Lane, North Hill Road Junction, my car's like a small 4x4, so even that gets knocked around by the bumpiness of it.
00:44So I don't know what they're going to do there.
00:45And also the turnings with the green bike lane going across the junctions, I find it's really ambiguous for the pedestrians and the drivers.
00:57I think it's probably less safe than it was before.
01:01Most of the main roads aren't so bad, but there definitely are some places where the potholes are really bad and really unavoidable.
01:08Kind of when you're coming out of certain turns as a pothole that you have to swerve around that kind of would be better if you didn't have to swerve.
01:15But I think mostly the biggest issue in Leeds is how confusing the roads are in the city.
01:19The amount of times that I've just been going around in circles because I have no idea what lane I'm supposed to be in, what direction I'm going.
01:26The work on Armley Gyratory has taken a lifetime. Has it improved travel? No, I don't think it has. I think it's made it worse.
01:37Too many road signs. Too many advertising signs. You're trying to find somewhere and there's just too many signs.
01:46And 20 mile an hour zones? Nightmare. Speed cameras? No. Just generally in Leeds, cities are bad.
01:57When you're coming on the inner ring road, coming up from Ellen Road, they have put the speed cameras in there.
02:03But people know where they are. So they're doing 50, 60 mile an hour, then slamming on so they can slow down.
02:08And then they're back to speeding again through the roundabouts.
02:11Coming onto the ring road by the First Direct Arena, that junction always gets super blocked up.
02:17Even in Headingley now, it's just traffic and you can come at tea time, it's even worse.
02:23Going down Kirkstall Hill, you can miss that for 10, 15 minutes just to get down a hill.
02:29Certainly the road quality is not particularly good. There's a lot of potholes. A lot of the road markings are quite poor.
02:38So they're the only negative things I can think of. But generally people are polite and well behaved in cars, I think, around here.
02:46And I find driving here quite pleasant compared to where I reside and where the driving is much more aggressive and confrontational.
02:55So, yeah, I mean, generally fairly positive, yeah.