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Sorry, wrong number
Road numbering is a system with clear rules. What happens when the people responsible for numbering roads don't follow them?
It's easy to see what happened: it was meant to be M14, but at some point the digits were accidentally transposed, and since M41 appeared to fit nicely in West London, surrounded by 4-zone numbers, nobody thought anything of it until it was too late. In 1973 it became clear that the rest of the West Cross Route would never be built, and the jumbled number remained in service until the stump of road lost motorway status about 26 years later. But the point of the exercise was to move through traffic to the new bypass - to encourage it to follow a different path, where the road now divides, and take an unfamiliar route around the west of Maybole rather than the familiar way through the middle.
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