The Watford Ring Road is a road located in Watford

Watford

Watford is a town and borough in Hertfordshire, England, situated northwest of central London and within the bounds of the M25 motorway. The borough is separated from Greater London to the south by the urbanised parish of Watford Rural in the Three Rivers District.Watford was created as an urban...

, Hertfordshire

Hertfordshire

Hertfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the East region of England. The county town is Hertford.The county is one of the Home Counties and lies inland, bordered by Greater London , Buckinghamshire , Bedfordshire , Cambridgeshire and...

, 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

M1 motorway

The M1 is a north–south motorway in England primarily connecting London to Leeds, where it joins the A1 near Aberford. While the M1 is considered to be the first inter-urban motorway to be completed in the United Kingdom, the first road to be built to motorway standard in the country was the...

 (by way of the A4008 road

A4008 road

The A4008 road starts at Hatch End in the London Borough of Harrow at a roundabout on the A410. It runs North from the roundabout and is known as Oxhey Lane. After it passes over the route of the Grims Dyke and Grimsdyke Golf Course is to the East. Very soon afterwards it passes in to Hertfordshire...

).

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

Multi-storey car park

A multi-storey car-park is a building designed specifically to be for car parking and where there are a number of floors or levels on which parking takes place...

s that can be reached from the ring road: Palace, Queens, Kings, Church, Gade and Sutton. These are connected to the Harlequin Shopping Centre

Harlequin Shopping Centre

The Harlequin Centre, in the centre of Watford, is the biggest shopping centre in Hertfordshire, in the United Kingdom, and is visited by over 17 million customers each year...

 and Watford Town Centre.

The road is a typical example of 1960s town planning: grade separation

Grade separation

Grade separation is the method of aligning a junction of two or more transport axes at different heights so that they will not disrupt the traffic flow on other transit routes when they cross each other. The composition of such transport axes does not have to be uniform; it can consist of a...

 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

A412 road

The A412 is a road in England that links Slough and Watford. It was previously the main artery for this corridor, prior to the construction of the M25. It provides interchange to the A40/M40 at the Denham Roundabout, the M25 in Maple Cross and the A41 north of Watford...

, which crosses an underpass before joining with the latter at a full-blown grade separated junction.