The Rubbish Ring Road Again, Cheltenham

I have said before on this blog that a measure of a traffic system's efficiency cannot always be determined when it is busy since the system by nature will be compromising to try and achieve the best flow (supposedly) and this is hard to judge when there is a lot of traffic around. However, when it is quiet, this is when you can tell how well the system works. While there is little traffic, you would expect lots of green lights and quick progress. Not so in Cheltenham. I decided to go on the ring road today since it is supposed to be the main east-west road in Cheltenham and I shouldn't have to travel down narrow side streets to shorten my journey time.
Anyway, I joined at Blockbusters and drove west to M5 junction 10. This was my experience: Red, red, green, green (just), red, green, green(pelican), red, red, green, red, red, green, red, red, green (only because I went faster than the limit before the lights changed). So an empty road (no traffic) and I get more reds than greens on the MAIN road. What is worse, you can see that getting stopped at a red light often creates a gap in traffic which causes the next set to change to red as you approach.
This system is DEFINITELY worse than anything else you could design (except perhaps all lights permanently on red - even then people would end up driving through). There are too many sets, too close together that can't even manage an empty road - sounds a bit like Gloucestershire council. This would be a great example in a text book of how not to design a system.
Now I don't like traffic lights but I did grow up in London and I am used to them and in London, apart from an odd set, I NEVER noticed this sort of obstruction to driving and that included journeys across most of North London.
My journey today? 3 miles in 11 minutes which equates to an average speed on an empty road (approx 50% 30mph and 50% 40mph) of 16 miles per hour. The traffic lights more than halved my average speed on a mostly empty road.
Gloucestershire, someone has to go. Whoever is responsible should do the decent thing and resign, accepting they have no idea what they are doing. NO IDEA!