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Two sides of the coin

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2010-07-06 20:50:56 - Graham Ellis

If you want to know a whole story - look at both sides of a coin. And if you want to know more than what you're being told, listen to what other people are being told.

The A350 / Westbury Bypass enquiry is water under the bridge now - so this is purely academic interest - but I was told (and frankly doubted) by the traffic modellers that their work showed that there would be no significant change in traffic levels on the A350 once you got north of Semington. And yet today, Peter Dawson from Bath and North East Somerset was telling the residents of Bath that they had hoped to ban lorries from the A36 and send them up to the motorway via the Westbury Bypass and A350, but now that they bypass had been rejected their plans were in tatters and they would have to find another way.

So do I now know the whole story? No - I don't think I do - I don't understand how the heavy lorries could have been sent via the A350, and yet the A350 have no significant change in traffic levels. Is there a missing piece to this jigsaw, or was someone being less than honest in what they were having us believe?

As I say - just academic interest. But a tale to learn from.

You'll also learn a lot if you look at what a Train Operating Company tells its passengers ... and also look at what they tell their shareholders at the AGM



14th July - And (but known to me) writes:

The plan to close Bath as a through route between the A46 to the A36 for commercial vehicles was something that concerned me from when it was first mentioned many years ago. At one time I regularly drove between Bath and Warminster and saw the A36 as cluttered with lorries as the A350. However in recent years the number of lorries using the A36 has become less and less. I think that many drivers transferred to the A350 (by leaving the motorway at junction17 instead of 18) at the time the Chippenham bypass was opened making the route to Warminster an easier option than driving through Bath and then a couple of years ago there were two very long periods when the A36 was closed at Limpley Stoke for road works and I think the remaining drivers transferred to the A350 never to return to the A36.

I have not put this in your comment section of your Horse’s Mouth (Permission given - Graham) because whenever I suggest this to local councillors and transport experts I am told that I am not correct and that at least 75% of commercial vehicles on the A350 from junction 17 to Warminster are local traffic in that they are delivering to the local area.

More recently you may have read that there have been moves by the Marlborough Area Board to close Marlborough to commercial through traffic although I think the main closure bids came from people living in the villages along A346 and A338. I noted that this has now been put forward to Wiltshire Council for consideration, even though I was told only months ago that the proposal would go nowhere. I understand that lorries joining the A346 at junction 16 of the M4 will now drive on to J13 and use the A34. I suspect many of these vehicles come to J16 via the A417 / A419 and so looking to the future I suspect that they will they find staying on the M5 to join the M4 to leave at J17 and use the A350 to the A303 a better option. Of course their return journey would be the reverse. Again I am told my guess assumption is not correct but I raised the query with a transport manager from outside the area recently and he supported my view but added drivers have their individual preferences routes, for stopping places and so one could not be sure. I guess only time will tell.

On to another subject and following the Government’s recent request for details of laws that could be modified or even abandoned to improve daily life I wrote to Duncan Hames drawing his attention to the duplication of bus services running just minutes apart locally and in other parts of the country and suggested that the logic of the law was correct to bring about competition but now needs to be redrafted to ensure buses run over similar routes by competitors are equally spaced in time interval throughout the journey route to provide a better service to the public. Last Friday morning in Melksham there as a 234 an X34 and a few minutes later an X31 and 231 all following one another nose to tail. [See [here] - G]