Dr. France’s point is certainly well-expressed, but will not sink into the heads of the people responsible.

Three problems:

1) We’re still dealing with the legacy of the last government’s philosophy which drummed it into local and national government employees that private transport is bad, public transport good, so almost every scheme will contain a (not-so) subtle element of inconvenience in a misguided attempt to make people use public transport which is not up to the grade in any case.

2) Highways engineers who have no real experience of the real World and, as in Telford and Wreking, get paid their salaries not for engineering highways but for bringing in advisors and consultants to do the work for them. Problem is, the public engineers are often unable to adequately understand or control the private consultants, leading to acceptance of a scheme like this where, as Dr. France correctly states, an “ahead through lane” tuns into a “local left lane” without any prior warning to prepare motorists.

3) Local government is STILL following old treasury instruction that dictated that the priority on junctions is the cause delay to allow revenues to be increased in the form of fuel wasted while traffic is held up. Few, if any, of the engineers seem to be aware or bothered that the treasury rules were restated in late 2008 to give precedence to “green” systems rather than “revenue” systems.

This meant that “fluid junctions” should be built instead of “stalling junctions” and light sequences along highways should be programmed to ensure that if vehicles keep to the speed limit, they will encounter green lights all the way along the primary route, without need for the stop-start that was treasury instruction before 2008.

Needless to say, almost every junction or light controlled roundabout that I encounter in Shrewsbury or Telford, (and elsewhere as I travel widely), is still programmed on the “revenue” model, not the “green” model. It’s a simple change to make, if only our engineers could just drag themselves away from chatting with expensive, wasteful consultants and start doing the jobs that we pay them to do rather than paying someone else to do it for them.

It does surprise me that at a time when local government is looking to make savings, any public employee would continue spending a significant amount of their time (and budget) in sub-contracting their role to someone else. By doing so, they are effectively making themselves into expensive intermediaries and thus opening their roles up to scrutiny and potential redundancy.

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Whitchurch road is an awful road to travel down now as there are 5 sets of traffic lights to navigate. Traffic flow down the road is bad to say the least, it is quicker to travel down Sundourne Road or Lancaster Road to access anywhere other than businesses close to the Harlescott lights. The newly restructured Harlescott junction is little different to previous versions and really should have been made into a roundabout.

As mentioned above the queues into Tesco are bad and there should be another entrance/exit to the site at another point to help alleviate traffic build up.

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What a waste of money when we are supposed to be making cuts. Not revamping the crossroad would have saved good on our budget.

Another thing I still feel it was road to cut the speed limmit on Whitchurch & Battlefield road to 30mph.

I feel having lived in Shresbury all my life that that 40mph was right from these roads along with Featherbed lane and Sundorne Road. Feel this is a complete waste of time and money and unneccesary.

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This scheme is on a par with the Quantum Leap with it’s waste of money and a picture of it should be the used on greetings cards. I received a birthday card last week and on the front of it was a picture of yes – the Quantum Leap! How sad is that!

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[Eva, it’s a popular saying…nothing to do with whether Dr France or anyone else for that matter, really believes that these people are really medically certifiable.]

Is it Roadrunner? I suppose it is probably often said to you if you drive to your own rules rather than the highway code.

I can think of many words used in a derogatory way, retard,idiot,feeble-minded, imbecile etc etc and as many highway officers working for councils started their careers in the police force they have probably heard much worse applied to them on numerous occasions. This does not make it acceptable however, particularly put into print and by someone who should know better.

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