Star comment: Roadwork misery is on the way
It sounds like a solution straight out of the pages of Alice in Wonderland. How to improve traffic flows? Put in traffic lights.
Work begins shortly to rip up the busy Preston Boats roundabout on the outskirts of Shrewsbury and replace it with traffic lights. This is the island at the end of the A5 dual carriageway, which itself is an extension of the M54 motorway.
In tandem with this, lanes at Emstrey island are to be widened.
According to the Highways Agency, the changes will make a real difference to drivers' journeys, by easing congestion, especially at peak times.
There does seem agreement that they will make a difference to drivers' journeys, but some motorists are complaining that the difference will be the creation of more congestion, not less.
Vote in today's poll: Are traffic lights on roundabouts ever a good idea?
This road is only a little more than 20 years old and already expensive work is being undertaken. You have to ask, if it is not fit for purpose, why it was not properly designed in the first place?
Roundabouts used to be all the fashion precisely because they were seen as maintaining traffic flows. Just look at Telford, a new town, which was designed with them as a key feature.
Yet now there appears to be a new fashion moving towards American-style intersections controlled by traffic lights. To suggest that these speed up traffic is counter-intuitive, and those who are stuck on red at Preston Boats in future will give a hollow laugh if reminded of it.
If roundabouts, which take up a lot of space, are to be controlled by traffic lights, there is no longer any logical reason to have a roundabout. So it is goodbye to Preston Boats.
From the motorists' point of view, the immediate prospect is one of misery caused by the disruption that will come with the work. As for the Highways Agency, it is faced with a dilemma. We can surely take it as read that it does not do things lightly, and only does so after extensive analysis and projections which have shown that Preston Boats will not cope adequately with increasing traffic in the future. Traffic lights may too confer some safety benefits.
Nevertheless, the dream when the new A5 dual carriageway and Shrewsbury bypass opened in 1992 was of a smooth and swift uninterrupted modern route around the county town and on to Oswestry and Mid Wales. It is a dream which has gone from green, to amber, and now red.
