Star comment: Are we on the road to nowhere?
Drive westwards along the M54 motorway and you make unhindered and swift progress across east Shropshire before joining the A5 dual carriageway and continuing seamlessly to Shrewsbury.
Beyond Shrewsbury, and heading towards Oswestry, there is a logic bypass. What was a uniform high standard road becomes of mix of dual carriageway, wide single carriageway, and stretches where road standards cannot be much changed from those which motorists endured 50 years ago.
In the coming years Britain is going to need to give national and international business every reason to invest in this country, and Shropshire wants to have a part of that. But the A5 beyond Shrewsbury is Shropshire's bad luck. It has had incomplete and inconsistent improvements which speak of lack of money and lack of commitment.
North Shropshire MP Owen Paterson, who has been campaigning for years for improvements, can see a light at the end of the tunnel with the announcement by a Government minister that the A5 and A483 - that's the road from Oswestry to Welshpool - have gone into advanced studies as part of the Government's investment strategy for beyond 2020.
"This is the best news we've had in years," he says.
It does indeed mark a welcome movement in the right direction. Anybody who uses the A5 route regularly knows that as things stand, this is a road that does not make sense, and is not fit for the demands of 21st century traffic along the whole of its length.
Meanwhile campaigners in the long-suffering villages of Pant and Llanymynech have been calling for a bypass.
There is a business case for improvements, but there is also a strong human case. Bad, busy, roads are dangerous for those who use them and for those who are living on their path.
Nobody who has followed the twists and turns of this saga is going to get carried away. Whatever happens, if anything, will not be for years yet. And there are going to be technical issues which the experts will have to address to make what is desirable, possible.
Quite apart from that, there is the issue of paying for these infrastructure improvements in a county which has to fight constantly to appear as a blip on the radar in Whitehall.
But look at the A5 beyond Shrewsbury now. It is unfinished business. So Shropshire is not asking for some grand and extraordinary new infrastructure project. We are just asking for something which has been left undone for decades to be completed at last.
