Those That Walk Amongst Us

We predicted, some time ago, that the announcement that the Government wished to push ahead with improving the A303/A30/A358 corridor to the West Country would flush out every failed and ill-considered proposal that has ever seen the light of day over the last half century or so.  Sadly, but all too predictably, we have not been disappointed.

We've said, all along, that our goal is to dual the A303, bypass the beleaguered village of Winterbourne Stoke and improve the traffic situation on local roads, particularly those in and around Shrewton to our north.  However, in achieving our goal, our second aim is to ensure the best possible environment for the whole of the World Heritage Site; much of which lies within our Parish boundaries - almost certainly making us the most visited village in England, on a per capita basis, as English Heritage's Stonehenge Visitor's Centre lies within our boundaries. Also lying within our perimeter lies what is arguably the most important feature of the World Heritage Site - not Stonehenge, which is something of a "Jonny Come Lately", but the Longbarrow which pre-dates even the earliest phase of Stonehenge by half a millennium.

Actually, only the left hand side of the Longbarrow lies within the parish of Winterbourne Stoke, the right hand (south eastern) side lies in the parish of Wilsford Cum Lake.

You'd have thought that there would be a common view, locally, to enhance this landscape.  Not a bit of it, it seems.  Though to be fair, no-one has yet, in recent times, sought the views of the locals in any consistent way.   That said, there seem to be several favoured alternatives locally:

A - Any solution that gets rid of the traffic jams;
B - A tunnel of 2.9km;
C - An even longer tunnel;
D - Dualling along the existing route, but sinking it in a ditch;
E - Putting the road way to the north, across the southern edge of the Salisbury Plain training area - to the north of Larkhill;
F - Putting the road south of Amesbury on any one of half a dozen routes.

The first solution (A) is borne of desperation by those who live along the A303 - understandable, but it may not help preserve our heritage.  (B) and (C) achieve the aims of dualling the A303 and taking the road out of the World Heritage Site.  The longer the tunnel the better, in environmental and heritage terms, but it comes at a cost.  Perhaps the biggest advantage is that it would enable ALL vehicles, including most of the coaches used by English Heritage and the risible Land Train, to be excluded from the environment.  Of course, you would need to provide some mechanised transport for the disabled and elderly, but every other bugger could walk into the landscape from the Visitor's Centre, Larkhill, Amesbury, etc.  The route of the A303 could be returned to a green Bridleway throughout the WHS

(E) is an interesting option.  The Armed Forces would kick and scream, but even with the current re-basing exercise, it's hard to justify still needing as much space to exercise our much diminished Forces as we did at the height of WWI and WWII.  It would be an inexpensive route, with few landowners to deal with and would remove the A303 from the WHS.  Far too sensible an option to be considered.

(F) looks superficially promising, until you get stuck into the detail. There are way too many vested interests that would help kill it off.  It may have been a viable option 50 years ago when the idea of improving things was first mooted, but the world has moved on - unlike many of the proponents of this schemes.

Finally, we have option (D).  About the only positive thing that can be said about this option is that it is cheap and cheerful.  It does nothing to enhance the environment of the World Heritage site - and here it is important to stress one thing - whether or not the landscape around Stonehenge remains as a World Heritage site is immaterial to the argument of how the area is crossed.  It comes down to whether WE as a region, WE as a nation, want to leave something valuable to posterity - or simply want to bung in a cheap and nasty road and to hell with the consequences.   Those that are pushing for this option are doing so on the basis of simple cost (certainly not cost in the broader sense, or else they would soon realise how utterly indefensible their position is).

So, do they have a point when it comes to pounds shillings and pence?  Lets look at just a couple of hard facts.  Even the 2.9 km tunnel is going to cost at least £2billion.  Now that is a big number and I can't imagine what it would look like as a pile of fivers, but is it really excessive in the greater scheme of things?  Well let's compare it with something else equally controversial.

Now I could choose the cost of membership of the EU as the comparator, but the booklet of facts on staying in the EU, or leaving, dropped through the door the other day and when I opened this piece of Tory propaganda, I found all the facts were missing from my copy - and the same was true in every other copy I've looked at, so that isn't going to be overly helpful.   What else might be a good comparator?  Something else that is expensive and controversial - like the UK's Foreign Aid budget.

In 2013, the UK spent 0.7% of GDP, £11.4bn on foreign aid - money spent that does not benefit the UK directly and some would argue is often misspent, maladministered and way to much.  We can point the finger of blame at the Lib-Dems for pushing the 0.7% of GDP target in Parliament.  The Tories and Labour seem happy with the spend, through the Greens would like to increase it to 1% of GDP.  UKIP on the other hand, want to reduce the Foreign Aid budget to 0.2% of GDP and spend the rest within the UK.  In a time of austerity, it's hard to justify spending anything not of direct benefit to UK citizens, but I digress...

Back to a fact or two.   Back in 2014, we gave India £279 million in Foreign Aid and that was 40% down on 2011.   India has its own space program, it has a planned mission to Mars, and the whole program costs £500 million to run per year. So, in bald terms, the money we put into the Indian economy was equivalent to more than 50% of the cost of their entire space program or could have funded 7-8 missions to Mars. We may have been funding it entirely prior to 2011.

Now DfID will argue that the money was targeted on things the Indian's wouldn't have spent their own money on anyway, but the bottom line was that India had a choice on how to spend its money and chose a space program over health and education.   I'm sure a little digging would uncover even more egregious examples, but this one will do for the moment.

So, the 2.9 km Stonehenge tunnel option might cost £2bn at December 2014 prices, but over the 40 years (more like 50, but lets be conservative) that there has been talk of improving the A303, we've probably ploughed a demonstrably un-needed £11.6 billion into Indian Foreign Aid. During the same period, we've probably ploughed close to half a trillion pounds into Foreign Aid in total.

Well, there you have it.  A one-off spend of £2bn on a tunnel for Stonehenge is peanuts in the greater scheme of things and can easily be afforded by cutting the Foreign Aid budget from those countries, like India, that can well-afford to look after their own population's interests, but choose to ignore them.  Of course, digressing again, there are real emergencies and situations that call for Foreign Aid and I wouldn't want to stop that, but we need to spend more wisely.

We have those that walk amongst us who believe a £2 billion tunnel is an extravagance, whilst their political bed-fellows were responsible for the concept of blowing 0.7% of GDP on Foreign Aid without any clear demonstration of need.  I would beg you to treat these people gently; their sanity is surely in question.

Breakfast With Nick Clegg at Stonehenge

Well, not exactly.  It's a bit of hyperbole to say that I actually had breakfast with the Deputy Prime Minister - I was up at Stonehenge this morning for the BIG announcement, as was Nick Clegg, and I was stood fairly close to him with a cup of coffee, which might pass for breakfast, but I never actually got to speak with him.  Never mind, we were all around for a common purpose - to give interviews to the Press.

Before getting up to Stonehenge, I had an assignation with a lovely lady called Rebecca Rooney from BBC Wiltshire, for an interview on the A303 funding announcement.  We met up on the forecourt of the Bell Inn, Winterbourne Stoke, with the fast-moving, early morning, commuter traffic providing an "interesting" backdrop.  We had the usual mix of large HGVs travelling at well over the 40 mph limit to help them get up the hills on either side of the village.  We had school kids using the light-controlled crossing with fast moving vehicles bearing down on them with seemingly little realisation that there was a crossing there at all.  Then we had the usual nightmare of villagers trying to get out of the village onto the A303 - with one taking almost 10 minutes to find a nearly safe gap into which to pull out.

I'll even forgive Rebecca for calling me Mr Churchill - perhaps I should go into politics after all and give John Glenn MP a run for his money?

So what's the big deal?  Well, the Government announced that it was going to be earmarking some £15 billion for important road projects across the UK.  Its worth contrasting that sum with the £17 billion earmarked (so far) for the HS2 - and bear in mind that only 10% of goods traffic and a fraction of passenger traffic is shipped by rail.

Of the £15 billion, some £2 billion has been ear-marked for the A303 and £1.3 billion earmarked for a tunnel under Stonehenge - though it isn't clear if the £1.3 billion is separate from the £2 billion, or the major part of it.  It sounds a lot of money, but how far will it go?  Well lets have some facts and figures:

- dual carriageway cost between £20 million/mile to £25 million/mile to build on average - so £2 billion would buy 80-100 milesof dual carriageway - much more than is needed for the A303.   £0.7 billion gets you 28-35 miles - probably about right.
- tunnels cost a darned site more to build than dual carriageway, though I'm not sure £1.3 billion is necessarily realistic.  
-to put things in perspective, the A3 Hindhead tunnel at 1.9km long cot the bulk of the £371 million spent on the whole 4km project.  However, the "Big Dig" project in Boston (US) cost in excess of £12.5 billion for a tunnel twice the length of the one proposed for Stonehenge.

So, we welcome the news - but with a healthy scepticism.  After all, we'vee been here before.  Back in the late 1980s, Maggie Thatcher promised A303 widening as a package of road building measures that were claimed to be the biggest since Roman times - they failed to deliver.  More recently, the last Labour government promised to do the job, but killed the project on cost grounds.  So in some ways, here we go again.

However, there are a few differences this time.  Firstly, English Heritage and the National Trust appear to be singing from the same song-sheet and have agreed a plan that minimises impact on the World Heritage Site.  Pragmatism is being shown by many other parties too, recognising that the A303 is a strategic route and it has to be dealt with sooner rather than later.

Pragmatism will also be needed here in Winterbourne Stoke - clearly we will benefit from the removal of traffic from the centre of the village, but there are risks - noise from a dual carriageway situated to the north of the village being an obvious issue. So we will need to fight hard to ensure the environmental issues are addressed to our satisfaction and benefit.  I am sure there will be other issues.

The best news is the fact that they plan to tie the funding into the Infrastructure Bill that is currently going through parliament.  It's all tied into making the Highways Agency a company and ensuring funding certainty in 5-year tranches.  It doesn't mean that a future government couldn't stop things going ahead, but they would have to change legislation as well as changing their minds.

So - a healthy scepticism.  As I write, Rebecca Rooney is reporting a similar healthy scepticism from Larkhill and other villagers

Up at Stonehenge, lots of positive vibes about the plan. STAGs Janice Hassett seemed to be more in demand from interviewers than did Nick Clegg - but then she is a bit of a straight-talking, fire-brand who calls a spade, a spade.

It was a good opportunity to buttonhole people like the regional head of the Highways Agency to ask about what happens in the meantime about the A303 nightmare.  Specifically, we raised the issue of the dangers of Longbarrow Roundabout - as did other STAG members.  We'll see if this has any effect.

So - lets see what happens when all the fuss about today's news dies down and the economic realities hit home. 

Was That the TDF Peloton Arriving in Winterbourne Stoke?

Since the summer solstice there has been precious little to report on the A303.  Stories of any substance have been hard to find and we had resorted to searching the internet for anything interesting.  We wondered just how many stories on the A303 had been initiated by Wiltshire Council since the start of the year, sitting in all their pontificatorial splendour in Trowbridge?  Given that the A303 is the major east-west trunk road in the south of the county, given its importance to the local economy and especially given the fact HMG are currently looking at the feasibility of improving the A303 through the county, you might expect some fairly regular stories to emerge.  Stories saying just how important this work was and how the county council was 100% behind it.  You might expect such stories but you would be gravely disappointed, there's not been a single one, nada, nothing, bugger-all.  Either Wiltshire Council, as some claim, are overly focussed on the north of the county, or they are determined to kowtow to central government when it comes to the A303.  There was a time when Wiltshire Council and Wiltshire councillors had a bit of backbone.  For whatever reason, they seem to be becoming invertebrates.

On Monday evening, the Winterbourne Stoke Parish Council held its regular meeting.  Lots of things on the agenda and several of them related to the A303 and surrounding roads.  As ever, the meeting was good humoured and purposeful and at the end of it, all the Parish Councillors were going wander down through the village to look at the playpark.

As we came to cross the A303, back into the village we saw a sight that made our blood run cold.  There was a convoy of around 30 to 40 cyclists riding down the A303 from the direction of Longbarrow Roundabout and Stonehenge, all in high-visibility jackets and most riding line astern. It looked like the Tour de France peloton had taken a wrong turn and finished up in Wiltshire. Way too many yellow jerseys to work out which one was Vincenzo Nibali winning yet another mountain stage!  As they got closer, there was a collective holding of breath as several vans passed them.  Regular users of the A303 are only to well aware that the road is barely wide enough to allow vehicles to pass in opposite directions.  It's way too narrow to allow overtaking.  Thankfully, at 9:15pm on a Monday evening, traffic is light and the riders survived long-enough for some of them to pull off the road at the end of Church Street.

We crossed the road to see if we could help them as it was clear that they were lost.  We couldn't work out their nationality, Japanese perhaps, but one of their number explained they were heading for the Stonehenge Campsite, about a mile away.  Clearly, the A303 had not quite been the road they had been expecting and a few of them looked a wee bit shaken.  We never did find out where they had cycled from.

It does raise another point about the A303 in this part of the West Country; it is a tourist area and people want to mover around the landscape on foot, on bikes and on horseback, as well as in and on motorised vehicles.  We hope that the government have sufficient foresight to construct a byway for this type of user.  One that runs alongside a dualled A303, but separated from it by barriers.  It should run from Amesbury (and ideally well east of Amesbury in time) all the way to Devon and Cornwall.  Such a facility would be welcomed by the many tourists, local, national and international, who flock to this area and put so much into the local economy.

It's interesting that such foresight was missing from the Wiltshire Council Local Transport Plan Cycling Strategy 2011-2026.

Another example of a missed opportunity by Wiltshire Council, where everyone matters, but where everything moves with slug-like velocity.

Stuck on the A303? - Win One of Two Bottles of Bubbly

 Win One of Two Bottles of Bubbly

It's been just over a year since adysayswakeupffs posted his marvellous video entitled "The A303 at 1000 mph" on You Tube.  We thought it was so brilliant that we ran a competition last year to see if anyone had experienced a worse journey, but by New Year's Day, no-one had - so our prizes went unclaimed.   We are so sure that someone is going to have a slower journey this summer that we are running the competition again, starting today, Easter Sunday.

The Rules

This year we have two bottles of bubbly on offer to the winner(s).   The rules are very simple.  All you have to do is either:

(a) Repeat the the journey along the whole 90 mile length of the A303 and record it on video.  
 or:
(b) Just record your journey between the Countess Roundabout in Amesbury and the A303 junction with the A36 at Deptford and record that on video.

Submit the video to YouTube and send us the link using the Contact Form at the foot of the page - or use the Contact Foem and we'll work out a way to get the video from you another way!

1.  The winning video will have the highest percentage of the overall journey time stuck in traffic between the Countess Roundabout at Amesbury and the A303 junction with the A36 at Wylye (Deptford).

2.  Journeys can be recorded West to East or East to West.

3.  We do not condone breaking any traffic laws in pursuit of the prize.

4.  Our decision as to the winner is final!

5.  The winner will be announced on 21st September (the Equinox) - or as soon afterwards as we can manage!

Extra Prizes!!!!!!!  f you know your attempt at glory has failed, but happen to record something of particular interest to our campaign, caused by the poor quality of the A303, then let us see it anyway, their may be additional spot prizes for interesting stuff.

If you want to get involved by sponsoring a competition, then we would love to hear from you!

A Treatise on Not Cutting the Mustard?

Some of the questions that have been puzzling us for a while now are:

How do you go about establishing the cost:benefit of upgrading the A303 to dual carriageway?

How do you determine if the cost is affordable?

What do we actually mean by "cost" and "affordability"?

These are more than just semantic questions because, to a large extent, they should underpin the entire A303 feasibility study now underway.

We would argue that while both "cost" and "affordability" clearly have major financial components, there are many other non-financial issues that need to be taken into consideration when determining the feasibility of any solution to the A303's problems.  This is a topic we will be re-examining from time to time over the coming months, but this week, we've had the opportunity to look at a couple of the issues - financial cost and national infrastructure resilience,  in a slightly different way.  Why?  Well, Network Rail were able to reopen the main Exeter to Penzance railway line, through Dawlish, to South Devon and Cornwall after the damage wreaked by the February storms.

The line was closed for 8 weeks and the repairs are said to have costed £35 million - but what does that really mean.

Shortly after the first storm ripped the coastal track apart, two other events happened that impacted on travel to Devon and Cornwall from the rest of the UK.  First there was flooding and a crash on the A303.  Because of flooding on many of the roads to the north and south of the A303, there were no alternative diversions. The only option for westbound travellers was to backtrack to Wiltshire and head north for the M4.

Then the unthinkable happened - a crash on the westbound M4 closed that as well.  We spoke to some fairly senior Highways Agency chaps a couple of weeks ago, who volunteered that the agencies involved in clearing this accident from the carriageway had been put under an immense amount of pressure to do so - and to do it damn quickly.  Mother Nature and Murphy's Law had combined to make the point that the national transport infrastucture to the west of England was not exactly resilient.  For a couple of hours there was no usable, direct east-west route across the south of England.  OK, it was only for a couple of hours, but even that ought to make people sit up and think seriously about transport resilience.   Every time the A303 is at a standstill, one third of the strategic routes to the West Country are not operational.  The same is true for the rail route and the M4/M5.

So what financial value do these routes have?  Is it possible to make a stab at the financial impact the rail closure has had?  Well yes, it is and folks in Devon and Cornwall have been doing just that.  Visit Devon reckons that the tourist industry in Devon has lost around £31 million over the eight weeks closure.  Visit Cornwall reckons the loss to the Cornish tourist industry has been around £18 million. 

The financial loss jusst to the city of Plymouth has been estimated at £1 million pounds a day - another £50 million.  Plymouth has a population of over quarter of a million.  As the population of Devon runs to over a million souls and Cornwall another half a million, then the pro-rata costs of losing the Exeter to Penzance line for 8 weeks has probably been in excess of £400 million, or £50 million a week.  So the financial value of 1/3 of the strategic routes into the West of England is £50 million per week - just for Devon and Cornwall.

If each of the three routes is equally valuable, then the same thinking could be applied to the A303 - which also passes through Wiltshire and Somerset and the problems on it affect both those counties too.  Lets be conservative though and halve the financial impact of the A303 on the residents of Somerset and Wiltshire, as we have more alternative north/south routes.   That would increase the "value" of the A303 to the economy of the West of England to £70 million per week:  £10 million per day.

So, as most traffic uses the A303 during the hours of daylight, the working day, that's roughly £1 million per hour.  Next time you get delayed or stuck on the A303 for an hour or two, just think of what that delay is costing the economy - and then add in your own and your fellow travellers costs - and a sum to compensate for the inconvenience, the added pollution, the stress, and the list goes on.

Now, let's be honest here.  We've taken figures snatched out of the air by others with no idea of their reliability, mixed them up with some fairly accurate demographics and then made a sweeping assumption about relative values of road and rail routes - at best a SWAG ( a scientific, wild-arsed guess).  But if decisions are going to be made about the future of the A303 on "cost" grounds, then these are the very types of numbers that we should expect Government to be able to present - but in their case, with a full audit trail. 

Anything less won't cut the mustard.

The A303/A30/A358 Corridor Feasibility Study

I've just received the following information on the A303 feasibility study from John Glen MP.  I thought it important enough to flag up as it is, without any comment from me, at least at this stage.   Robert Goodwill, the Transport Minister, writes:

I want to give as may folk as possible the chance to read it.  If you have any comments, please send them to me and to John Glen.

It will also be interesting to see if STAG, as a local voice of stakeholders here in Wiltshire, will be invited to participate on the 24th in Taunton?

A303/A30/A358 Corridor Feasibility Study

Background
Following the 2013 Spending Review, the Government announced plans for the biggest ever upgrade of our strategic roads network. Government has also committed to carrying out a number of feasibility studies to tackle some of the most notorious road hot spots in the country.
The feasibility studies will look at these problems in detail and identify potential schemes to solve them. They will be progressed alongside the Highways Agency’s Route Based Strategy programme which is considering the current and future performance of the network. When taken together they will inform future roads investment decisions as part of the Roads Investment Strategy development process.

The A303/A30/A358 corridor
The A303 corridor provides an important role in connecting the South East and South West regions. It is dualled over much of its length but between the M3 motorway, A358 and A30 there remain several unimproved single carriageway sections which cause congestion, especially during summer weekends.
Given the history of progress with investment proposals in the A303 corridor, at the time of the 2010 Spending Review, the Government did not have sufficiently developed business cases for investment proposals to be able to confirm specific investment projects in the A303 corridor.
Somerset County Council held a summit with other relevant stakeholders in 2012 the outcome of which was a commitment by the region for further work on the relative prioritisation of potential interventions and consideration of possible funding avenues. The grouping of local authorities and Local Enterprise Partnerships produced an initial analysis and business case for future improvements to the A303 corridor, to reiterate the importance of investment in the corridor, particularly the wider economic benefits to the South West economy.
The Department for Transport and the Highways Agency have worked closely with the South West local authorities on the details of the analysis and business case for potential investment, providing assistance and views on the methodology adopted and views on what further analysis may be necessary.

Study Aims and Objectives
The aim of the study is to identify the opportunities and understand the case for future investment solutions on the A303/A30/A358 corridor that are deliverable, affordable and offer value for money.

The specific objectives of the study are to:

•   Identify and assess the case, deliverability and timing of specific road investments that address exiting problems on the A303 corridor.
  
•   Understand the balance of benefits and impacts from potential individual investment proposals and any additional benefits or impacts from investment on corridor basis.
  
•   Evidence where possible, the wider economic benefits from the road investment in the corridor.
  
•   Understand the impacts of potential investment in the A303 corridor on the performance of other road transport corridors to the South West region.
  
•   Understand the impacts of the proposed investment in the A303 corridor on the resilience of the road transport network.
  
  Geographic and modal scope
  The proposed geographic scope of the study should consider the length of the A303/A30 corridor from the junction between the A303 and M3 in the east to the junction between the A30 and the M5 in the west. The geographic scope of the study would also include the A358 from its junction with the A303 at Ilminster to its junction with the M5. The Blackdown Hills are designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and as such we do not propose to consider large-scale road building in that area.
  

The modal scope of the study will be predominantly road-based and would need to understand the details of performance and current investment proposals for the identified parts of the strategic road network, as well as the local authority road network, particularly the A358.


Questions to be addressed
There are a number of questions that need to be addressed as part of the study work, and these are set out below.

•   Given the assessment of current and future performance of the A303 corridor are there specific priority location/problems that should be addressed?
  
•   Are there viable potential solutions to these problems which are deliverable, affordable and offer value for money?
  
•   What are the potential timescales for the delivery of the identified potential solutions?
  
•   Are there additional benefits or impacts from combinations of potential solutions over and above those for individual solutions?
  
•   Is there evidence of the impact of investment in potential solutions on the resilience of the road network?
  
•   What are the impacts of investment in the A303 corridor on other road transport links/corridors to the South West?
  
•   Have the potential solutions identified fully considered and optimised the environmental opportunities and mitigation that the potential transport investment could bring?
  
•   Are there any changes necessary to current responsibilities for the management and operation of the road network in the A303 corridor?
  
•   Is further work/analysis required for Government to be able to make specific investment decisions, and if so what are the timescale of such work?
  Phases of work
  The study will be completed in several stages which are set out below.
  

Stage 0:  Agreement to the scope, timing and management arrangements for the study
Stage 1:  Review of evidence and identification of problems along the corridor
Stage 2: Work to finalise the range of infrastructure proposals that could address the problems along the corridor
Stage 3: Work to assess the affordability, value for money and deliverability of prioritised infrastructure proposals

Governance Arrangements

A303/A30/A358 Reference Group
Given the wide range of stakeholder interest in the A303/A30/A358 study it is proposed to establish a Reference Group for the study. The main role of the Reference Group will be to ensure stakeholders’ views are captured and considered during the study process, particularly at key points in the study work and at times of the development of key outputs.

Blowing £300 Million on Fripperies.

Yesterday, the Daily Telegraph published an interesting article on the £300 million spent so far on the HS2 rail project.  Yes, you read that correctly, £300 million without so much as a sleeper, or length of track being laid.  

When you look at how this has been spent, you really do begin to wonder what is going on.  £700 on iPad covers,  £128,000 on promotional videos; including versions with alternative endings - I assume this covers the eventuality where they manage to build it for £50 million and the alternative, and much more likely scenario, when the costs rise and they come back with a begging bowl to buy a few more iPad covers.   Of course, the majority of this money- some £192 million has been spent on "consultancy" so we can expect to see precious little of any practical value from that.

Sound familiar?   It reminds me of the large sums spent so far in NOT dualing the A303 west from Stonehenge.  It also brings into sharp relief the difference between HS2 and SH2 - the need to dual the A303/A30 along its entire length.  The first is unliked, unwanted and will, according to the politicians, be fully funded - despite growing concerns that the financial case is indefensible.  The second, SH2, is liked, wanted and has a strong financial case.  It makes you wonder about the arse-about-face country in which we live!

The A303 Ship Canal

Shortly before Christmas, the A303 responded to the intense rainfall by flooding near Yeovil, between the Cartgate and the Podimore Roundabouts.  For a couple of days, an Amphicar or another amphibious vehicle would have proved an absolute godsend to those wishing to travel along the A303.

Now, just over a week into the New Year and the same thing has happened again, this time a bit nearer to us at the A36 interchange.  Fortunately only on the eastbound carriageway and as I write, the Highways Agency are predicting it will be opened by 1800.  Time will tell - they do tend to err on the side of total unreality.

That got me thinking about the impact of floods and flooding on any A303 improvement scheme that might be put forward.  Clearly, flooding is becoming increasingly common with the effects of global warming, so we ought to expect that the Environment Agency ought to be one of the stakeholders for the forthcoming A303 feasibility study.  Someone else for us to talk to.

One of the plans put forward for a bypass of Winterbourne Stoke a few years since, had  the route of the A303 diverted north of the village, towards Shrewton.  It ran across the flood plain of the River Till, raised on a large earthwork berm.  Think dam -with a gap in it.  Now the River Till is normally a very benign little stream, but it hides a dark and dangerous secret - the Great Till Flood of 1841.

So notorious is that event, as an example of chalk downland groundwater flooding, that it is taught as an example of this phenomenon in universities around the world.  Events in 2014 are following a remarkably similar pattern to those in the January of 1841 - a period of heavy rain, with cold, possibly freezing weather in the next week.   At the moment, the Environment Agency have the following flood alert in place:

When you look at the water level in the Tilshead borehole, the aquifer that may be responsible (I'm speculating here, I'm not a hydrologist) for the flood on the A303 today, you will see why the idea of building the A303 on a berm might need looking at.

 It seems we are less than 0.5 metre from having an "interesting" situation.  I guess the next 4 or 5 days, with more rain forecast on Sunday, could prove interesting indeed for traffic on the A303.

Let's keep fingers crossed that the rain stops, the ground doesn't freeze, we don't have snow followed by a quick thaw and the water level in the aquifer drops - that way the A303 through Winterbourne Stoke might stay open.  Imagine though, for a moment, what might happen if the Great Flood of 1841 was repeated when the Till valley was largely blocked by a berm? 

Routing a new dual carriageway has many more things to consider than just the World Heritage site at Stonehenge.

 UPDATE: 

The Highways Agency have announced that the A303 (eastbound) is likely to remain closed at the A36 Deptford interchange all day today.  Great joy!

At 09:00 on Friday 10/01/2014, the water levels had crept up to 99.71 metres AOD (AOD - Above Ordnance Datum - or to you and me, above the mean sea level determined for the Ordnance Survey), which is just a smidgen below the highest astronomical tide level for this site, which is 99.88 m AOD.

Anyone wanting to learn more about the Great Flood of 1841 might want to read a paper called "Estimating Extreme Floods".   It was written by by Colin Clark in 2004 and published in a journal with the catchy title of:  International Water Power and Dam Construction.  You couldn't make this stuff up, could you!

Despite the turgid sounding nature of this paper, it is a surprisingly good and thought provoking read.

A Tale of Monkeys and Men - The Need for Good Information

Whilst WiSBANg and STAG are only too happy to poke fun at the authorities at every chance and expose ineptitude wherever we find it in relation to the Highway to Hell  - the A303/A30 corridor (and boy, do they give us so many chances!), the main purpose of our campaign is to try and improve the situation - for locals, businesses and the travelling public.

To do this effectively, we need to be able to engage with other stakeholders during the forthcoming consultations and we can't do that just with public opinion - we need hard facts and figures.  So, over the coming months, we will be collecting our own; either using the methods already employed by the relevant authorities, or in a way that shows the deficiency of the methods that have been used to date.  A good example of this latter case, are the manual traffic censuses undertaken by the Department for Transport that we highlighted in an earlier post.  You should read that original article, because it explains why, even if the DfT methodology is used, the results are skewed in a way that underestimates the traffic problems.  The reason that it is so inappropriate for a road like the A303 is quite simple, the censuses are conducted in the middle of the week and not on public holidays or school holidays - exactly the periods when the Highway to Hell is at its busiest.

So, if the DfT can't be trusted to conduct rigorous traffic censuses, we would like to have a bash ourselves. We would like to do this in the most professional way we can and are seeking to find a few folks with experience of conducting traffic censuses on behalf of DfT in the past - who are familiar with the methods used.

Please let us know if you have such skills, or know of anyone who does and who would be prepared to help us out?

We also learned yesterday that Doug Clifton, a local resident and student at the University of Southampton, is doing a dissertation on the impacts of the developments at Stonehenge between 2009 and 2013.

To achieve this, he has set up a Stonehenge Local Residents Survey on the Survey Monkey web site.  If you are a local resident, please can you follow the link and complete the survey?  We are keen to encourage Doug in his efforts and will be happy to publicise his results once he is free to use them.

A303 - The Highway to Hell

It is Monday 30th December 2013.  It is raining heavily, 10mm already this morning, and it is blowing a gale; though not as bad as it was a week ago in the run-up to Christmas.  The great New Year exodus will begin today, with folks travelling east and west along the A303.  Of course, minds will be a little more focused than they were last week, particularly in relation to the flooding of the A303 between the Podimore and Cartgate Roundabouts in Somerset.

At the moment, Cartgate looks like this:

and Podimore looks like this:

The weather does look to be clearing a bit from the West, so there is some hope the rain will stop - at least for a while.


But if the traffic gets bad and you get stuck on the A303, what can you do to pass the time?  Well, how about a bit of karaoke?  What better track to sing along to than AC/DC's Highway to Hell.  It sort of sums up the A303 experience at the moment.  Enjoy: