Yet Another Damn Feasibility Study and Another Delay!

Roads minister Robert Goodwill today announced yet another dualling feasibility study for the A303. This is expected to be complete by spring 2015 along with other key roads.

You have to ask yourself just how many feasibility studies are needed for a government of any persuasion to get the message that something needs to be done quickly.  Another long delay is completely unacceptable.
 

Methinks goodwill is going to be the last thing offered to the roads minister from this neck of the woods.   We've posted his picture so you will recognise him if you see him stuck in an A303 jam.  If you do spot him here, there or anywhere, please have a word and help him to see the error of his ways!


UPDATE:  I am sure that it is an absolute co-incidence that the next election is due to take place on Thursday 7th May 2015.  Anyone care to give odds on the reporting date for the feasibility study being Friday 8th May 2015, or later?

STAG Begins to Lock Horns

It seems that slowly, but surely, the Shrewton Traffic Action Group (STAG) is gaining traction.  In doing so, the Press are beginning to take an interest and that is beginning to get officialdom taking things a little more seriously than they have so far.  They'd better - this is only the beginning.

Both last week and this week, there was some excellent publicity in the Salisbury Journal in relation to the STAG petition and taking it to 10 Downing Street.  This morning, STAG were interviewed by Spire FM and it seems that English Heritage want an informal chat with STAG tomorrow...

...now that will be interesting.  Will it be to offer support for a plan to re-open the A344?  Support for a "cut and shut" two-level dual carriageway past the stones on the route of the original A303 maybe?  To deliver news that Stonehenge has been sold to the Disney Corporation and is being shipped to a more suitable site in the Nevada Desert perhaps.  Or is it just to express their concern that attention is being drawn to the Free Local Residents Passes?

After all, if each of the 30,000 adults in the local area who seem to be eligible for the passes take up the scheme and each takes just one child to visit Stonehenge, just once a year, then this would add 60,000 visitors to the Stonhenge annual visitor statistics.   Put another way, that is a minimum of £384,000 in lost revenues.  If each local visit were to involve 2 adults accompanying 6 children, then the loss could be nearly £700,000 per annum.   Stonehenge gets around 900,000 visitors a year - so if these locals visited Stonehenge just once a year it would represent around 13% of the annual visitors to Stonehenge. Ouch!   If they visit once a month, they will be in the majority and represent a 2-year potential loss of revenue to English Heritage of £16.8 million.

Whatever English Heritage claim to be their motivation to meet with STAG, you might guess that numbers like these would be influencing their thinking - at least a little.

The High Points and Low Points of the A303

A few miles west of Andover, travellers along the A303 cross from Hampshire into Wiltshire and shortly thereafter encounter Beacon Hill; with Boscome Down and Porton Down visible to the south and Bulford over the crest of the hill to the north.

At the summit of Beacon Hill, at a height of around 560ft above sea level, is perhaps one of the most important points on the entire length of the A303.  Obviously, it's a high point because it is at the highest point of Beacon Hill. But the reason it's a low point is much less obvious.

Can you think what it might be?  Why do we regard it as a low point?  Need a clue?

OK, take a look here then:

Can you see it now?  Look in the foreground to the left of the carriageway.  Can you see how the strip of tarmac immediately to the left of the continuous white line all but disappears?   The similar strip on the right hand side of the carriageway continues for a few metres further, to roughly a point level with the back of the car transporter ahead of the Google Earth camera car.

So what?  We would argue that this point is where the A303 changes from being a high quality trunk road with carriageways wide enough to take modern traffic, to the narrow roads that lead beyond, past Stonehenge, to Winterbourne Stoke.

Apart from a few (but, not all) of the more modern dual carriageway sections and the 3-lane "death trap" sections, that little strip of tarmac never re-appears between the top of Beacon Hill and Penzance.  It never ever appears on an un-dualled section of the A303.   It represents the effective loss of 1.2 metres off the overall width of a single carriageway road, or 2.4 metres off the width of a dual carriageway.  That little strip of land, that inocuous-seeming piece of tarmac at the edge of each lane might represent the difference between life and death for a pedestrian, a cyclist or a motor-cyclist.  That's how important it is!  Life and death important.

According to the Department for Transport in its Design Manual for Roads and Bridges (2005), the specifications for rural dual and single carriageway roads are as shown below (click on the picture to get a larger view).

So East of Beacon Hill, by and large, the A303 complies with this, but West of Beacon Hill, all the way south west through Somerset and into Devon, down to the junction with the A30, it largely doesn't.  The consequences of this are fairly damning - west of Beacon Hill, the A303 is largely not fit for purpose, it certainly isn't fit to be a trunk road.  It isn't really fit to be an un-trunked A-road.  All this assumes that the lanes of the A303 (the bit between the centreline of the carriageway and the outermost edge of the edge line are 3.65 metres in width.   We should never take anything for granted and the width of these lanes is something we will return to later.

I'm sure that someone somewhere will take delight in pointing out that these are modern standards and that you can't expect an old road to match such a standard.   To an extent a fair argument, particularly for a road that had followed its current course for a century or more.  But as we saw in earlier posts, that doesn't really apply to the A303 and the stretch between Amesbury and Mere, through Winterbourne Stoke, in particular.  The A303 only came into being in 1958 - fairly recently in the great scheme of things.

Perhaps the most embarrassing point is that shown in the first photograph.  Someone, somewhere decided to make the A303 metalled surface 2.4 metres narrower to the west of Beacon Hill summit than it was to the east.   Now just which half-wit, or half-wits, were responsible for that piece of forward thinking?  Perhaps it is time to de-trunk the A303!

Good Information is Essential to Make Our Case

One of the difficulties in pressing forward the argument for a bypass for Winterbourne Stoke and Stonehenge is that we need good information to inform our position and to rebut the arguments of the opposition.  Often, the information we need is deeply buried and seemingly inaccessible and is often under the control of the very people and organisations who are proving a stumbling block.

Part of the mission of this blog is to wheedle out that information, provide easy links to it so that you can read it for yourselves, but also to consider whether the data that is being used is valid.  Just because information comes from an official source doesn't mean it is credible, doesn't mean it makes the case that is claimed and sometimes it has been  (let's be charitable here) mis-interpreted by the opposition.  It is for you to make up your own minds whether that misinterpretation is accidental or wilful.

Links to this information will appear both in the text of related blog posts, but also under the "Favourite A303 Links" section to the right of the blog posts.   Although the blog has an easy search facility, we wanted all the useful stuff in one place to save time.

Of course, not all of the information from official sources is readily available.  However, we can make use of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to try and get at much of that.  It is very easy to do and essentially means you just write to the official body you think controls the information and ask them for it.  In simple terms, if the information you have asked for is not exempt from the FOIA (eg it's a national security issue), it isn't going to cost too much and take too long to answer it (disproportionate cost to the public interest value) and isn't covered by any other statutory "get out" clauses, then the information owner is legally obliged to provide the answer within a very short space of time.  If they don't, the whole issue can be escalated to the Information Commissioner for review.  The good news is that much of the information these days is held in searchable, electronic databases (and more historical data is digitised daily), so rejecting an FOIA on the grounds of cost is becoming increasingly indefensible.  The best FOIA questions are those where you may already know, or strongly suspect, what the answer is, but want original documents or hard facts and figures to reference in making your case. 

The whole FOIA process is made so much easier if you use the What Do They Know? website.   This is a smashing resource that gives you advice on how best to formulate an FOIA request, sends it off to the appropriate authority on your behalf, tracks progress and warns you if the recipient is failing to respond in time.  It provides an easy way of commenting on a response and then asking supplementary questions.  However, the biggest advantage is that the whole process is public.  If you make an FOIA request on your own, only you get the answer, it isn't public, isn't searchable and so isn't as useful to others.

In a campaign like this one, getting the information into the public domain is vital; so if you are tempted to make an FOIA request, please use What Do They Know.

So, what information is there already.  Well, there are already links to the Trunk Road Act (1936) and the later amendment to it, the Trunk Road Act (1946).   All good historical scene setting on trunk roads.  If you like the minutiae of Acts of Parliament, they may be of interest to you.

There are two excellent recent documents that everyone involved in this campaign should read and refer to.  The first is "The Eddington Transport Study" of December 2006 - written for the British Government by the Australian former CEO of BA, Sir Rod Eddington

The Eddington Transport Study set out the case for action to improve road and rail networks, as a "crucial enabler of sustained productivity and competitiveness". The report's main conclusions were that Britain has transport networks that provide the right connections, in the right places, to support the journeys that matter to economic performance. But roads in particular were in serious danger of becoming so congested, the economy would suffer.  Something most of us would agree with.

The second document, and by far and away the single most important information source we have come across, so far, is the "A303, A358, A30: Corridor Improvement Programme - Economic Impact Study" of October 2012.  This most boring sounding report was produced by Parsons Brinckerhoff for Somerset County Council.   What on earth has a report commissioned for Somerset County Council got to do with the little village of Winterbourne Stoke in Wiltshire, rat-running on the roads around and the problems at Stonehenge?

Well you might ask.  Somerset Council are to be congratulated for an inspired piece of work. Parsons Brinckerhoff undertook an appraisal of the economic benefits of dualling the full length of the A303 between Amesbury and Honiton as well as the A358 between Ilminster and Taunton.  The bottom line, for all of us, is that if the A303 and the A3588 were both dualled, then in the context of this plan as a whole, for every pound spent on providing an A303 by-pass for our village of Winterbourne Stoke, the economy would recover £1.80.  For every pound spent putting the A303 in a tunnel the economy would recover £1.80.   The economic advantage is astonishing.  Isn't it a crying shame that Wiltshire Council hadn't either participated fully with Somerset Council and produced a joint document with breakdowns to county level or commissioned a purely Wiltshire-centric study at any point over the last 30 years?

Despite the horrific title, this report is a really good read - and we suggest everyone does at least dip into it. It is full of useful facts and figures that we can make use of in the campaigns to improve our lot.   It is also very well researched and the authors have, in places demonstrated they have seen through the inadequacies of some of the Government's own data processing and interpretation.  Perhaps the best example of this is when it comes to traffic volumes.

Consider the traffic statistics for our village of Winterbourne Stoke.  They look fairly interesting, but one set of numbers got me thinking - those for bicycles.  It seems that four times more bikes go west through our village than go east.  There could be lots of reasons for this, but amongst the most likely reasons is the fact that it may simply be an aretfact of the way data was collected.   Thankfully, the Department of Transport has published its methodology for Road Traffic Estimates.

More turgid stuff, but what it appears to say is that they try to do a manual count on each sampled road length, like the census point 6874 on the A303 at Winterbourne Stoke, as often as they can.  In reality, this means that every 1, 2, 4 or 8 years (depends on the road), they conduct a manual survey for 12 hours.  Of course, they don't work weekends, public holidays or school holidays; nor do they survey between November and February.  They only undertake manual counts on the 110 what they call 'neutral days' each year.  I guess that is DoT speak for saying they only work on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays when it isn't cold - poor dears!

These infrequent manual counts are supplemented by electronic input from a national network of 180 (yes, you read that correctly 180) of Automatic Traffic Counters that are used to produce what they call "expansion factors" to interpolate the traffic flow 24 hours a day, 365 days a year; something DoT refer to as the annual average daily flow (AADF).  In other words, this is pseudo-science, a wise-arse guess, or more succinctly, in the vernacular, complete and utter bollocks.

Interpolating from data derived in this way has a number of effects.  Regardless of any seasonal road traffic variations, the inbuilt methodological bias will overestimate the AADF on urban roads where traffic flow is predominantly on weekdays and underestimate traffic flow on rural roads.  The methodology will grossly underestimate traffic flow on the A303 and similar rural trunk routes to holiday destinations, where high traffic flows are predominantly over the weekend, bank holiday and school holiday periods when the manual data is simply not collected.

Worse is to come.  Investment in roads inevitably follows the perceived usage 'statistics'.  When the  usage statistics are as flawed or fictitious as the AADF, the money will be used for urban roads and not rural ones.  It's all down to perception management - we have to ensure the debate questions and asks for validation of every bit of data that is presented - regardless of the source.

Parsons Brinckerhoff, in undertaking the "A303, A358, A30: Corridor Improvement Programme - Economic Impact Study" appear to have looked at the DoT methodology and found it wanting.  They seem to have come up with a different, possibly more robust approach to traffic flow (see section 2.2 of the above report), but it is still based on the manual and automated traffic counts.  We'll be doing some more digging to see just how robust this approach really is.

We suspect that the report may still underestimate traffic flows on the A303, but the good news to end this post on, is simply this. Parsons Brinckerhoff may also have have underestimated the financial benefit to cost ratio of dualling the A303 and thus providing a bypass to Winterbourne Stoke.  That is even without considering both the financial and non-financial benefits to Shrewton, Orcheston, Tilshead, Larkhill, Durrington, Berwick St James, Stapleford and all the other local villages currently suffering

Of Turnpikes and April Fools

To understand the present day A303 trunk road, you have to understand a little bit more about the recent history of routes around Stonehenge and the road west from London to Penzance.

The bigger road near Stonehenge didn’t initially run along the route of what became the A344.  Instead, it led from Amesbury to Seven Barrows (Now known as the New King’s Barrows) to Maddington, north of Shrewton, and then on to Warminster and eventually the important trading port of Barnstaple in north Devon, via Bridgewater.

Traffic on the minor route between Amesbury and Mere, past Stonehenge and on through Winterbourne Stoke, really picked up in the 1700s and around 250 years ago, the powers that be organised themselves into the Amesbury Turnpike Trust, opening up the route from Mere to Thruxton and on to London. Money raised through tolls was used to maintain these roads and provide a profit for the turnpike trust.  It was probably around this time that the direct link to Bridgewater and Barnstaple was broken when a section of the route was converted to parkland by an affluent landowner – no doubt trying to recreate his idealistic view of what the “natural” landscape should look like. Sound familiar?

Attempts were made to improve the road to Shrewton after 1761, but these were abandoned.  In 1773, a brand new turnpike road was built, leading away from the Amesbury to Mere turnpike at Stonehenge Bottom, directly to Shrewton; the route of the recently closed A344.  

In 1871, both these roads and several others in the locality were dis-turnpiked.  The reasons for this are unclear, but by the early part of the 20^th century, the main route west from London had changed radically west of Basingstoke and looked as follows.   It began by following the route of what was then the A30:

London

Hounslow Heath

Staines

Egham

Bagshot

Hartley Row

Basingstoke

Dummer Down

Stockbridge 

Lopcombe Corner

Salisbury

Wilton

Shaftesbury

Sherborne

Yeovil

Crewkerne

Chard

Yarcombe

Honiton

Exeter.

Then along a bit of the then A38

Exeter

Kennford

Chudleigh

Ashburton

Ivybridge

Plymouth

Torpoint

Liskeard—

Bodmin

And finally back on the route of the A30

Bodmin

Fraddon

Zelah

Redruth

Hayle

Penzance

In 1936, the Trunk Roads Act came into force, intended to develop a network of 30 fast, important and ‘modern’ routes across the UK.  A bit ironic when you consider the traffic jams of today.  The route of the current A303 through Wiltshire wasn’t even considered as part of this review – the London to Penzance route via Salisbury was going to become the new T3 trunk road.  As it happens, the new nomenclature, based on the French Route Nationale, was never adopted, even though all the new signs had been prepared and so the A30 kept its status as the main trunk route through the West Country.

In 1939, the bridge over the River Till in Winterbourne Stoke , which now carries the A303, was built.  No doubt it was designed to carry the traffic of the 1930s on what remained a minor route to the West Country. (The Till road bridge became a listed Grade II building on 10 October 1988).  Aside from a few repairs and modifications to the roadway over the years, the bridge remains largely unchanged form its pre trunk road days.  This is a really important factor when considering the A303 today and it is a point I will return to in future posts.

Nothing changed after WWII either.  In 1946, a second Trunk Roads Act was passed, but again, the London to Penzance route in Wiltshire remained unchanged.

It was only in 1958 that the A303 was born and the role of the A30 downgraded.  On April the 1^st to be exact. 

Finally, in this roundup of the last 250 years of recent history, the Amesbury bypass was opened in 1970 – ending a few hundred yards east of Stonehenge bottom and providing us with the legacy from which we now suffer.

There is an encouraging message here, for all of us. Paths have become tracks and tracks have reverted to downland.  Downland has become road. Roads have become turnpikes and in turn, these have been de-turnpiked.  Trunk roads have been created and then detrunked. 

Nothing that has been done to the roads around Winterbourne Stoke and Stonehenge in the past can’t be undone in the future – it has happened time and time again before.  When it comes to the A303, there is no such word as can’t.

The Old Way is Often the Best - Or: How English Heritage and Others Have Abused Our Heritage

Anyone wishing to enter the debate on the A303 and the traffic problems a single-carriageway road generates around Stonehenge – recently worsened by the closure of the A344 at the behest of English Heritage  - should have at least a little understanding of the history of the A303 and the surrounding tracks and paths.

Ok, let’s begin with ancient history and few statements of the blindingly obvious.  These are needed to understand the nonsense of English Heritage’s desire to return Stonehenge to its ancient setting.

At some point in time, and no one knows when for sure, ancient man wandered past the area of what eventually became the site of Stonehenge.  Over time, many more people, individuals, family groups, tribes wandered past the same area.  They may have wandered randomly across the ancient landscape, but people don’t tend to move around in that way; they find the easiest and safest routes, the routes that take them to water, food and shelter and they also move towards sites that mean something to them.  For instance, they wandered westwards in Neolithic times, crossing the River Till and later building a wooden bridge whose remains were found recently in Winterbourne Stoke. The more people who travelled that way, the more these paths became permanent features of the landscape.  Most importantly of all, of course,  the scale of the paths and tracks both matched, and was a reflection of the transport needs of pre-Stonehenge southern England.

Once someone had the bright idea of building a wooden prototype (probably during the Mesolithic period (8500 to 7000 BC)) for what would eventually become a glorified rockery in the middle of Wiltshire, paths, tracks and even fairly wide roadways would have been apparent across Salisbury Plain – leading right up to the site of Stonehenge.  Paths pre-dated that pre-dated every phase of the henge.  Routes would have been adapted and adopted to meet the transport needs of the day.  It seems likely that later still, when Stonehenge came into use, paths and tracks would continue to evolve to meet changing needs.

One of these routes already was, or became, a major East-West route; later known variously as the Old Way, the Harrow Way (Harroway) and even the Hoary Way.  It would have been used as a means of travelling east-west for trading, to move armies rapidly (a Herewag or Herepath) or as a route to, or past, a sacred place (Stonehenge?) and again the routes around the stones would have been altered to meet the changing volume of human traffic and other emerging traffic needs.

Around 1930, the A344 seems to have been the dominant road, at least judging by this old photo of a car deciding whether to fork left towards Exeter or continue right, past the AA Box, towards the Stonehenge Cafe:

Judging by the road positioning, the driver is either indecisive or a foreign visitor. This priority probably continued until the Trunk Road Act of 1936.

This evolution of traffic and routes to meet current transport requirements carried on for thousands of years, until 2013, when, at the behest of English Heritage the A344 – A303 link was closed in June 2013.

Call me a cynic if you will, but isn’t it ironic, that the body charged with protecting our heritage has itself buggered up so much of it around Stonehenge?  They clearly seem to want to bugger up yet more of it by closing other tracks and by-ways in the vicinity of the stones, without any historical imperative for doing so.

If English Heritage had any integrity at all, returning Stonehenge to the ancient landscape they claim to want would be a very different prospect to the Disney-fied future they seem to have planned.  They and other agencies involved should honour the evolutionary nature of our English heritage by re-opening the A344, create a dual carriageway to relieve the beleaguered village of Winterbourne Stoke, move the path of the A303 away from the stones, or bury it alongside them, dualling that section as well, all to meet the very obvious transport and economic demands.

If they refuse and obfuscate, as seems inevitable? Well, you have to consider how the A344 and the A303 got there in the first place?  They arose by force of public opinion and use – not through public inquiry, planning consent and parliamentary pontification.  One thing I am sure English Heritage would not disagree about – and that is we should always learn the lessons of history and act upon them.

The Need for Evidence-based Decisions on the A303 - Not the Usual Nonsense

Here at WiSBAng we are firm believers in evidence-based government policy, not the usual emotional knee-jerk, ill-educated, gut-feeling, wishy-washy, party politics-driven claptrap to which we are usually subject and which has been the bane of the debate around the future of the A303 and the much needed bypass for Winterbourne Stoke.   

One of the roles of this blog, aside from the occasional rant, is to dig out that evidence and try and put as much of it as possible into one place.  That gives you, the reader, an easy way of getting to it and deciding for yourselves the merits of any particular line of argument.   Make up your own minds – chase the evidence.

Clearly, we don’t have the resources or time to find all the interesting, useful or downright embarrassing evidence ourselves, so if we miss anything, let us know by leaving a comment to a blog post.