Wales to cancel most new road schemes

[deltic]

As reported by the BBC and others the Welsh Government has cancelled most proposed new road schemes https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-64640215. They are the first government body to recognise tough choices have to be made if net zero by 2050 is to be reached.

In England the DfT have published traffic forecasts which also show traffic levels must fall if the government is to meet its net zero targets but the government has no policies in place to achieve this.

Deputy Minister for Climate Change Lee Waters told the Senedd the approach of the last 70 years was not working.
"We will not get to net zero unless we stop doing the same thing over and over," he said.
"None of this is easy but neither is the alternative."
To reach net zero by 2050, he said, the Welsh government must "be prepared to follow through".
The deputy minister insisted new roads would be built in future, but said the government was "raising the bar" to ensure any new road was "the right response to transport problems".

 

[johncrossley]

The rather sensationalist BBC headline is unnecessarily misleading. Almost a quarter of all assessed schemes will go ahead unchanged and many of the others will be amended rather than scrapped completely.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

Up here in North East Wales it's a double reversal.
In the 2000s they were going to dual the A494 across the Dee and up Aston Bank, and bought all the necessary land.
They then abandoned that in favour of a new route linking A494/A55 using the existing Flintshire bridge and the connecting low-usage Deeside dual carriageway, with a short new road up to the A55 at Northop.
Now they have abandoned the Flintshire bridge "Red" route to go back to "improvements to the A494".
It's just wasted 20 years.
(There are also stylized concrete Welsh dragon/English lion features on the bridge embankments at the border, put there when the A494 was upgraded at Shotwick.
Now they are invisible with grass/shrub growth).
The contraction from 3-lane dual carriageway to 2-lane over the River Dee at Queensferry and up Aston Bank remains the major bottleneck in the area.
The proposed North Wales Metro will do nothing to solve this problem, which is mainly from long-distance road traffic (local/tourist/freight/Irish).
Doing nothing at Menai also seems exceptionally short-sighted.

 

[ABB125]

Up here in North East Wales it's a double reversal.
In the 2000s they were going to dual the A494 across the Dee and up Aston Bank, and bought all the necessary land.
They then abandoned that in favour of a new route linking A494/A55 using the existing Flintshire bridge and the connecting low-usage Deeside dual carriageway, with a short new road up to the A55 at Northop.
Now they have abandoned the Flintshire bridge "Red" route to go back to "improvements to the A494".
It's just wasted 20 years.
(There are also stylized concrete Welsh dragon/English lion features on the bridge embankments at the border, put there when the A494 was upgraded at Shotwick.
Now they are invisible with grass/shrub growth).
The contraction from 3-lane dual carriageway to 2-lane over the River Dee at Queensferry and up Aston Bank remains the major bottleneck in the area.
The proposed North Wales Metro will do nothing to solve this problem, which is mainly from long-distance road traffic (local/tourist/freight/Irish).
Doing nothing at Menai also seems exceptionally short-sighted.

I seem to remember from the last consultation that they had that the "red route" (new road to the Flintshire Bridge) was about half the price of the "blue route" (upgrading the existing road). Plus, it's a far better scheme overall (due to the diversionary ability of the road network following its building*), so not doing it in favour of the upgrade of the existing road is madness.


*Something that we're very bad at in this country; for decades the preferred approach has been "all the eggs in one basket", ie: widening existing roads rather than building parallel(ish) roads to better distribute the traffic.