Just watching this on BBC HD. Quite interesting!

Good programme, shame about the road itself.

The road is mostly a very nice road. It's those Druids who made a mess of it.

And the A358. That awful link to the M5 ruins the whole of the A303 for me.

With hindsight, could it have been a better idea to have upgraded the A30 to D2 rather than the A303? It would have avoided Stonehenge, provided bypasses for Salisbury, Sherborne, Yeovil and Chard and would also have avoided part of the Blackdown Hills.

It is surely also more direct than the 303.

Another thread about this programme here.

...and would probably have been more expensive to upgrade, with all those houses, villages, and things along the route... I suppose it depends really whether you want a local distributor route or a route for long distance traffic...

I have looked at an upgraded A30 as a fantasy roads project. As far as i can see it would need several bypasses to get around the towns, with varying degrees of difficulty (Yeovil and Salisbury would be the worst). But i think the towns would be the easy bits as there are several 'open country' sections that would require extensive off line upgrades to bring them up to modern D2 standard. The section between Salisbury and Shaftesbury would be the hardest to do i think and would need an offline section some distance to the north of the present road. Much as we complain about it, thank goodness for the A303 i'd say. That said it would be an interesting exercise to imagine the A303 didnt exist and come up with a alternate time line/history for upgrading the A30.

I liked the way at the end he got out of the car to point out the end of the A303 as a bit of a non-event as the A30 comes in from the left and that's the end of the A303, without any signs or fanfare.

Here: http://g.co/maps/5t9ev

The only reason the A303 does exist is because the A30 route was so slow and congested even 200 years ago so William Hanning had the New Direct Road (now known as the A303) built to replace it.

Unfortunately in 1923 the DoT c***ked it up in the same way as they did for the A1 routing north of York and the A303 was instituted in 1933 as a result after much local protest. It should really have been the A30 from day 1

It may well have been a good idea at the time if the main purpose of the route was for long distance traffic from London to Exeter but since then things have changed. Upgrades have been done piecemeal to provide relief for the towns and villages on the route rather than with the intention of creating a second high quality route from London to Exeter. The fact that the road passes close to Stonehenge and through the Blackdown Hills will likely prevent the route from becoming this high quality route. If the A30 had been upgraded instead there would not have been the difficulty with Stonehenge and the road would also have provided relief for places like Salisbury and Yeovil which are larger than most of the places bypassed by the A303.

It was suggested on another thread to divert the Stonehenge section way to the South to Salisbury. It would add a fair number of extra miles, but would mean it could be made the same high quality as the rest of the road.

When you start adding in these diversions though including going via the A358 to avoid the Blackdown Hills you start to lose the distance benefit over the M4/M5. What's surprising is that there was never a plan to build a high quality route from London to the South West unlike most of the other regions of England. Birmingham to Exeter justifies D3M but London to Exeter only justifies S2 and D2 and even then the D2 is only a result of piecemeal upgrades to bypass towns/villages on the route and not part of a plan to create a high quality route.

I would contend that dualling and bypassing towns on the A30 would not have been easier than completing the A303. I think Salisbury would have proved a massive sticking point that makes stonehenge look like nothing. The fact that recent efforts to provice an A36 bypass failed as much on environmental issues and NIMBYism as on government cuts, would support this argument. You might have got the rest done but been left with Salisbury (and possibly Yeovil too) as major bottlenecks on the route.

I don't think the terrain through the Blackdown Hills is any easier on the A30 than on the A303. Heading westwards any bypass of Crewkerne would be very circuitous and/or hilly and/or expensive, there's a long hill west of Chard (though it looks as if a bypass on a southerly line on a good alignment could cope with it), and there's no obvious high quality line past the very steep gradients around Yarcombe.

Er are you sure? the route is even moreso a direct route for long distance traffic from London to Exeter today than it was in 1809?




The upgrades were done piecemeal but as part of an overall strategy to create a high quality route from London to Exeter. The first bits to be done were narrow river crossings such as Petherton Bridge (which were wide S1 (look at the Yarty bridge west of Chard on the A30 and you will get the idea), then the towns and villages as these were the main congestion points for long distance holiday traffic, by the '80s the gaps were busily being filled and plans existed to complete the route. Most of the upgrades that were done could never have been justified by local traffic levels which spike on summer Saturdays but only as a strategic route under then then predict and provide policy.




The Blackdown upgrade was ready to go in the late '80s, having passed all enquiries with barely a bleat, when the government ran out of money and cancelled it just before construction (the cancellation causing much local outrage). Only one thing proved contentious at the enquiry, the plan to have a roundabout rather than grade separated junction at the A30/A303 junction. (which was presumably the idea of the "Black Cat" roundabout propagation society )

If the A30 was upgraded instead, there is of course a handy canyon 50m wide all the way from Chard to Honiton that goes right through the Blackdowns that it could use. For some reason, the people who built the original Chard to A303 turnpike through the Blackdowns forgot to use it and carved a spectacularly engineered route through the Blackdowns instead .

As for Stonehenge, it could fairly simply be bypassed by a route running north of Bulford Camp and Larkhall, then dropping east of Shrewton to rejoin the A303 west of Winterbourne Stoke. A significant amount of the land needed is already government owned (shown on maps by the numerous Danger Area endorsements).



...but there would have been a bigger problem at Salisbury. I recall the A36 bypass of Salisbury was cancelled due to general outrage.



The A303 is the Salisbury and Yeovil Bypass.

The A30 was detrunked and the A303 trunked after the authorities concluded as early as the 1950s that upgrading the A30 was not feasible. If it could not be done then, it is even moreso the case now.

I'm not referring to the fact that it is the most direct route but that at the time when it was built, S2 was all that was needed for a long distance route from London to Exeter. This is no longer the case, it's not possible for the route to fully be upgraded to D2 due to Stonehenge and the Blackdown Hills .At the time the remaining upgrades were cancelled it was also stated that the A303 was a route of regional not national importance. You can't justify a D2 through the Blackdown Hills on the current traffic levels.

The upgrade was given the go-ahead in February 1997 around the time constructions started on the A30 Honiton to Exeter improvement. It may well have been built had there not been a general election before the orders could be confirmed. Labour though showed that they actually listened to public opinion and cancelled this and quite a few road improvements when they were elected as by that time public opinion was more against road buolding.

It does remove London to Exeter traffic but requires travel on S2 roads for some distance to reach it, an A30 bypass would have been nearer and may well have removed even more traffic from the town/city centres.

It is quite possible, there just is not the political will.




Which is very convenient if you want to cancel the upgrades.




Indeed for a route of regional importance you cannot, however for a route of national importance you can. The decision to downgrade the London to Penzance trunk road from a route of national importance to a route of regional importance looks to me to be driven by treasury bean counting rather than the reality of the situation.

Plymouth has a population of 250,000, Exeter a population of 120,000 with the Exeter Heart of Devon sub region having a population of 500,000. To say that the south west peninsular including these populations is of such little importance that a direct high quality route to the capital and channel ports is unneccesary is absurd and would be unthinkable in France or Germany.

Imagine if in the the Republic of Ireland it was deemed that as Cork is to be linked to Dublin via a high quality route via Limerick (M7/M20) the M8 could be cancelled as the traffic levels through Fermoy and Mitchelstown did not justify a D2?

No it is not justified by the narrow prism of viewing traffic levels through the Blackdowns but it is justifed by the wider picture of providing a high quality route to the southwest and the benefits this would bring in employment and business to the region. If that view had been taken in the 1950's I very much doubt that much of the motorway network would have been built.

Very similar arguments were deployed to justify closing much of the south wes'ts rail network in the 1960s, indeed the London - Salisbury - Exeter - Okehampton - Plymouth intercity rail route was downgraded and single tracked for much of its length east of Exeter as the local traffic did not justify it and the through traffic from west of Exeter could be diverted via Taunton and Reading. Similarly rest of the line west of Exeter to Okehampton Plymouth line was closed altogether on the same grounds. The region still suffers.

If that was the case then why was the Ilminster bypass built as S2?