NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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exiled
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Re: A1 Banbridge improvements

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bothar wrote:
exiled wrote:
vlad wrote:Given Banbridge is home of this really old GSJ surely it's a prerequisite of SABRE membership to know where it is? :)
Is that the only medieval GSJ still in use in these islands? :D
Point of information, it isn't medieval, but early 19th century (1834). There probably wasn't of anything much there in medieval times, never mind need for a GSJ!

It still remains a better design than the bypass.
I know, just being difficult! It looks brilliant though.
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Re: A1 Banbridge improvements

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Owain wrote:
vlad wrote:Given Banbridge is home of this really old GSJ surely it's a prerequisite of SABRE membership to know where it is? :)
If you've driven through it, you get elected President! :msnangel:
Bryn666 wrote:The bigger issue is that there is now an obvious gap in the combined Irish motorway system.

Time for the M1 to go to the border and create a new M4 to Dungannon.
Of course that's what should happen, just as the M2 should go to Derry. But the DUP would never have either.
You have now ridden me of any desire to drive through that junction. I was looking at P and O ferries last night as well...
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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When the Banbridge bypass was built in the late 1970s, it was single carriageway with land reserved for an extra carriageway and one or two overbridges built for dual. It was a very unusual and not a little dangerous layout, as at night drivers approaching the bridges might have thought they were on a DC when it was only S2. It was also located between two sections of D2 on the A1. The second carriageway was added in 1988/89.

The A1 dualling was done in the 1970s and 80s as a second-best backup option in any case. Back in the 1960s when there were very ambitious motorway plans for NI, there was to be a M11 motorway running from the existing new M1 south to Newry. It was scrapped along with most of the other planned motorways when the Troubles erupted. Wesley Johnston - a member here - has an excellent website detailing the history of road schemes and plans in Northern Ireland.

I think, given the growth in traffic between Dublin and Belfast since the peace process, they should revisit plans for an offline new motorway from the M1 to the recently built Border to North of Newry HQDC section of A1. Although they have upgraded the A1 by adding GSJs at key locations and closed some central reservation gaps, there are still a lot of private access roads leading off the A1 and it's alignment is very bendy in some spots.

But with the DUP effectively holding the cards in terms of public spending in the North, I don't see it as likely any time soon.
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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Enceladus wrote:The A1 dualling was done in the 1970s and 80s as a second-best backup option in any case. Back in the 1960s when there were very ambitious motorway plans for NI, there was to be a M11 motorway running from the existing new M1 south to Newry. It was scrapped along with most of the other planned motorways when the Troubles erupted. Wesley Johnston - a member here - has an excellent website detailing the history of road schemes and plans in Northern Ireland.
I believe the M11 was planned to start north of the M1, and to head west from Belfast before turning south and crossing over the M1. A very curious arrangement.
I think, given the growth in traffic between Dublin and Belfast since the peace process, they should revisit plans for an offline new motorway from the M1 to the recently built Border to North of Newry HQDC section of A1. Although they have upgraded the A1 by adding GSJs at key locations and closed some central reservation gaps, there are still a lot of private access roads leading off the A1 and it's alignment is very bendy in some spots.
It's not as bad as the A26 between Antrim and Ballymena though; the things I've seen near some of those turning gaps beggar belief! I drove that road on my very first day in Northern Ireland, and I felt like I'd fallen through a time warp. I can't think of any HQDC in England that has so many gaps, nor gaps that are so busy, combined with NSL.

My experiences on there are probably all catalogued on Numpty Overload!
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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When the Banbridge bypass was built in the late 1970s, it was single carriageway with land reserved for an extra carriageway and one or two overbridges built for dual. It was a very unusual and not a little dangerous layout, as at night drivers approaching the bridges might have thought they were on a DC when it was only S2. It was also located between two sections of D2 on the A1. The second carriageway was added in 1988/89.

The A1 dualling was done in the 1970s and 80s as a second-best backup option in any case. Back in the 1960s when there were very ambitious motorway plans for NI, there was to be a M11 motorway running from the existing new M1 south to Newry. It was scrapped along with most of the other planned motorways when the Troubles erupted. Wesley Johnston - a member here - has an excellent website detailing the history of road schemes and plans in Northern Ireland.

I think, given the growth in traffic between Dublin and Belfast since the peace process, they should revisit plans for an offline new motorway from the M1 to the recently built Border to North of Newry HQDC section of A1. Although they have upgraded the A1 by adding GSJs at key locations and closed some central reservation gaps, there are still a lot of private access roads leading off the A1 and it's alignment is very bendy in some spots.

But with the DUP effectively holding the cards in terms of public spending in the North, I don't see it as likely any time soon.
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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Enceladus wrote:When the Banbridge bypass was built in the late 1970s, it was single carriageway with land reserved for an extra carriageway and one or two overbridges built for dual. It was a very unusual and not a little dangerous layout, as at night drivers approaching the bridges might have thought they were on a DC when it was only S2. It was also located between two sections of D2 on the A1. The second carriageway was added in 1988/89.

The A1 dualling was done in the 1970s and 80s as a second-best backup option in any case. Back in the 1960s when there were very ambitious motorway plans for NI, there was to be a M11 motorway running from the existing new M1 south to Newry. It was scrapped along with most of the other planned motorways when the Troubles erupted. Wesley Johnston - a member here - has an excellent website detailing the history of road schemes and plans in Northern Ireland.

I think, given the growth in traffic between Dublin and Belfast since the peace process, they should revisit plans for an offline new motorway from the M1 to the recently built Border to North of Newry HQDC section of A1. Although they have upgraded the A1 by adding GSJs at key locations and closed some central reservation gaps, there are still a lot of private access roads leading off the A1 and it's alignment is very bendy in some spots.

But with the DUP effectively holding the cards in terms of public spending in the North, I don't see it as likely any time soon.
Building a motorway to the border won't just be a political decision, it'll be a financial one. There will never be the money in Northern Ireland to achieve it.
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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explo wrote: Building a motorway to the border won't just be a political decision, it'll be a financial one. There will never be the money in Northern Ireland to achieve it.

That's nonsense - look at the road infrastructure that has been built over the last decade or so: grade separation of the westlink; the A26 north of Balleymena; the A8 to Larne and the A4 to Ballygawley and the A1 at Newry. In the next decade we've got York Street, the A6, and A5 all coming. As with the rest of the UK, the signs aren't blue but to say that road investment per capita in the north isn't happening and that there isn't money for it simply isn't true.

The population is about the same as the historic county area of Kent, and Kent certainly hasn't had that level of investment since the completion of the M20 in the mid 90s.
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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The problem is that back in the 70s and 80s the M1 and A1 was easily the best standard of road between Belfast and Dublin, with most of the road south of the border being pretty poor with no bypasses.

But the situation completely reversed between 1995 and 2005, with the A1 between Newry and Sprucefield being of the lowest standard. No matter how many more compact GSJs they install on the A1, it will simply never be up to standard with the route in the Republic, both in terms of capacity and safety, so an offline motorway would be the best medium to long-term option.

But at the moment NI has other more pressing road needs issues, including getting the terrible A5 sorted out.
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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Enceladus wrote:The problem is that back in the 70s and 80s the M1 and A1 was easily the best standard of road between Belfast and Dublin, with most of the road south of the border being pretty poor with no bypasses. But the situation completely reversed between 1995 and 2005
Yes, historically it was the other way around. When considering whether bias played a part in road building, it's worth noting that Northern Ireland was systematically upgrading the road to Dublin long before the Republic of Ireland was upgrading the road to Belfast in any serious way. So accusations like that do have to consider the actions of both states, rather than just one of them.

I recently found an NI traffic survey from the late 1950s. What is very interesting is where the traffic was actually going in the era BEFORE major road building began, i.e. the position before the provision of new roads to certain areas and not others started to skew the patterns. Leaving Belfast to the south-west, considerably more traffic was heading west towards Portadown than south towards Newry. Cross border traffic was very low, in the order of 1000 vehicles per day. If you were a planner planning a motorway out of Belfast, it would have been very difficult to defend a decision to build it south to the border rather than west towards Portadown on those traffic figures. The only way you could justify it was if you were trying to encourage cross border traffic, or make a statement about your association with Dublin. Similarly, of the traffic heading east from Derry, 80% of it was travelling via Limavady and Coleraine, and 20% via the Glenshane Pass. So if you were planning to get a decent road to the North West in the late 1950s, it would have been fairly obvious that a route via Coleraine was the one that made sense. This is in fact what the 1964 motorway plan showed, except that the planned M23 towards Derry actually diverged a good bit south of Coleraine, which shortened the total distance. It's also why the A2 Clooney Road out of Derry was dualled in the 1960s, but the A6 was not.

To demonstrate if the decision to build the M1 west towards Portadown was nevertheless motivated by sectarianism you would first need to demonstrate that the decision to base Northern Ireland's 1960s road building plans primarily on traffic flow figures was atypical of what was going on in the rest of western Europe (and especially the rest of the British Isles) at the time. In other words, you would need to demonstrate that a plan based on traffic flow was unreasonable for the era. If it was atypical, and other countries were building roads to make political statements of unity or to encourage traffic between certain states, and were not paying as much attention to traffic flow, then the accusation is on firmer ground. If however other countries were also planning their road upgrades based primarily on traffic flow figures then I don't think the accusation would stand up. I don't have enough knowledge of transport policy in other European states in the 1960s to conclude more than that. Perhaps others can help with that.
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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As an outsider, and looking at a map, I would say if there was sectarianism in NI roads, it is the route from Belfast to *Derry. Going along the A1 NI it feels quite rural the closer to the Border.

States do build infrastructure to link up with other states, but it requires commitment from the otherside. If the old UUP Stormont had built a D2 to the border it would have expected a similar road up from Dublin, which sounds like in the sixties was not forthcoming.
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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nirs wrote:To demonstrate if the decision to build the M1 west towards Portadown was nevertheless motivated by sectarianism you would first need to demonstrate that the decision to base Northern Ireland's 1960s road building plans primarily on traffic flow figures was atypical of what was going on in the rest of western Europe (and especially the rest of the British Isles) at the time. In other words, you would need to demonstrate that a plan based on traffic flow was unreasonable for the era. If it was atypical, and other countries were building roads to make political statements of unity or to encourage traffic between certain states, and were not paying as much attention to traffic flow, then the accusation is on firmer ground. If however other countries were also planning their road upgrades based primarily on traffic flow figures then I don't think the accusation would stand up. I don't have enough knowledge of transport policy in other European states in the 1960s to conclude more than that. Perhaps others can help with that.
The issue in this case and no doubt in other parts of Europe was that cross border traffic was initially reduced by deliberate efforts by governments through customs restrictions and so forth. In the 1950s you couldn't just get into your car in Belfast and drive to Dublin, you had to get a Triptyque and in many cases you had to get a resident of the other side to stand guarantor for you. People in border areas tended to do the guarantor thing for each other, but someone wanting a spur of the moment day trip might be stuck. The GNR was pretty busy all through, but the road traffic was small. There was negligible HGV traffic for the similar reasons. The trend from the founding of the EU in 1956 (at least until Brexit) been to eliminate all of this paperwork so the traffic more closely approximates population levels and so on. So from 1965 and the Anglo Irish trade agreement this was dismantled and traffic volumes rose quickly in the late 1960s. Cross border traffic on the A1 was of the order of 8000 in the 1970s, quite a change.

So the traffic planners may well have taken good account of current traffic, but may have failed to take account of predictable changes in traffic patterns. The Stormont government later did take account of the changes with the change of the B37 to the A509, for instance, to provide a more direct route from Enniskillen to Cavan with a new customs post.

Not sure about the Derry route, but it is also true that in the 1950s people did not do long jouneys by car as they do now. They might drive from Derry to Limavady, but not Belfast. So you'd need more data on that one.
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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c2R wrote:
explo wrote: Building a motorway to the border won't just be a political decision, it'll be a financial one. There will never be the money in Northern Ireland to achieve it.

That's nonsense - look at the road infrastructure that has been built over the last decade or so: grade separation of the westlink; the A26 north of Balleymena; the A8 to Larne and the A4 to Ballygawley and the A1 at Newry. In the next decade we've got York Street, the A6, and A5 all coming. As with the rest of the UK, the signs aren't blue but to say that road investment per capita in the north isn't happening and that there isn't money for it simply isn't true.

The population is about the same as the historic county area of Kent, and Kent certainly hasn't had that level of investment since the completion of the M20 in the mid 90s.
Every scheme you mention only undermines your case. There's a reason Stormont has been building all purpose schemes. Motorways are much more expensive than the upgrades that have been done over the last decade or so. The policy will not change as having blue signs, a hard shoulder and full scale GSJs adds nothing to the functionality of the road in most people's eyes.
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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explo wrote:
c2R wrote:
explo wrote: Building a motorway to the border won't just be a political decision, it'll be a financial one. There will never be the money in Northern Ireland to achieve it.

That's nonsense - look at the road infrastructure that has been built over the last decade or so: grade separation of the westlink; the A26 north of Balleymena; the A8 to Larne and the A4 to Ballygawley and the A1 at Newry. In the next decade we've got York Street, the A6, and A5 all coming. As with the rest of the UK, the signs aren't blue but to say that road investment per capita in the north isn't happening and that there isn't money for it simply isn't true.

The population is about the same as the historic county area of Kent, and Kent certainly hasn't had that level of investment since the completion of the M20 in the mid 90s.
Every scheme you mention only undermines your case. There's a reason Stormont has been building all purpose schemes. Motorways are much more expensive than the upgrades that have been done over the last decade or so. The policy will not change as having blue signs, a hard shoulder and full scale GSJs adds nothing to the functionality of the road in most people's eyes.
no, not really it doesn't. Your point was that there isn't the money in the north to build a motorway. That's clearly false, as there has been a lot of road investment that I've pointed out. They're schemes built to modern design standards in an area that is fairly sparsely populated. The general policy of UK government has been against building new blue lines on the map; and that isn't really a financial one. While it is true that motorways are more expensive, the schemes that have been built have been of enormous infrastructure benefit. I suspect the BCR of building them to full motorway spec wouldn't really add up. To do a comparison the AADT of the A14 in England is around 100,000 - this is being upgraded to expressway and may receive blue signs... Banbridge bypass has an AADT of about 20,000, and other roads like the A4, A5, and A6 are lower still. I suspect the assembly would have done the BCRs and asked itself "what are the net benefits of blue signs and hard shoulders on roads with such low AADT" - and decided that more schemes are a better way of spending the money than a single gold plated scheme.

Perhaps if Stormont actually gets up and running again there may be a chance of new initiatives like the expressways being "ported" across, which might mean that the same cheap approach to motorway conversion occurs in the north of Ireland - but barring that I really don't see new motorways appearing any time soon.
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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The Assembly would say anything to get itself votes...! Spending more money on a particular area is a good way to get them, so naturally you'd expect motorway.

For that reason, I think that "not enough money" does stand up as the reason for no new motorways, and lack of willingness to do anything other than milk the GB taxpayer for more money to get what they want - on the other hand, Alternative A5 Alliance and Chris Murphy are the only ones apparently making substantial objections to offline HQDC. HQDC is doing what it says on the tin.
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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AndyB wrote:The Assembly would say anything to get itself votes...! Spending more money on a particular area is a good way to get them, so naturally you'd expect motorway.

For that reason, I think that "not enough money" does stand up as the reason for no new motorways, and lack of willingness to do anything other than milk the GB taxpayer for more money to get what they want - on the other hand, Alternative A5 Alliance and Chris Murphy are the only ones apparently making substantial objections to offline HQDC. HQDC is doing what it says on the tin.
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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A8 and A26 are certainly built to expressway standards. Continuous central barrier, all junctions either GSJ or LILO.

However, they are all but on-line upgrades. Both do go off-line, for example the A8 around Ballynure, or the A26 around the Frosses trees, but it's the exception and there is no continuous LAR except at Ballynure, let alone a sensible line to construct one, never mind the shared use foot/cycle paths (excusable where there are next to no pedestrians). Quite unsuitable for blue signs.

The A6 between the M22 and Castledawson is largely off-line, and if the junctions around Toome were converted to GSJs, it could be done with blue signs provided that the old road remains navigable.
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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AndyB wrote:The A6 between the M22 and Castledawson is largely off-line, and if the junctions around Toome were converted to GSJs, it could be done with blue signs provided that the old road remains navigable.
Indeed, it's the best candidate we have. The only other thing is you'd have to close up the 3 or 4 laybys that are to be provided on that stretch (since it would become illegal to stop in them except in an emergency).
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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Rest areas with full length slips and end of motorway regs signs? ;)
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Re: NI: A1 Banbridge improvements

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Further gap closure legislation published yesterday.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/nisr/2019 ... 166_en.pdf
The Central Reservations on the A1 Dromore By-Pass, Dromore and the A1 Dromore Road, Hillsborough (Stopping-Up) Order (Northern Ireland) 2019

Map 1 https://www.infrastructure-ni.gov.uk/si ... re-map.pdf

Map 2 https://www.infrastructure-ni.gov.uk/si ... gh-map.pdf
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