Should the A64 east of York be dualled?

[NICK 647063]

And more traffic travelling to and from Leeds city centre is being encouraged to use the M1 and A63 instead of the A64.

It depends really from Leeds City Centre York and the A1(M) North is very much signed up the A64, from York direction it gives you more options but to be fair most traffic still uses the A64 it’s 4 miles shorter and normally quicker, looking at traffic data the A63 since opening has very little difference to the A64 in Leeds it’s still carrying around 50,000 Vehicles per day, the free flows from the A64 east to the A1 south do help get traffic to the M1 to in affect bypass Leeds for through traffic which used to have to go through Leeds.

[Rillington]

Stevie, you're in a far better position to comment as you have local knowledge but I always thought it was staggering that they did what they did rather than creating a GSJ although forcing every motorist to stop is safer for all road users when compared to the previous situation that existed at Hop Grove.

I totally accept Nick's point re congestion being caused by the road going from two lanes to one lane but to force all traffic on such a major road to effectively stop will cause traffic to build up very quickly and I would imagine that many motorists spend huge amounts of time stopping and starting whilst they get through the traffic lights and it must take up to an hour if you are caught in a queue that backs up all the way to Grimston Bar.

OK, Hopgrove 101 ...

Back in the late 1990s and 2000s, Hopgrove suffered from two major problems:

• on busy days (particularly summer weekends in the morning), traffic heading for the coast would snarl up as the A64D2, A1036 and A1237 all fed into an S2 road, causing long tailbacks in all directions.
• at busy times (particularly evening peak), the principal flows were A64(W) to A64(E) and A1036/A1237 to A64(W). Traffic heading east along the A64 was generally unimpeded and had a continuous flow, meaning that traffic coming from Monks Cross and Clifton Moor and trying to turn right onto A64(W) had no break to get onto the roundabout, leading to 30 minute queues as a matter of course.

The first one of those can only be solved by dualling the road between Hopgrove and Malton. (Dualling beyond Malton is not necessary, as traffic levels between Malton and Scarbados are only about half the levels between York and Malton). The second one was solved by the upgrade, and queues that used to take 30 minutes now take no more than 3 minutes and often only 30 seconds.

When the plans were made to improve the roundabout in c.2008, there was no possibility of the road beyond Hopgrove being dualled in the foreseeable future. Building a flyover would probably have cost about twice as much as the upgrade we got, and without that dualling it would have delivered only very small additional benefits – not enough to justify the additional costs.

The traffic lights do prioritise traffic on the A64 over turning traffic, so at times when the eastbound outflow is running freely, all traffic has to slow down but a lot of traffic doesn't have to stop because the lights spend more than half the time on green for the A64. The only time there are significant queues at the roundabout are when the eastbound outflow is not flowing – it is not the roundabout that causes queues. If a flyover had been built, in free-flowing conditions it would save a few seconds but not enough to justify the additional costs – when the A64E is chuggered, it would potentially allow traffic from A64W to flow fractionally better but that would be at the expense of coast-bound traffic coming from A1036/A1237, so no net gain.

When the road is dualled, it will be a different story. There is likely to be a significant amount of repressed demand that is unleashed, and that additional traffic would put the roundabout under strain – so then there is justification for upgrading to a GSJ. If we had known 10 years ago that dualling would be on the cards then it might have made sense to future-proof the junction by grade-separating it, but without any certainty around that, it could have been an expensive gamble.

Thank you for that explanation.

I just hope that if the road is dualled, they build a GSJ for through traffic.