Phil wrote: ↑Sat Aug 12, 2023 05:22
roadtester wrote: ↑Fri Aug 11, 2023 18:20
I think the best answer to this would be to replace the current West Winch section of the A10 with a new decent bypass unencumbered by roundabouts and local accesses and so on, and then find a way to repurpose the bypassed section to serve as the access road serving the new developments.
What you think is the 'best' answer and what the national Governmnt (who have totally neutered any ability for local Government to oppose it) think the 'best'* answer is are very different things...
* That is to say, housing development = always good. Housing development where the developer pays for a bit of new road = very, very good....
Actually, the more I look at it, the crappier it seems. It's adding an additional inadequate route to work in parallel with the existing single inadequate route. If they really do build the number of houses they're talking about, I suspect it won't be long before people start saying a third route, a 'proper' bypass, is needed for through traffic to get around the whole newly created mess. As skiddaw05 has already pointed out, at the very least, any solution has to start back at the A134 roundabout.
My main use of the existing piece of road is that a few times a month I drive up the A10 and straight into King's Lynn. While it can sometimes get clogged, it is actually tolerably usable for most of the day, offering a decent, if 40-limited, straight-through run, especially if you avoid the rush hour. The thing I really dislike about the scheme is that it actually degrades the journey by adding the faff of roundabouts and a dog-leg to get to the Hardwick roundabout and into King's Lynn instead of that straight run, so for most of the day it will be worse than what's there now.
The context to this, which goes beyond the lines on the map and may not be appreciated by non-locals is that the Cambs Fens are booming, at least from a house-building point of view - I live in Ely, a little to the South, which has doubled in size in the last twenty to thirty years with not much in the way of objection. Traffic levels here have changed out of all recognition since I moved there in 1998. As I said up-thread, acceptance of new housebuilding is actually fairly high because we are one of the more spacious parts of the country. Houses are going up everywhere.
King's Lynn is not itself an enormous place but it is a very important regional centre, drawing in huge numbers of people from a large surrounding catchment area which is often short of amenities. That's why just north of the Hardwick roundabout Tesco and Sainsbury's have built enormous stores, probably among their biggest in the whole of the UK.
I think this is scheme is probably the smallest conceivable sticking plaster they think they can get away with to ward off the side-effects of growth for a few years.
