Monthly Archives: April 2014
Stalbridge Cross should stay where it is, early 1990s?
Proponents of moving the cross pointed out that motorists needed protecting against the cross colliding with their vehicles; town residents countered that it provides useful traffic calming, deflecting traffic around it as it enters the A357 High Street. Stalbridge’s ancient market cross did indeed always stay where it was, gaining some serious wooden bollards in the early-mid 1990s. Don’t think this cutting, which I guess is from the Blackmore Vale Magazine, included a date, but I suppose it was a little before those bollards turned up.
Rodwell Relief Road, 1991
Having built the A354 Weymouth Town Centre Relief Road in the mid 1980s, and intending to extend it north as the Weymouth Relief Road, laurels couldn’t be rested on. Things turned south, as proposals were made to lay a similarly big road across the old Portland Railway through Rodwell — now instead the lovely, calm, green Rodwell rail trail walking and cycling path, thankfully!
Weymouth Relief Road: Non-technical Summary, 1994
The zombie Weymouth Relief Road at least provides a nice illustration of how council comms developed over the decades, from the spartan monochrome typo-filled typewriter texts of the 1970s and 80s, through the gaudy desktop published factsheets of the 1990s and more cleverly designed leaflets of the 2000s to today’s website.
Stalbridge Traffic Management Consultation, 2000
By 2000, the new realism was beginning to sink in and the bypasses were on the shelf. Instead, it’s all tinkering with the S106 contributions. This one went ahead, but some of the pavement buildouts were quietly rolled back a few years later, as far as I know without consultation.
Shaftesbury Outer Bypass, 1991
Shaftesbury was one of the first Dorset towns to get a bypass. I didn’t even realise there ever was a plan to give it a second bypass until I stumbled upon this status record.
Wareham Bypass Stage 2 and Norden Improvement, 1988
Innovative schemes at Westham Roundabout, 1998
It seems that in 1998, presumably in response to 1996’s National Cycling Strategy, the DfT were trying out “innovative schemes” as they do every decade or so in order to put off doing things that have actually been shown to work. The council volunteered Weymouth’s Westham Roundabout, a busy junction between the Town Centre Relief Road and the main road to Portland, for a cycle lane to be painted around the edge. On the carriageway, of course, not done properly like the Dutch would do. Today the Rodwell Rail Trail ends at this junction, but the opportunity to do something truly great for cycling here was passed up again when the roundabout was converted to a complex high-capacity signal-controlled cross ahead of the 2012 Olympics.
Note the Echo’s particularly absurd transport mode tribalism fail: “positive discrimination”.
Improved road links for Weymouth & Portland: route options (1991)
From the many decades spent drawing and redrawing Weymouth relief roads. One of those killed off by the new realism, Weymouth’s hosting 2012 Olympic events meant that something like the Orange route eventually did get built (but scaled back to single carriageway and with slightly better attempts to make it an actual relief road rather than the typical 1980s pump more traffic in road).