Tag Archives: 1990s
Letter to the editor: County Structure Plan, 1993
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.
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.
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.
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”.
Highways and byways in Dorset 