A45 ban for next year?
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AN EXPERIMENTAL one-year ban on through lorry traffic on the A45 in Cambridgeshire looks certain to start sometime next Spring.
The county council has advertised an order to introduce the ban, which would affect lorries over 16.5 tonnes gvw on a section between the Cambridgeshire county boundary and the Al, but which would permit vehicles to have access for deliveries and collecting goods (CM, June 19).
Objectors have been given until October 18 to lodge their case, and the final decision on whether to go ahead will be made at a transport committee meeting in January. A Spring commencement date looks likely.
The committee also voted last week to oppose the Department of Transport's draft order for the Al/M1 link road if there is no change from the present Government plan to build the road to single-carriageway standard.
This follows a county council survey carried out in April this year at five points of the Al/M1 route — at the Al, A14, A45, A603, and A604 in Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, and Northamptonshire. This showed that 9,500 long-distance lorries and 3,700 local delivery vehicles would use the Al/M1 route each day.
The total represents a 65 per cent growth in traffic over six years, or 10 per cent a year, and the council argues that if this rate continues, instead of rising at the three per cent rate forecast by the DTp, there will be 27,000 vehicles a day by the year 2000.
It goes on to argue that the single-carriageway road proposed would have capacity for 17,000 vehicles a day, and could not cope with the anticipated volume.
Cambridgeshire also says that historical evidence proves that new roads attractadditional traffic, and that improvements to Felixstowe docks could generate even more. it is still trying to convince both the DTp and the Treasury that a dual carriageway should be built.