Adding lanes has literally never fixed traffic anywhere ever.
It might fix everyone slowing down to a crawl as they go past Stonehenge though. The a303 is a dual carriageway that goes down to 1 Lane past stone henge, the new tunnel would stop the bottleneck that happens as it goes past stonehenge, if having a busy road that goes past Stonehenge hasn’t affected it’s world heritage status, then changing that to a tunnel shouldn’t affect it either, if anything it will improve the aesthetics as all you can hear there is the road.
The main question should be, could this money be better spent? The answer is obviously yes.
That being said, if the issue is traffic slowing down, then you put up a monument between the highway and Stonehenge that blocks drivers’ view. Could easily be a monument to the Celtic and Gallic history of England. Something nondescript from the road’s side.
If the issue is the amount of traffic, then regulated entry is the way. Put stoplights at the highway’s entry and only let several on at a time.
How to kill your country’s infrastructure 101
It will not fix everyone slowing down to a crawl, it will lead to more people driving when they should be taking a train and make traffic worse. This is the only possible result of road widening.
If there were a train route along the a303 this may be true. It’s also not building an extra Lane the whole route, most of the route is a 2 Lane dual carriageway, this section is not, it gets gridlocked as the roads struggle with it going from 2 lanes to 1 Lane, this is a rural route, everyone already drives anyway.
I’m not defending the building of the tunnel as I no longer need to use it, I couldn’t care less. But saying that building the tunnel won’t make a difference is completely wrong here as the traffic is not caused because the roads cannot handle the traffic, it’s caused because it’s a single lane road next to a world heritage monument that everyone slows down to look at it. Building a tunnel will improve the area around the monument and will stop idiots from stopping to take pictures on a single lane road. The extra lane will also prevent the bottleneck caused by going from 2 lanes down to one.
Traffic is caused by cars. Any affordance made for more cars will only and always make more traffic.
If by traffic, you mean the flow of traffic will increase, then yea, of course because if you remove obsticles and increase capacity, then more cars can use it instead of travelling through small villages and clogging up their roads.
If you mean building more capacity and removing junctions in the middle of nowhere where there is a bottleneck of traffic because of poor road layouts and a world heritage site will cause more traffic jams, I’d love to see that study. That’s pretty a niche study, and I’d imagine the people protesting this tunnel would appreciate seeing it.
carbrain
Carbrain /kar 'bren/ [1] is a neighbourhood in Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire in Scotland. It gets a brief mention on William Roy’s eighteenth century map of the Scottish Lowlands.[2] In the nineteenth century it was no more than a farm steading.[3] An early map shows just a few buildings existed in 1864.[4] By the start of the First World War it had not grown significantly, although there was a school near the railway station.[5] It was sometimes spelled Carbrane.[6] Even in 1956 Carbrain was mostly farmland[7] with a small burn flowing through it.[8] The map seems to show this flowing possibly down the Gully[9] and eventually feeding the Red Burn in the Vault Glen. This burn isn’t named so can’t be identified with the Horseward Burn from historic maps.[10]
Fixing the a303 isn’t going to lead to more cars on the road: everyone uses it anyway, they just hate it. The tunnel is just to stop people slowing down to look at stonehenge as they drive past while keeping the number of lanes the same all the way so it doesn’t randomly narrow.
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I came here thinking this was going to be an archeological tunnel underneath due to some cool thing they found with GPR or something.
I must admit I’m sadly disappointed.
Way to anger the old gods
I recognise the UK government has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it
Isn’t this out in farmland? Why is a tunnel needed? Are they going right under Stonehedge or something?
Article doesn’t directly state it, but implies the tunnel is going to be there to reduce the visual impact of adding a bigger road to the area.
Big waste of money IMO. Makes way more financial and environmental sense to just move the highway a couple KM away(buying land as needed) and widen it there.
It is in farmland, but it’s also smack next to one of the country’s major arterial routes to the southwest, and a two-lane road (one lane in each direction) at that. So the traffic buildup at peak season can lead to terrible delays. Add to that the gawpers who slow down to look at it, the coaches and tourists and it’s just always been an absolute nightmare. If you ever find you might need to be on the a303 in that area after 4pm on a Friday or Sunday in the summer, change your plans.
A short term and way cheaper potential alternative would be putting up the green fencing you see alongside airports - make it Impossible to see the stones from the road and you’ll solve a good deal of the problems.
This has been going on for decades and will likely go on for a few more. I dont think this is the best use of money when half the country is wondering how they’re going to pay the mortgage next month.
Why don’t they just build a wall to block the view? Seems a lot cheaper than a tunnel. I guess then they’d have to be honest about the design strategy.
Yes literally within 400yds of the stones building a cut and cover tunnel
Boosh RealCivilEngineer!
The tunnel’s gonna be in the strongest shape, isn’t it…
Can I raise a practical question at this point? We gonna do Stonehenge tomorrow?
NO WE AIN’T GUNNA FUCKIN DO STONEHENGE!
That fucking sucks. They’re definitely going to damage one of the oldest archeological sites in the world and they’re just cool with it.
