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I used to work in Amesbury very near this site and I can tell you this completely unnecessary.
Sure fix the potholes but 2bn for 2 miles of duel carriage way that ultimately won’t speed up journeys between London and the shitholes on the A303 (eg. Salisbury) just aren’t worth it.
I mean it would speed things up, I think the plan involved a bypass for the village next to it too?
I didn't agree with the location of the tunnel though, so kinda happy it got canned.
It would move the queues to the next bottleneck. "Just one more lane bro" planning never works.
Rail between London and Cornwall needs improving instead, as does local transport around Salisbury (active travel, public transport) as a large portion of the queuing vehicles are local drivers avoiding congestion in the town.
On the one more lane thing, going from 1 lane each way to two is a massive improvement as it allows overtaking.
Agree otherwise.
When I saw Stonehenge as a kid, we just drove past it really slowly, with my dad saying "don't worry, everyone else wants to slow down to look too!"
Now I make that drive every few weeks 🫠
I mean, it's a bottleneck heading back towards London too, between the barrow roundabout and Stonehenge is often a mess in both directions. Mostly due to people looking at Stonehenge instead of the road.
It's less about improving the trains and more about making them cheaper! (Not that I would complain about some new lines either!)
Just another lane in a tunnel, bro, I swears on me mums, its gonna solve all problems!
It did seem ridiculous building a treasured monument next to a main road.
Maybe they'll build it somewhere more suitable next time.
Well if they’d built it in the middle of nowhere, no one would have seen it.
They already got the removal men in once.
I was in support of this, but with the way finances are looking for the country, I understand why this has gone down the priority list.
While dualing that section would only move traffic to the next choke point (chicklade/blackdown hills I'm guessing, where it will never get dualed), it's worth remembering the A303 is the spine road for the whole central section of Dorset/Somerset. And it's 50 miles in each direction to the north M5, or the A35.
Funneling the traffic via existing large routes is going to be a massive detour. And it's mostly local traffic.
I also personally feel that not having a trunk road thundering past a world heritage site would be preferable, even if it does take the form of a £2 billion tunnel.
The original plan was to knock down Stonehenge, but I have no idea how serious that plan really was.
I mean, the people who destroyed The Crooked House are now out and about again...
Quite sure what the relevance of that comment is, but anyway, they have not been released they have simply been bailed which is different. They are still 100% absolutely fucked, they will be lucky if they come out of this without jail time and just with heavy fines.
But they're not considered flea risks (where are they going to go, it's not like they're hardened criminals with foreign assets) so there's no point keeping them in custody.
Ah, it was a little joke about how if they were planning to knock down a cherished location, the people responsible for The Crooked House would be ideal candidates.
Well small mercies from the revived austerity bollocks I guess that this project is dead.
You can't just say 'austerity' every time a Chancellor decides not to spend even more money...
Government spending in the UK today accounts for 45% of GDP. The state that the Tories have bequeathed to Labour represents a significantly larger share of the UK economy than it did at any point in Gordon Brown's decade as Chancellor. The state today is bigger than it was when the Atlee government left office. In fact the only post-WW2 years in which the state has been bigger than in the Sunak years were very briefly for a couple of years in the mid-1970s and then in 2009-11. The only people in this country for whom a state of today's size is normal relative to most of their life experiences are toddlers who were born in the Johnson/Truss/Sunak era.
By all means argue for a more massive state if you like. But we're not living in austere times.
What depth would the tunnel have to be to avoid affecting archaeological remains?
I'm glad about this. There's clearly major issues with traffic in that area, but why on earth would the solution be to build a huge tunnel so close to one of our most ancient and iconic heritage sites? Think of all the archaeological relics this might have destroyed.
Just build a new road further away from Stonehenge!
New roads don't reduce traffic, they create more. It's called induced demand. We should be building viable alternatives to driving.
I couldn’t agree more, the destruction of what might be there was my major concern. Digging a tunnel through a world heritage site should never have been approved in the first place, even if archaeologists excavated it all by hand.
And I guess building a new road further away would eat into other national parks/landscapes. Not sure what the answer is here. Suck it up I guess.