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Title: ‘Bypass’ Alert! Author: Anarchist Communist Federation Date: 1997 Language: en Topics: transport, infrastructure, United Kingdom, Organise! Source: Retrieved on May 13, 2013 from https://web.archive.org/web/20130513162704/http://www.afed.org.uk/org/issue45/bypass.html Notes: Published in Organise! Issue 45 — Spring 1997.
An 11-mile dual carriageway of the A36 trunk road around Salisbury,
costing at least £150m to build by private finance, is proposed. This
will cut off and wreck the landscape setting of this medieval city,
cross three our of five rivers in Britain’s best chalk stream system,
carve through chalk hills in cuttings as deep as 60ft and bury one
corner of one of the country’s rarest grass meadows. Yet, for all this
waste and destruction, this ‘bypass’ would do nothing to reduce traffic
and pollution in the city itself.
“It would be wrong to give the public the impression that the bypass
will take traffic out of the city centre”
— Dept. of Transport evidence to public inquiry, 2 Dec. 1993 — although
that is exactly what they are doing.
The government said that it was a bypass to relieve traffic congestion
in Salisbury, yet even at the time of the inquiry the Department of
Transport’sown figures showed that most traffic is ‘local’ and
congestion would therefore get steadily worse, even with the bypass. New
roads they said, drew in new traffic, so leading to congestion and
reducing time-savings that road builders use to justify their schemes.
They admitted that the bypass was being build to serve through traffic
and that this accounted for only 10% of traffic in Salisbury.
”There will be a traffic increase in Salisbury, bypass or no bypass”
— DoT, 10 Nov. 1993.
The DoT knows that this road is bigger and uglier than Newbury, that the
landscape and city under threat is far more valuable and that it will
have ‘presentational difficulties’ building a privatised road through
the watermeadows and chalk hills here. It is too late for second
thoughts when the bulldozers come. To be silent now is to invite the
earthmovers to rip into the chalk hills and dump them across the river
valleys. It is time to act!