Well, this is rapidly turning into a farce! The latest information from Highways England amounts to yet a further 3 months delay in announcing the prefered route. This is now scheduled to be in the Spring of 2019. Yet another delay! They only say that they are “in the advanced stages of planning for the preferred route announcement”. Well, “Planning for the ……announcement” must be an onerous task then, if it is going to take 3 or 4 months!….and that statement implies that the actual decision has already been made.
They also say that the delays have been caused by the need to take note of the ongoing revisions to the A1 corridor upgrades currently under review. This is bureaucratic fudge as the junction of the A1 and A428 will not change significantly whatever happens to the A1 and its associated slip roads and roundabouts. The point at which the A428 leaves/meets the A1 will not really change in a way to affect the routing of the new A428. It will always leave in the vicinity of the Black Cat Roundabout. To move it further south would be pointless and in any case, it would run into Tempsford and the currently-postponed major housing development there. [See Bedford Borough Council and/or Central Bedfordshire websites for more information on this] Any further north and it would run into St Neots and Little Paxton. Take it to the north of those towns and you run into the new A14, so that won’t happen.
Village gossip, informed or otherwise, your guess is as good as mine, in the affected area is that Highways England will ultimately select the northern, or orange, route. It is hard to see how it could really be either of the other two candidate routes, the pink or purple. Both these routes run quite a way further to the south and go around Abbottsley and just north of Waresley. As work has now started on the next stage of the Loves Farm development south-east of St Neots, utilising either of these more southerly routes would mean that this development, and in addition, the planned Wintringham development (Loves Farm 3?), would have no access to the new road and would feed out onto the existing A428. This is quite unrealistic.
The current road can hardly cope with the traffic volume as it is now, let alone a further 2,000 plus rush-hour commuter cars and bikes. The existing plan, as used in the consultation, shows that the orange route has slip roads at this new development, which is a bit of a giveaway.
So we shall see, come the Spring, what will actually come to pass. Unless, of course, there is a further delay….but that won’t happen, will it? 😎
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