In message , at 18:24:11 on Sat, 7 Dec 2019,
Basil Jet remarked:
On 07/12/2019 15:49, Roland Perry wrote:
While it's not quite the M25, the A14 is one of the busiest dual
carriageways in the country.
They've recently finished (ahead of schedule) building the
green-fields bypass round the southwest of Huntingdon, and now just
need to splice it onto the old road towards Cambridge and the M11.
Plenty of opportunity to stagger this, achieve it by some crafty
re-arrangement of bollards etc.
But no. They've closed the road from 9pm yesterday until 5am on
Monday.
ps The competition now is to see how long the new road takes to get
on
** various mapping sites, satnavs etc. Tom Tom's doing the best, fsvo,
** with not just the road but as I type a 3.5mile eastbound queue on it
** before it's even open. Contractors vehicles, the speculation is.

It's surprising that the new alignment starts east of Fenstanton. Over
7 miles of existing dual carriageway with every junction already grade
separated is partly being removed and partly becoming very quiet.
Admittedly the new alignment is 3+3 where the old one was 2+2, but it
still looks like they had money to burn.

The viaduct on the old dual carriageway, over the ECML, is life expired
(and some) and that section is only 2-lane and not practical to widen,
and hugely congested.

So the solution is to bypass the whole sorry mess, and downgrade the old
route to "local", including a diversion down to ground level (the
railway is in a cutting) and back up, to get past the line.

As for money to burn, it started as a toll road, but then got swept up
into a government-funded "shovels ready" project to stimulate the
economy due to the construction jobs created.
--
Roland Perry