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Roland Perry · December 10th 19, 01:22 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In message , at 12:29:52 on Tue, 10 Dec
2019, remarked:
On Mon, 9 Dec 2019 17:29:21 +0000
Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 16:41:19 on Mon, 9 Dec
2019, remarked:
On Mon, 9 Dec 2019 11:13:38 +0000
Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 09:19:42 on Sun, 8 Dec
2019, remarked:
And don't the local residents know it. I have some relatives who live in a
village near there. 2 years ago it was lovely green fields down the road
from their house , now theres a bloody dual carraigeway with all the
accompanying noise and pollution they'll soon have to enjoy to follow on
from
all the construction work. All so trucks can save 10 mins on their way from
Felixstow instead of putting the containers on trains where they should be.

Nobody cares how much the time the trucks save, it's mainly for the cars
caught up in jams along with other cars. There's negligible HGV
container traffic on that flow anyway, it's one of the enduring local
urban myths.

Whatever the governmental reason for it, no one in the area wanted the damn
bypass. Its just more countryside carved up and more farmland disappeared
under
concrete to make a few minutes savings in journey times.

Clearly you don't actually understand the problem, which is daily
traffic jams of half an hour or more.

Aww, poor things, a whole 30 mins. They should try the 1+ hour jams I had to
endure on the north circular when I commuted by car. And that was 5 years ago,
probably worse now. Also how exactly do you get a 30 min jam in the few miles
that this bypass is avoiding from a tiny town like Huntingdon when its already
all dual carraigeway?

The jam is on the vastly over-subscribed dual carriageway which
currently doubles as the Huntingdon inner ring road, plus the only major
road between Huntingdon and Cambridge (any of the periphery, let alone
the centre).

How many of the trailers arrive on our shores at container ports. None I
think you'll find. Therefore even if the loading gauge was higher a

Not at container ports, but plenty of trailers get loaded and unloaded at
Ro-ro ports.

In the peaks, which are entirely car-created, there are 1000 HGVs an
hour and 6000 other vehicles (about half of which are people who work in
Cambridge). That's a total of one a second, and it's only a two lane
road. So much for keeping a two second gap.

Worse than that, the *total* of cars and HGVs using the most congested
part of the A14, which have come from the East (which you'll need to if
port traffic) is only 250 an hour. That's including all cars, and all
HGVs from places other than the ports. The port traffic, even including
trailers, is tiny.

Which should be used. If companies don't want to use it then slap a massive
tax on every truck coming out of the port with a container which is going to
a destination that could be reached part or whole of the way by rail.

There are very few such containers, because they are already travelling
by rail if at all possible. Apart from anything else it's vastly

If that was the case you'd barely see any in Essex.

If you mean "on the A12" that's a different scenario completely. Many of
those containers will be heading for destinations not served by a rail
terminal, compared to the ones in the Midlands and the North that the
trains via Bury, Ely and Peterborough are carrying.
--
Roland Perry