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End of the bypass
By Steve Hanlon | October 1, 2008
Haven’t posted in a while, just busy getting on with the day job and trying to make sure that we can get through to the other side of the forthcoming recession.
A lot of interesting things politically over the summer, the most interesting for me being the shelving of the Ormskirk Bypass for another 10 years. Not quite as grim as the local papers put it, the report to the Lancashire Local Committee said that it might be reconsidered as early as 2016 (though it does say that funding would still be unlikely). However, given the projection of traffic in 2012 that the County traffic engineers presented, it is imperative that minds are urgently turned to a viable alternative for Ormskirk.
At the end of the day it comes down to cash available to put any scheme into place, and it must be regrettable that a reported £1.4million was spent putting this new set of plans together. Doubly so, given that the recent speculation, reports and surveys came two years after the government had ranked the scheme in the third quartile of transport projects for the North West, where it remains.
It is admirable that it was believed that force of personality alone might make the bypass happen, but ultimately all that money invested in drawing up the plans and lobbying government was wasted.
That cash would have been better spent on trying to find a viable alternative. I’m no fan of the “road across the park”, but at least it shows that there are alternatives. There are much better minds that mine applying themselves to finding new and novel ways of addressing traffic problems, and that is the kind of thinking that we need in West Lancs. Our local politicians need to be pressing the County Council to start the ball rolling on a new scheme for the town.
Topics: Local Politics |