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So the big lane change over on the A338 as mentioned in an earlier post happen in the early hours of Monday morning (it was in place when I went through at 5:45am), I am glad I went through early it was a total mess and it was a bigger mess in the evening rush hour. The tailbacks were so long they were blocking exit and access to roundabout on surrounding roads and the whole area became a large gridlocked car park.

Tonight on the local radio station Wave105 a local lady phoned in to the station, she had been stuck in the Bournemouth hospital car park (which is about a quarter of a mile to the east of the A338) since 3:30pm, the time she was on the radio was 5:00pm. The presenter asked on the radio that if anybody else was also stuck in the car park and was also listening to the program to give a blast on there car horn, what followed can only be called a crescendo of honking car horns.

I and I guess the thousands of other motorists who have been caught up in the farce called road works can only hope that the Dorset County council get there act together for the ramainder of these road works and when the work starts for real in the autum of 2010.

More information can be found on the following links

• Monday local newspaper coverage Monday Evening Echo
• Tuesday local newspaper coverage Tuesday Evening Echo
• The Dorset County Council latest news

I will make one correction to my previous post on the matter bureaucratic manure, I said it was local authority, when it is actually the Dorset County Council who are in charge of this work.

I would assume that the County council did speak to the local council about this work rather than just imposing it on them but hey who knows……………..

You sometimes have to wonder about the logic of those in power, particularly your local council. There is a dual carriageway near us, a major artery when it comes to traffic in and out of the local town and surrounding areas. The dual carriageway is to undergo a major refurbishment in the new year and as a preliminary exercise the local authority are removing all the reptiles (the road run next to forest and heathland which is home to smooth snakes and sand lizard, both protected species) from the verge area and clearing a lot of the undergrowth.

For the past couple off weeks one of the inbound carriageways has been permanently coned off so that stretch of the road is extremely busy with two mile tail backs normal in both morning and evening rush hours. Now they don’t start work till 7:30am and they finish around 4:30am which is 9 hours, this is equal to 37.5% of the day. So for 62.5% of the day the coned off carriageway is empty with no working going on. while the traffic queues up around the cones

Now as you can imagine the local shop owners and business have kicked up a stink over this, it is an important time of the year for them leading up-to Christmas etc. So what brainwave have the local authority come up with to get help the local shop owners and business??? lets stop work on the inbound lane and move the reptile collecting and verge clearing to the outbound carriageway!!!

Er let me get this right, we welcome visitor to our town but if you have to sit in a traffic jam to get out of our town well hell we don’t care……………………

I use the A34 from Winchester to Oxford on a regular basis, a section from Tothill to north of Newbury has just been re-surfaced with all the work going on overnight. This is a major artery for the south of England, while not on the same scale the A338 is a major artery for the Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch areas. So why can’t our local authority take a leave out of the Berkshire local authority book and do the work overnight so as to reduce the traffic chaos that is happening.

But it is not just the traffic that is jammed up on the A338, all the other surrounding routes are jammed up as well as motorist try to find their way around the traffic, local residential roads are blocked with traffic as more traffic try to find a faster, less traffic jammed way home.

I could go on but I just feel so frustrated by it all…………..

For more information on this mess from the local authority here is a link to information about the work on their web site

Web link