ONE of the city’s bottleneck traffic islands is to get a massive overhaul in hopes of reducing lengthy queues.
The roundabout where traffic from the Carrington Bridge, the A38 and the city’s St Peter’s estate comes together – better known as the Ketch Island – is to be completely re-worked, as proposals emerging from County Hall show.
The “substantial” works will mean “a complete re-design to make the island bigger”, said Councillor Simon Geraghty, the county council’s economic development chief.
“It is just far too small for the amount of traffic it is serving,” he said.
“Nor are we just going to re-design the island.
“A section of carriageway running from the Ketch in the direction of the Norton island will be dualled to about a third of the way along, so we’ll have two lanes of traffic coming off the island and merging.”
He was discussing the council’s next move to improve the delay-hit A4440 southern link road which takes all the traffic along the southern outskirts of the city from the M5 junction seven, to the main Malvern road, after work finished on another of the road’s roundabouts.
The Whittington island, by the motorway junction, now boasts two small slip lanes handling traffic travelling in both directions on the stretch down to the Norton roundabout.
Councillor Geraghty said the Ketch works were more important than the relatively-minor engineering done at Whittington, saying roadworks would take at least five months to complete from spring or summer of next year.
The project is set for consulation at the end of the year.
“That island is a real bottleneck, and needs tackling because even off-peak we get a lot of traffic stacking onto Carrington Bridge because it’s just too small – there’s not enough of what traffic planners call ‘gapping opportunities’ where vehicles can merge,” said Coun Geraghty.
He said the works are part of the longer-term aspiration to have the southern link road completely dualled, because currently the road was “a negative factor to the city’s growth”, especially as commuters simply did not know, from one day to the next, how long it could take to negotiate the stretch of road.
Coun John Smith, the county’s elected road chief, said the Whittington works were part of the council strategy to show the Government “we’re putting our money where our mouth is” in the hope it can secure the millions of pounds which would be needed to turn part of the A4440, at least from Carrington Bridge to Whittington, into a dual lane.