Upgrades ‘have made road junctions more dangerous’

Changes to junctions on Herefordshire A-roads have made them more dangerous, it has been claimed.

Councillor Richard Thomas, a member of the county’s environment and sustainability scrutiny committee questioning officials on how best to address road safety issues, claimed junctions in the county had been made more dangerous by recent redesigns.

The safety of the staggered Lock’s Garage junction, where the A465 meets the B4348 southwest of Hereford, “is discussed quite regularly” at meetings of Allensmore and Kilpeck parish councils, he said.

“They consider that after improvements were made, that junction became far more dangerous.”

Meanwhile where the B4348 meets the A49 at Llandinabo, “there is a problem with HGVs trying to get out, and your signage doesn’t do anything for that problem”.

And the A49’s junction with the A4137 at nearby Pengethley “is incredibly dangerous, and the engineering made it more dangerous”, Coun Thomas said.

“Turning lorries come right across the carriageway, and I have seen two that have caught cars,” he added. “Where are we going with this?”

The council’s senior accident investigation engineer Simon Hobbs explained that as the A49 is a national trunk road, “we don’t get any say in the design”.

“Lock’s Garage has been the site of a lot of collisions for decades,” he said, adding that the council’s road accident data “shows it’s still high-profile, but it’s better than it was ten years ago”.

Since then, acceleration and deceleration lanes had been removed from the junction, as “you want to slow them down”, Mr Hobbs said.

“The difficulty is differentiating between who is using the very busy garage and who is using the junction, contributed to by drivers not using their indicators or using them inappropriately.”

He added that the idea of lowering the speed limit around the junction had been rejected as “increasing frustration and leading to more instances of overtaking” rather than the new limit being adhered to – “which it won’t be until autonomous vehicles and speed restriction exists”.