Date published: 2005/08/01
The Cambridge Evening News says:
When it comes to praying for a solution to the A14, we're all singing from the same hymn sheet - the killer road must be widened, and quickly.
Cambridgeshire County Council, four district councils, Conservative MPs, the police, and a host of other important regional organisations have joined forces to demand swift action, and have sent a letter to the Highways Agency urging it to get moving on the project.
But one lone body is holding out and refusing to sign up fully to the initiative - the Liberal Democrat-controlled Cambridge City Council. And Cambridge's new Lib Dem MP David Howarth and the county council's Lib Dem group have also snubbed the campaign.
How do the Lib Dems justify their stance? Aren't they putting more lives at risk on the A14 by failing to throw their full weight behind a swift start to the £490 million scheme?
Ian Nimmo-Smith, leader of the city party - which has as many seats on the council as Labour and the Conservatives combined, holding 28 of the 42 - agrees that urgent safety measures are needed. But he insists that the widening scheme poses threats to Cambridge itself, and wants an investigation into how to prevent more traffic flooding into the city. He and his Lib Dem colleagues believe that road pricing may be needed - that is, making motorists pay for driving on the city's roads - as a deterrent.
...
We are not in complete opposition to the Government's proposals for the A14. We agree there needs to be an urgent package of measures to improve the A14 for safety and to combat congestion so that enhanced public transport can pass reliably between Huntingdon, St Ives and Cambridge. We endorse the proposal to widen the A14 to six lanes and to re-route it to the west of Huntingdon."What the Lib Dems are worried about, however, is the volume of traffic a new, wider road will generate.
Mr Nimmo-Smith claims the road improvements will effectively create an American-style superhighway between Fenstanton and Fen Ditton.
He said: "This will inevitably bring more cars. The county council has recently produced traffic modelling projections which indicate an additional 43 per cent of vehicles will try to access central Cambridge along Huntingdon Road every day, of which 29 per cent would be caused by this vast increase in road access. This is completely unacceptable to Cambridge residents.
We are asking the Highways Agency and the county council to ensure that the appropriate technical studies, including into road pricing, are done so that we can have measures in place to stem this choking tide.
So the LibDems want the A14 to become a six-lane "American-style superhighway" but they also want to make Cambridge effectively totally inaccessible from it. They want even more money wasted on yet another study as to how the government can stop additional traffic coming into Cambridge. They claim it will not delay the scheme but of course it will, and what do they expect to be the outcome of this study? The LibDems should accept responsibility for every death that occurs on the A14 over the next few years if they continue with this ridiculous selfish Cambridge-centric policy.
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