Tollgate Roundabout – Update 8 February, 2011
Posted by Jeremy Rowe in Local Matters, News.Tags: Cornwall Council, Highways, St Breock, St Eval, St Issey, Tollgate, Wadebridge
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I posted recently about Member Highway Schemes for the St Issey & St Tudy Division and mentioned the three improvements I was keen to progress – improved signage at Hal’s Grave, safety measures at Porthcothan and road markings at the Tollgate Roundabout. While there were unlikely to be any problems with the first two, there were suggestions that there might be the odd technical hitch with the Tollgate scheme.
I am happy to report that the Highways people have now cleared the addition of some paint and – providing there are no material objections – it shouldn’t be too long before the improvements are made. This relatively simple solution should help to avoid any number of near misses at the roundabout as two lanes of traffic often try to squeeze into one. Those who have been approaching the junction in the left lane while continuing on the A39 haven’t been doing anything wrong by the Highway Code, but equally there are many who feel that the left lane should be for Wadebridge traffic and the right lane for Padstow, Truro etc.
Hopefully these simple splashes of paint will help make this junction safer for everyone.
Highway schemes, Tollgate Roundabout and white paint 18 January, 2011
Posted by Jeremy Rowe in Local Matters, News.Tags: Highways, St Breock, St Eval, St Issey, Tollgate
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Today I met with Highways staff to discuss some (relatively) minor improvement schemes in various parts of the St Issey & St Tudy Division. As you may be aware, Cornwall Councillors have a small budget (£8,000) available to them to progress schemes which fall outside the standard Highway Maintenance budget and, within the clearly limited finances, we settled on three to be tackled in this financial year.
The first two should be reasonably straightforward and uncontroversial: improved signage at Hal’s Grave to try to prevent heavy goods vehicles heading through the narrow roads of St Issey and Little Petherick, and some safety improvements to the road through Porthcothan in St Eval Parish. The third could yet prove a little trickier.
Few would argue that the new(ish) roundabout at Tollgate is anything other than a dramatic improvement on the deadly junction it replaced, but I still receive a large number of complaints about the two-lane approach to it coming up the hill from the bypass bridge. Locals will be aware that these two lanes feed in to a roundabout with, effectively, two options on the other side – one takes you into Wadebridge, the other carries on along the A39. Logic perhaps dictates that Wadebridge-bound traffic takes the left lane while those going straight on take the right hand lane. However this is not necessarily clear to those who don’t know the area as well and there have been quite a number of near misses on the exit for the A39 as two into one don’t tend to fit very well.
I have once again asked Highways to either paint directional arrows on the road surface or provide better signage on the approach to the roundabout as it is probably only a matter of time before there is a more serious accident than the minor scrapes which have occurred so far. (Indeed, last week there was quite a serious-looking accident where a car appeared to take off completely, although at this stage it is impossible to say exactly what caused it.) I am fully aware that the excellent staff at Highways have to work within a tight regulatory framework and that there may be any number of reasons why they can’t solve the problem with a simple lick of white paint on the road. However, this seemingly minor niggle is causing no end of problems for motorists in the area and I hope that every possibility will be explored in order to iron this issue out.
Each of these three schemes will still have a number of hoops to jump through before any work can start and we may yet find ourselves back to the drawing board with any or all of them. However, the improvements with regard to Little Petherick and Porthcothan should hopefully be fairly straightforward. Tollgate, on the other hand, may well be another matter altogether.
