As part of the original planning application for the former council depot east of the Salisbury Road, when it was going to be developed for homes and light industrial workshops, Wiltshire Council’s highways department put forward a controversial traffic management plan for the section of Salisbury Road by the homes on its west side and the exit from Priorsfield and the depot on its east side.
This plan involved bringing the east side kerb further out into the road – so producing, it was said, a safer exit from Priorsfield and the new homes on the depot site. It would have made the road narrower where residents’ cars are parked outside the houses on the west side of the Salisbury Road.
The road would have been made so narrow that it would in effect have become one-way – stoking up congestion trying to go both north and south along Salisbury Road.
At the time protests were voiced about the safety of this scheme. It was said that with large trucks coming north at speed up from the Tesco roundabout and over the virtually blind brow of the hill, accidents would surely have happened.
And residents feared their parked cars would be damaged as the traffic was squeezed into such narrow lanes.
Now the kerb has not been moved out from the east side of the road and the central white line has been moved eastwards, leaving a full carriageway alongside the parked cars.
Has the Highways Department been listening to road users? In 2016 will they listen to protests about the town’s traffic problems?
Transition Marlborough’s air quality report sent to the Area Board
