Tohight’s West Area committee was interesting but frustrating – there’ll be a more detailed report tomorrow night.
Just one nice thing to mention now. It’s about the recent widening of the eastbound slip road onto the A127 at the Fairglen interchange
The officer from County Highways confirmed that this was due to a resident (and onlinefocus reader) suggesting something like this at a previous West Area Committee.
Well done that man.
Now all we need is signage at the top of the off sliproad at the Weir to show that the left hand lane is for the High Street and back onto the A127 ONLY. This may help to avoid lane skippers trying to cut the line and attempting to barge their way into the traffic using the correct lane for Sainsburys/Hadleigh!
I regularly witness this happening and have often been subjected to and seen drivers intimidating others to force their way into the traffic flow and, on many occasions, been in fear of losing the cars’ left wing! Just so that drivers who appear never to have read and inwardly digested the Highway Code can gain a vital few seconds or yards!!
Does anyone else think that the revised layout at the Fairglen interchange has made things worse? Not the slip road widening mentioned above, but the work carried out before. The new feeder lane from the north-bound A1245 onto the west-bound A127 is allowing cars to flow through the junction faster than before, but the slip road does not have the available capacity for them to merge quickly and safely with the traffic coming off of the roundabout. This results in the roundabout becoming blocked, and traffic queuing on the south-bound A1245 as they wait to get on the junction.
The traffic lights on the roundabout can change several times before you clear the roundabout. If you hang back on the roundabout to allow cars from the northbound A1245 through while you wait for the slip road to clear, it is quite often dangerous to then pull forward because there is then a stream of traffic taking advantage of the gap you left that does not want to let you move.
Even on the rare occasions that the A127 is clear during the morning rush, the slip road and roundabout are still blocked, suggesting the issue is with the junction/slip road and not traffic on the A127.
A lot of money and time was spent doing the work on widening the eastbound slip from the A1245 onto the A127 but this has had no effect whatsoever.
The few yards of widening still go into the exact 2 lanes and there is no benefit at all. Drivers from both the roundabout and the A1245 still fight for position and the actual flow of traffic has not improved at all.