Motorway Inquiry - TrustNews February 1988
The M3 Inquiry re-opened on 12th January and the Winchester M3 Joint Action Group (JAG) has presented its evidence. The JAG case, which the Trust supports, takes as a basis the unacceptability of both the Department of Transport's preferred route (the cutting) and any of the west-of-the-hill (valley) routes. There is an environmental barrier in the Winchester corridor which ought to be as insistent as any geographical barrier and demands the same commitment of effort and money to surmount.
The case against the valley route has been made before and accepted by the Department of Transport, and it has recently been reinforced by St. Cross residents and Winchester College. The Trust made its own views clear at the earlier part of the Inquiry in 1985. The case against the cutting route has been made forcefully in the resumed Inquiry by the Countryside Commission. It was a pity that their dismay at what was threatened by the cutting should have tempted them to espouse a valley route as alternative. Fortunately, however, their case for a route on the By-pass alignment was ill-thought-out and almost certainly will not have convinced the Inspector.
The Joint Action Group has sought to define the most acceptable overall package environmentally for the section between Bar End and Compton. The environmental barrier formed by St. Catherine's Hill, Plague Pits Valley, Twyford Down and the Winchester water meadows cannot be by-passed to east or west and it has been clear for a long time that only a tunnel would give any hope of completing the M3 without massive landscape damage.
The Hockley - Compton crossing of the Itchen Valley is also a serious problem, with the Department's preferred route putting traffic on top of a very high embankment designed to raise the road in order to reduce the depth of cutting in Twyford Down, to allow a cheaper over-crossing of the railway and to dispose of waste from the cutting.
The tunnel solution provides a level road from Bar End, through St. Catherine's Hill, under Plague Pits Valley and through Twyford Down, across the valley and under the railway.
The undoubted landscape and amenity benefits of such an alternative, compared with the preferred route, are offset by the additional and considerable costs of tunnel and underline crossing of the railway. The costs, however, have been exaggerated by the Department and the City Council is satisfied that they are not an unreasonable price to pay. JAG's consulting engineers also advise much lower costs than the Department's estimates, and taken as part of the Bar End - Bassett Scheme they are by no means exceptional. There are many road schemes with a greater cost per mile. The motorists' costs for the Bar End - Compton section are also significantly reduced by virtue of the straightness and levelness of the JAG scheme.
JAG originally proposed that the Department should examine a tunnel scheme with the Hockley slip roads as in the preferred route, or without the Hockley slips at all. The slips could not be retained within the tunnel without it being too wide, and the traffic consequences of removing them were felt to be too severe or problematical for the Inspector to be persuadable.
JAG eventually asked for a variation of a scheme first proposed by the Landscape Institute, where the Hockley slips move across the Itchen Valley, with the northbound slip coming over the railway from a small roundabout south of Bushfield and the southbound slip exiting via a carriageway of the old A33 using the existing bridge to go under the railway to a second small roundabout, allowing connection to Bushfield.
The connection from Twyford, Colden Common, etc. to Winchester or to the Motorway is made via a simple (unconnected) bridge over the Motorway as it emerges from the tunnel at Hockley, then via St. Cross Bridge Road and thence to St. Cross Road or to Bushfield.
The underline railway crossing will undoubtedly be more expensive than the overline crossing of the preferred route, but not as problematical as British Rail have made out. The problem lies in BR's desire to maintain a third track in this area, but a small movement northwards of the alignment of the Motorway (closer to the viaduct and further from the southern Site of Special Scientific Interest) will allow the railway crossing to be over two tracks only.
Much is made by the Department and its apologists in the County Council of the delays caused by the JAG alternatives, to the ludicrous extent that a 1.5km tunnel with easy access at each end is predicted to take longer to build than the 40kms of Channel Tunnel. Certainly the tunnel will take longer than the cutting, but not inordinately so.
Despite the mythology, there is no economic or accident saving case to be made for an urgent completion of the M3. A simple interim bridging of the Twyford to Winchester road at Hockley relieves the only major bottleneck (and incidentally achieves most of the economic benefit of the complete Motorway scheme). In any case, it is not improbable that, given a scheme like JAG's which can command widespread acceptance, the Bar End - Compton section will be completed before the Compton - Bassett section, concerning which an appeal has been registered in the High Court.