Three villages band together to tackle HGV heavy traffic concerns

CONCERNED residents and parish councillors of Chapmanslade, Corsley and Maiden Bradley recently met with representatives from Wiltshire Council and the local MP Andrew Murrison to discuss the damage caused by HGVs travelling through the three villages. 

Chapmanslade Parish Council want to implement a 7.5 tonne weight limit for HGVs travelling through the village to get to the Frome bypass, following incidents throughout the past 10 years of HGVs having to mount pavements to get past each other. Residents are also concerned over an increase in pollution and damage to the road by the heavy vehicles. 

The parish council also pointed out that vibrations from HGVs often travelling to nearby quarries in Somerset are causing damage to the structural integrity of many listed buildings and that 65% of the village community lives on the A3098. 

The parish council say that when the A3098 through Chapmanslade was upgraded from a B road over 50 years ago, a weight limit of 17 tonnes was set. In 2013, Somerset County Council (SCC) initially agreed to a traffic regulation order to reduce the weight limit to 7.5t but this was never implemented as SCC county council claimed it would divert HGVs to other equally unsuitable roads.  

The parish councils of Chapmanslade, Corsley and Maiden Bradley met with representatives of Wiltshire Council last month, chaired by local MP Andrew Murrison, to discuss the problem.  

The three villages group say, “We are encouraged to see our MP and Wiltshire Council actively engaged in addressing the blight on our communities caused by incessant HGV traffic at all hours of the day and night.  

“Our villagers have been kept waiting for over a decade for agreed weight limits to be implemented. We will work alongside Wiltshire Council to achieve a solution, but we emphasize that further data analysis and strategy development must not be used as an excuse for avoiding practical action.” 

At the meeting, it was agreed that each village had to be considered individually as their situations differ, but that there was a common factor which is the weight of traffic currently permitted to drive through them, notably to access quarries in Somerset. 

Wiltshire Council’s solution to the concerns is to update the HGV impact data in 2022, and to include HGV solutions for all three villages within the Local Transport Plan, and freight strategy under development by 2024. There was also an agreement that it is not acceptable to wait another two years to implement the weight limits, and all parties agreed to a follow-up meeting in July, hosted by the MP, to receive an update from Wiltshire Council about progress made. 

Dr Murrison said, “Until recently, the prospect of improvements on the A303 and the consequential impact on the minor roads through the three villages meant plans to remove heavy traffic from them, drafted years ago, had been put on hold. If plans to improve the A303 at some point was ever a tenable argument for not doing something about the minor roads, it is no longer, since the A303 grand scheme is now a distant prospect. We need action now to remove heavy traffic from the three villages.  

“The meeting did accept that traffic data – now more than a decade old – needed updating, but wanted it done more quickly than the council’s local transport planning process allowed. The council accepted that. It agreed to meet with us again in July with a brief for how this will be done. It will meet with us again by December, once the new data has been collected and compared with existing. Modelling will then tell us the likely impact of, for example, weight restrictions on traffic flows in the three villages and beyond.” 

Cllr Philip Holihead of Chapmanslade Parish Council, who also attended the meeting said, “The villages of Chapmanslade, Corsley and Maiden Bradley continue to suffer social and environmental impacts from HGVs that use them as transit routes outside the strategic routing system of trunk roads. 

“They have continued to be subjected to this whilst awaiting a decision for over a decade on work on the A303 has meant that their communities’ road misery has been exacerbated. We welcome the intervention of our MP and the de-latching of our village roads from any work on the A303, and look forward to successfully resolving our HGV issues with Wiltshire Council within 2022; it is about time.”

Findings from Chapmanslade Parish Council: 

A 2017 Chapmanslade HGV watch found that 60% of all HGVs were over 40t and that 40% of lorries transit during school pick up/ drop off times. The watch also found that very few HGVs were local, with many using the route in both directions as a short cut from the Frome bypass to the A36. HGV operators also often admitted that drivers were using personal rather than commercial satnav which was causing a build-up of traffic in the centre of the village, with vehicles often having to mount pavements to pass. 

As a result of these findings the parish council requested for updated road signs to be posted on the A36 to give greater warning to HGV drivers approaching the weight limit at Dead Meads junction – new signs were agreed to advise lorries to continue along the A36, but they do not mention a weight limit on the A3098.