Pedestrianising Salisbury? Nice idea, but won't it make the ring road worse?

THERE is a reason why motorists use the city centre as a through route. It’s called the ring road.

Wiltshire Council acknowledges this on its website.

Churchill Way can get so clogged up that for me, for example, to take rubbish to the tip from Harnham, it’s far easier to go via Exeter Street, New Street and Mill Road than to queue at the gyratory and then at four successive roundabouts.

It doesn’t work wonders for the air quality in town, but then neither do those queues all around the outskirts.

Easier, too, to head down Netherhampton Road and rat-run past the beleagured inhabitants of Quidhampton.

That’s the truth. Unpalatable, but it’s what happens.

Likewise, if I’m heading for Waitrose and I see motionless cars all the way from the Exeter Street roundabout to the College, I turn off into town and cut through the central car park. Who wouldn’t?

So whilst the benefits for public health of pedestrianising large chunks of the city centre on an experimental basis are obvious, and whilst traders seem OK with giving it a try, I’m sure that every resident has a perfectly good excuse for doing their level best to avoid the jams on the Seventh Circle of Hell which will only get worse as a result.

Having said which, I wish this trial scheme all the best, and there are plenty of opportunities promised for the public and businesses to feed in their early reactions so that it can be ‘tweaked’ if necessary.

Given that we appear to be stuck forever without a bypass and with an industrial estate that’s in the wrong place, the council’s got to do something. And this seems to be the only thing within its control.

Well, aside from relocating the tip. If it had any money. Which it did have, once, back in the day when the previous administration wasn’t in any mood to listen to the taxpayers of Salisbury.