A419 road
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The A419 road is a dual carriageway trunk road between Chiseldon near Swindon at junction 15 of the M4 with the A346 road, and Whitminster in Gloucestershire, England. It generally follows the course of the Roman road Ermin Street, but dualling work completed in the late 1990s, and the bypass of Cirencester, has taken it off-course in some places. The road goes through Cirencester and Stroud then finishes at a roundabout with the A38 close to junction 13 with the M5, close to a Little Chef (useful for M5 drivers as well).
The three-mile £4m Stratton St. Margaret (Swindon) Bypass opened in October 1977. The two-mile £2.4m Blunsdon-Cricklade Improvement opened in June 1988. The four-mile Latton Bypass opened on December 24th 1997. At the start of the Cirencester bypass, the dual carriageway continues as the A417, and the A419 goes from here into the centre of Cirencester.
It used to run further south to Hungerford, Berkshire, but following the opening of the M4 motorway, this section was downclassified to the B4192. The old lay-bys remain, showing that this was once a major route south.
The A419 is unusual in that it is managed and maintained by a private company, Road Management Group, on behalf of the UK Department for Transport.
Parts of the newly dualled sections road are surfaced in concrete, which is relatively unusual in the UK. The high tyre noise generated by this surface is unpopular with nearby residents.
Although the road is now dual carriageway for all its length, there is a major bottleneck in Swindon at Blunsdon traffic lights and the nearby Turnpike roundabout, where local traffic mixes with through traffic for the M4 and the Cotswolds. This is being addressed at present. Construction of a bypass at Blunsdon commenced on 13th September 2006, and is set to be complete by the end of 2008[1]. A flyover at Commonhead, the main junction for southwest Swindon and another notorious source of congestion, was opened to traffic on 6th February 2007. The roundabout below now caters for a much smaller volume of traffic and its three sets of traffic lights were immediately decommissioned.
[edit] External links
Highways Agency pages:
- A419/A417 Route Management Strategy
- Blunsdon Bypass Scheme
- Commonhead Junction Scheme
- SABRE page on the A417
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