Talk:A470 road

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Reference to the railway at Talerddig as the "Mid Wales Railway" removed as this is unclear and throwing up a lot of erroneous google hits. The Mid Wales Railway was the line from Moat Lane Junction to Brecon via Llanidloes, Rhayader, and Builth Wells, which closed in 1963, and given its geographic proximity to the A470, using the term to refer to the Shrewsbury-Machynlleth route is misleading at best. The latter route is termed by Wikipedia the Cambrian Line. Graldensblud 17:37, 30 August 2006 (UTC)]

This is correct. --Fuelboy 16:16, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Anyone know how this particular route was arrived at / chosen?

If anyone's got some insider information on this important, reknowned, but decidedly odd and illogical-looking bit of tarmac, i'd be interested to hear it. It's not exactly taking the most direct route, now, is it? Though the maths involved may not match exactly what happens on the ground, my route planning software was incredibly reticent to send me along the A470 in either "quickest" or "shortest" modes between it's terminus near the Cardiff docks and the Llandudno seafront... in fact it barely touched it until approaching the A55 even after I prohibited it from using motorways or country lanes. A total of NINE carefully placed waypoints were required to avoid various (more logical-looking, i.e. shorter and straighter) detours along various other A- and B- roads for large sections ---- all so I could get a reasonable readout of it's total length. If I'd programmed this route into a Satnav (and wasn't wanting to simply go M4, A40, M50, M6, M56, A55...) it looks like I'd have covered about 11 miles less and made about the same time by just following the robot lady and her 'shortest' route (going by the motorways would be 60 miles more, but saves an hour and who knows how much fuel). Must be either political influence or an old-school effort to connect the most important towns instead of a straight-through long distance route. Guess you have to make some compromises when needing to juggle two disperate priorities (trunk transport, local services) with only one main road and the very bare minimum of collectors/distributors and basically no slip roads.

A telling insight into how tortuous the geography is in terms of roadbuilding is that the straight line distance is 133 miles - or in other words, there's more difference between the "crow's flight" and the road itself, than there is between the a470 and taking a largely English motorway route. o_O

82.46.180.56 (talk) 01:39, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Primary destinations on infobox

I have taken the primary destination on the infobox from List of primary destinations on the United Kingdom road network. Seth Whales (talk) 18:15, 5 February 2008 (UTC)