Real Northumberland Murky: Blyth Drivers lose £13m per year Yet the conservative County Council sits back on bypass roads and expects drivers to absorb greater costs.

Wednesday, 8 January 2025

Blyth Drivers lose £13m per year Yet the conservative County Council sits back on bypass roads and expects drivers to absorb greater costs.

Hiding behind failed bids to their own Government since 2017 to attempt to deliver two bypass roads for the town of Blyth which has 44,000 vehicles accessing and egressing the Town every day has become a major issue across South East Northumberland.

During 2019 the Conservative regional chairperson at the time, Councillor Wearmouth joined by Councillor Riddle the Council’s highways guru allegedly said that their ‘Council had £18m available to develop the required roads and their bid to help ease the pressure from Blyth drivers through Highways England was to save ratepayers costs if they could’.

The bid which contained the numbers of 20,000 vehicles per day on each of the two access roads, Laverock Road and Cowpen Road was not accepted by the then Government as major highways work on the A66 was announced and austerity formula’s landed on the doorstep of County Hall in Morpeth.

That situation rolled on and a further bid was clagged together in 2023 using similar figures along with some safety features which were immediately challenged by the former deputy leader of Northumberland Conservatives, Councillor Daley. His campaign won the day at County hall but led to the bid for cash from the state failing due to the ‘lack of vision and it being less safe’.

Traffic has increased greatly on Cowpen Road whilst Laverock Hall Road has remained ‘full’ with a similar 20,000 vehicles per day using the road.

This has been a costly exercise for Blyth drivers with sitting time each day adding up using minimum wage as a measure and the new figures of 44,000 vehicles each day reaching a staggering £13m each year in lost time.

That standing time is about to be increased further with an active travel plan to extend Blyth’s already huge active travel network by reducing the width of Cowpen Road by a third, removing all right turn pockets, setting back all junctions many behind the sight line so that cyclists can have a right of passage at all junctions.

It's a scheme that may benefit Deliveroo employees but which has been condemned by cycling clubs who know too well how dangerous this type of scheme has developed in other areas and failed to increase active users due to the danger it causes when drivers become impatient. But Northumberland County Council wants to build this new dangerous route before they develop the long designed bypass road and its tested for success for Cowpen Road. A plan that has also been opposed by Blyth Town Councillors who are worried that this active travel route will kill off their town for good.

Exacerbating the traffic flow on Cowpen Road will endanger the viability of commerce sited along this highway and as the shopping precinct in Blyth has been recently destroyed in order to build an apprentice training facility instead of shops in the Town in the name of levelling up, people from across Blyth, Northumberland’s largest town have come to rely on the shopping experience Cowpen Road can currently offer.

With the extreme amount of time lost in travelling into and out of Blyth there has to be a better way of managing traffic flow and still retain commerce and employment in the Town, it's time Northumberland’s Morpeth based Conservatives came up with a better offer than ‘ON YER BIKE’ if you live, work or want to play in Northumberland’s largest enclave.

2015 Sustrans plan for Blyth, illustrating that the ‘academies cycleway’ would alleviate the need to narrow Cowpen Road, for cross Town travellers to access the new footbridge to Bebside Station and that the current Cowpen Road cycle path is adequate for local cyclists.