135 people from Longworth and Hinton turned up at Longworth Village Hall on 3rd August to view Hanson’s latest plans for the A420/Pine Woods junction, which bears striking witness to the concern locally felt at the proposals. However, the new plans gave no comfort to the many who had dutifully and lawfully registered objections to the earlier version sent out by the OCC in April; instead they raised even more concerns about safety. The latest plans still envisaging closing one lane of the eastbound dual carriageway up to Pine Woods Road, now make that single lane stretch even more hazardous by putting a raised kerb on each side. This makes that half-mile of road inaccessible to emergency vehicles - ambulance, fire, police and breakdown - which would need to get past queued vehicles in order to reach an accident or breakdown within that stretch. These might as well be trapped in a tunnel.

This is of course in addition to the already identified impedance to crossing and joining traffic under normal circumstances against an unbroken stream of single-lane traffic, which has been amply identified in earlier objections and by many individual representations.

Nor are these problems confined to residents of Longworth and Hinton; this junction is a well-used crossroads. Any interruption to its free traffic flow will impact villages east and south as far as Charney Basset and Buckland, with knock-on effects even further.

We have now been presented by the OCC with several possible solutions from Hanson, proposing road alterations to accommodate the passage of 40 heavy quarry vehicles a day for the next ten years. Despite numerous and continued objections that the proposal is unsafe, from both local residents and those who regularly use this stretch of the A420, the OCC and Hanson still appear to persist in the contention that lane closure is a viable and safe option. It would seem that objections, despite being argued and re-argued in repeated consultations, are being wilfully disregarded, since no specific rational counters to them have been received.