Highways Agency

A34 Chieveley / M4 Jct 13 Improvement

Environment

Construction Impact & Mitigation

The Story so far...

Care for the Environment has been a long standing objective, helping to decide on the choice of routes and the need for measures to limit environmental impact.

The proposed scheme has been designed to minimize, as far as possible, any adverse effects to the environment whilst still considering other factors such as road safety, engineering design and cost.

A range of mitigation measures would be provided to further reduce the effect of noise and the visual impact of the scheme on the surrounding area. These measures include extensive ground modeling, the use of carefully sited planting and a 500m long environmental barrier, tapering from 2 to 1m high, north of Chieveley Crossroads Bridge.

The proposed route has been optimized to reduce the land take required and minimize the number of properties to be demolished. There are no direct impacts on any Sites of Special Scientific

• Community
  • Keeping residents informed and being a good neighbour
• Noise

  • Considerable efforts have been put into the design, development and operation of the new road improvement on the A34 to try and reduce, or mitigate against, any adverse 'noise nuisance'.

    These measures include:

    • realigning the route away from properties where possible
    • keeping the new road at a low level and/or placing it in cuttings wherever possible
    • providing earthmounding, landscaping and planting to screen the road and blend it into its surroundings
    • the provision of low noise road surfacings
    • noise monitoring
• Dust
  • suppression measures
  • monitoring
• Ecology
  • badgers
  • dormice
  • slowworms
  • bats
  • birds
• Archaeology
  • exploratory trenching
  • working brief
• Landscaping
  • extensive compensatory planting