Highways Agency

• A500 basford hough shavington bypass
• recent activities
• recent activities
• Executive summary
• 1. introduction
• 2. data collected
• 3. summary of results
• 4. conclusion

A500 Basford, Hough, Shavington Bypass

Executive Summary

The A500 Basford, Hough, Shavington Bypass officially opened on Thursday 22nd May 2003, providing relief from traffic for the villages of Shavington and Hough in Cheshire. The scheme consists of an approximately 7.5 km long new section of dual carriageway road accessed from roundabouts at either end. There is an intermediate access on Crewe Road just north of Shavington village, and another (the easternmost access, as shown on the map) due to open in the future near to Mill Lane just north of Weston.

The layout of the scheme is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 0.1 - Scheme layout

The objectives of the scheme were defined in the Scheme Appraisal Summary Table (AST) and can be summarised as follows:

• To reduce traffic flow through the villages of Hough and Shavington by up to 75%;
• To reduce the accident rate on the existing road by the removal of through traffic; and
• To improve local air quality by taking traffic out of the villages.

In order to assess whether these objectives have been achieved, traffic flow and journey time data for the bypassed section of the original A500 were collected immediately prior to and after scheme opening and 'after' data for the bypass itself was also collected in order to monitor the effects of the new scheme.

In addition, traffic data from existing Highways Agency permanent count sites and from Cheshire County Council temporary sites was obtained in order to evaluate the effects of the opening of the A500 Basford, Hough, Shavington Bypass on strategic traffic routing patterns in the area.

A comparison of the 'Before' and 'After' traffic volumes is shown in Figure 0.2.

Figure 0.2 - Summary of ATC data

In the weeks following opening, the three main traffic effects of the bypass were:

• The new road was used by 14,600 vehicles per average weekday at the western end and 16,800 vehicles per day (vpd) at the eastern end;
• The scheme was successful in its primary aim of reducing traffic levels through Shavington and Hough in that the number of vehicles using the main road through the villages has reduced from 15,900 to 5,500 vehicles, a reduction of over 60%;
• The bypass provides time savings of up to 4 minutes from Nantwich to the M6, and journey times on the old A500 have also decreased by up to 2 minutes as a significant level of traffic has re-routed on to the bypass.