It’s been a difficult week for people who use the A14/B1049 junction to get to school, work etc and for the County Council signals engineers who’ve been working to fine tune the new system.

Firstly: why are we doing it? Because, as the photo shows, lots of cyclists and pedestrians use it (both southbound and northbound) and crossing the on slip-roads is unprotected and scary. The scheme being implemented would give these people protection whenever the opposite off slip-road is on green.

Secondly: where are we today? It’s difficult to be precise but it seems that on Thursday and Friday traffic was flowing again about as well as it did before the change. We’ve now got about three weeks with schools off and the Xmas holiday period until we can test it again.

Although it hasn’t been a good week for commuters it has been a good week for local democracy and social media. There’s been energetic dialogues on Facebook , by email and with the phone. People have provided input and opinion from the ground and CCC engineers have responded promptly. Well done!

It’s worth thinking carefully about this junction:

• it’s as much about managing traffic off the A14 as it is about managing traffic on the B1049 and unfortunately if the former begin to queue back onto the A14 it gets priority
• the B1049 is at capacity and in the rush hour it doesn’t take much to push it over the limit
• the road network locally is a delicate micro system and problems in one part very quickly become problems elsewhere and that includes this junction

With changes to the A14 coming we need to address its resilience and the extent that it can keep traffic off and attract traffic from the local roads. If the local access road south from the Bar Hill junction works then that will be good for the B1049.

Thank again for everyone’s patience this week.