Britain's Abandoned Roads - Episode 4 - The Motorway Junction You Can't Use or Access! M49 Bristol
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- čas přidán 21. 08. 2024
- #abandoned #roads #Avonmouth
In this episode I visit Avonmouth near Bristol to look at a motorway junction that having been built with tax payers cash sits unused and abandoned.
Welcome to Britain's Abandoned Roads. In this series, I go out to explore some of the UKs abandoned or disused roads. Old roads in the woods, motorway junctions or forgotten slip roads, this series has it all! Join me as I travel all over the country seeking out forgotten infrastructure.
Be sure to follow us on twitter - @JonShenanigans
You can't expect the likes of Tesco, DHL, Lidl and Amazon to pay for infrastructure that they will use on a daily basis, they don't even like paying UK tax. The people of South Gloucestershire are going to pay for it through their council tax.
They shouldn’t have to pay for it, it’s the governments responsibility to pay for roads and infrastructure, that’s the entire point of road tax.
In the last financial year, Tesco paid £5.3bn in taxes to the treasury. Now, this includes things like VAT, colleague income taxes etc. Exclude those, and the company themselves paid £1.7bn. 4th largest corporate tax payer in the country. Amazon on the other hand....
@@aldredd use a perfectly legal method of reducing the tax bill, I would get mad at the government for that one, but remember it is a similar method to one the Labour Party threw into a manifesto allowing the employees to own shares in a company.
@@melbournesbaddrivers4831 Or even possible Vehicle Excise Duty, otherwise known as V.E.D.
@@almostanengineer Road tax doesn’t even begin to cover the cost of maintaining and building roads
Now if I were the local authority I would let the land owners know that any further development, no matter how small, is not permissible due lack of appropriate access. I’d also put width and weight restrictions on the existing roads. Now, about these link roads…
You mean block any other access to Amazon's trucks and lets see how fast they will complain to their landlord?
@@dustojnikhummer In a word, yes.
Sooo, bribery then 🤔
@@almostanengineer No, blackmail
Shouldn't the problem solve itself when the inexplicable lack of willing tenants becomes a drag on their balance sheet?
Until they do open the junction, the M49 remains the only motorway with no junctions of its own. Going from the M4 to M5 with nothing in between. It's also the only way to see "welcome to England" signs without leaving England. Instructions for doing so: Drive up the M49 from the M5, at the M4 end is a roundabout. Select either the M4 east or go back down the M49 to see the signs.
What about the M181? It starts at a trumpet junction, but that's part of the M180 arguably, and ends at a roundabout.
in February 2022 Highways England even released an article stating they were now having to replace the bridge joints on the repurposed bridge on this new junction. That has to be unheard of, a junction being essentially completed and then being disused for such a period of time that no public cars have driven on it and now maintenance is being carried out on it, beggars belief
I love the way that they built a Travelodge on the junction that is currently inaccessible from the motorway!!!
I know we have to go via the M48 to get there.
I love this series. I was talking to my best friend about them and it turns how his very boring and confusing job is about roads. He's now specialising in land surveying for road building. He's the guy who tells highways England, the council and the depelopers why there all ideots and how to get the job done. He also mentioned they often intentionally build a section of road, wait for the land to be sold for development then when they have the money from sales finish it off and join it all up.... obviously this ends up like this road.
Quite an interesting job I reckon. Sounds like actual work though... not a fan. Thanks for watching mate!
"and the depelopers why there all ideots"
You couldn't make it up. Don't call anyone else an idiot if you don't know how to write.
or at least that's the idea, unless the various parties decide they don't want to talk to each other about it. There is no way in hell I'm going to even consider spending My Money on 50m of roadway!
I used to work in Avonmouth from time to time, there were two chemical sites there that I used to provide IT support for, although this was back in the nineties, up till about 2003, so before the M49 was a thing. So I had to look it up to see what it was. And my god, what a complete clusterfuck it is! As this abandoned junction is the only one on there, the M49 seems to serve only to be a short-cut for traffic going between the West Country and south Wales. And that industrial estate's only apparent motorway connections are going off St. Andrew's Road (which was a pain in the arse 20 years ago, so christ only knows how bad it is now) onto the M5, or waaaaay off up to the M48 at Aust. And this junction is RIGHT THERE! It's spitting distance from the roundabout spur that clearly was meant to feed it!
I suspect the developers managed to lure Amazon et al to the site with the promise of a Mway link, and then expected Highways England/local council to build the full link, not just the junction. Now they actually have to spend money to construct the link themselves they have no reason to: they have the leases and traffic isn't their problem. Selfish bastards as expected
@@ottermanuk Heaven forbid Amazon or Tesco (and other gits) to chip in for a piece of road that they will exclusively use or need...Meh...;D
St Andrews Rd was hell FIFTY years ago - I know; I spent many nights trying to sleep in digs there at no. 2!
@@ottermanuk Yeah, sounds about right, sadly
@@danstewart8218 Stupid, isn't it? Highways England did their bit, they don't have the jurisdiction to build on private land, the developers don't care and if one of those companies built it, they'd forbid anyone else from using it. Maybe if the companies withheld the rent, the developers might sort it out, but I suspect they won't.
What is funny about this is when they built it it had 2 years of 50mph speed limit on the m49 costing millions of tax payers money for them to build a junction that doesn’t go anywhere. CRAZY
Was so much easier when you could just drive a tractor through Arthur Dent's house without even telling him
Not fair! The plans had been made available for inspection prior to the works commencing so Arthur could have inspected them once he’d got past the leopard...
We were promised that junction was going to be built when we moved on to the estate in 2006. Tesco built their new hub years ago and offered to build a junction as part of their project, but that was rejected. They finally built the junction in 2019, but without the 150m link road due to the dispute with Delta properties. The council announced at the end of 2021 that an agreement had been made and the link road would be built by the end of 2022, but in June 2022 they stated that no such agreement had actually been made and they are still working on it. Because of the embankment required to get the link road up on to the junction the council have stated the work will take a year to complete, if they ever start it.
Seems strange that compulsory purchase orders can be made to turf out hundreds of private residents from their homes for major projects like HS2 or Heathrow expansion, but it's some sort of impossible task purchasing land from warehouse owners to complete 100yds of tarmac linking two roundabouts 🤷🏻♂️
I'm sure the developer would love that though, they get their link road provided for them & their customers paid for by the taxpayer and also get given a shedload of money for the land CPO'd to build the road. My bet is that the developer is trying to get this very thing.
Looking at Google Maps this junction is even crazier! The developer only has to put in 150m of fresh tarmac from the roundabout that they've already built. Removing the 75m of existing tarmac that they've already laid done! It just goes to show how cheap the developer must be!
There's a non-trivial height difference to overcome, meaning that an embankment needs to be built, which requires significant quantities of material to be trucked in, laid and compacted.
It's not a huge construction project, but it's more than just "laying 150m of tarmac".
I don't even think it's 150m, closer to 100m. This is just childish behaviour by the land developer and I have no idea why.
@@misterflibble9799 If only there were a road that they could use to transport the materials on! Maybe even a motorway with a nice unused junction.
@@burgersnchips As always, the answer is money. No reason for the developer to pay when (inevitably) the council or Highways England will cave in and stump up the cost.
It’s been like that for a while now, it would take some traffic away from the Avonmouth road and allow it to be accessed to avoid the southbound m5 carnage on a fridays
Interesting video. Bit of backstory, I worked on the project for the second warehouse on the distribution park back in 1996, I can genuinely remember when it was all fields! We were excited that we would be getting a junction to reduce our commute time. When this was originally built the country was coming out of a long recession hence it was difficult to justify building a junction when public money needed to be spent elsewhere, there wasn’t the actual traffic demand to justify the investment at the time.
Due to the lack of a junction the users of the shed I worked on negotiated a discount in rent and business rates, until such time the junction is open. I assume others also did this. At the time the plans were to complete the junction when the distribution park reached a certain size.
The ground conditions in the area are dire, making any construction really expensive. Closing the small gap and building the embankment requires a complicated geotechnical design, it isn’t going to be cheap to build.
One of the bridges that form the junction was built when the M49 was constructed, i.e. dates from the early 1990’s, hence needing maintenance now, even though it has hardly been used.
It’s a muddle, I can see how it occurred and why it is difficult to fix. No doubt there will be lessons learned… Whether they will be applied is a different question.
Check out the Hastings 'queensway gateway road'. This cluster fuck of a road was started in 2015, but still not complete as of now...it is only a few hundred metres long! Sea change Sussex has a habit of destroying countryside with the 'if we build it, they will come' mentality, which has caused horrendous blight to several areas locally.
Is that still not done? Blimey. My eldest left Hastings three years ago and all it needed then was a few yards of tarmac to finish the job. And in the meantime, traffic on the Ridge was diabolical
On the M55 (Preston -Blackpool) they’re finally building the junction that never was !!!
It’s between Preston and Kirkham, even sat navs thought there was a junction there loooong before they started building it (about 18 months ago now)
"so who's f#*k up is it this time." nearly killed me off laughing mate. I had to pause it while i got my sh*t together. Only just found the channel and its brilliant.
I didn't realise they had built the junction - it had been promised for many years. I used to go in & out of Western Approach distribution park with a 44 tonne truck, sometimes 5 or more days a week, and the approach from the South West up through Avonmouth village from the M5 is a right pain. Had to give up Trucking late in 2018 due to health problems so haven't been that way since.
UPDATE As of now (Nov 2023) South Gloucestershire Council have compulsory purchased the land between the junction and the industrial estate and said they plan to start work in early 2024 with completion in 2025. Also, there are plans to build services next to the Travelodge on the junction. So 6 years after the junction was completed it will be connected. Excellent work by South Gloucestershire Council then 😢
Just drove past this and thought "I bet there's an Auto Shenanigans episode about this" and boy am I glad I was right
We let them hand our public services to private industry. What else should we expect - efficiency and value for our money?
According to Google maps, there is also part of an exit to the east, onto green fields at present, as well as the undeveloped link to the west from junction 1 on the M49.
The exit to the east was intended to head towards the Wave. Which sits just North of the village of Pilling and just South of the village of Easter Compton. Current access via the motorway network is to go through Easter Compton from the M5, J17.
This junction is just a complete joke. I’m not sure how the developers can be held to account to complete the access roads which they promised to complete. I honestly believe they are expecting the local authorities or Highways England to either foot the bill or complete the works.
The junction was only built so the Amazon depot could easier access the motorway network and was built with the provision of Amazon siting their depot here rather than in South Wales (which was the expected development).
Not sure who has shafted who on this project, but it seems there is a lot of losers and no real winners and the land owner/developer digging in to not pay for the works or refusing to take responsibility.
@@TheScubapez376 Clearly there is a winner - the developer (as we might expect). They rented/sold their land, and didn't have to pay the cost of building a link road.
All these abandoned motorways down there . We can't even get two lanes from Newcastle to Edinburgh for Christ sake .nice to know money isn't being wasted down there .
I used to drive past the construction every week when travelling from Bristol airport. Never thought this would be mothballed how sad after all that effort.
This reminds me of the car park in Farnborough, which is on the top of a building of shops and flats, to which no cars have ever had access becuase the in/out ramp never got built,
Any more info on that mate.. it sounds awesome..
One of those bridges has been there a lot longer, as the idea was originally to build a housing estate to the East of the M49. It may have even been there as long as the M49 itself but I'd have to check. The houses never materialized of course so you had a crossover bridge only that ended in some farmers fields to the East. The West side of the bridge had a unfinished road that wound south through the now Amazon BRS1 site and linked with the power station road.
Source: I used to go hooning cars and offroading in the area before all the warehouses appeared.
More about hooning and offroading please :D
It's not abandoned, for that to be true it would have to have been used at some point. It is unused.
And yes, it's a stupid situation where Highways England was being proactive but the business that would benefit would rather see traffic jams.
I think its more a case of they'd rather not spend the money and just put it in to shareholder dividends because that's more important.
Excellent video good sir! I like a good game of "Let's play Pass The Responsibility Parcel" between different groups that have the resources to sort things out, but just don't want to - because... reasons.
It's rather like the funny bit of the A466 that straddles the England 🏴 border in the extreme south - Monmouth to Chepstow is the bit I have in mind.
There are some parts south of Tintern that are just about clinging on to the side of the cliff with a fearsome drop below it.
In the mid 70s, some local road inspector chap noticed that the extreme outside lane was starting to drift towards the edge of that very cliff, and hurriedly (in the 70s... cups of tea... thinking... more tea) plans were hatched. The road was temporarily diverted into and through the lay-by on the inside of the cliff, and the dangerous "real" road was coned off and the obligatory piles of gravel were placed.
As we had family in the area, we would at least once a year travel this road. And each time we did, we noticed the strange red chevron diversion signs sank lower into the ground whilst accumulating green lichen. We used to joke - "When will the lay-by return.... (Dad drives round corner...) Not this year!"
Indeed this situation just went on and on. My old man told me some apocryphal tales - the construction company had gone bankrupt, the original road was now beyond repair... But one year in the early 1080s, the "DIVERSION AHEAD" signs were gone. Could this be it? We rounded the corner with excitement and trepidation...
And they had made the lay-by the actual road. Gone were the bumps into and out of the lay-by, the road markings were changed, everything.
BUT!! They couldn't hide that one lane of road built prior to the company going bankrupt. The one with the piles of gravel.
In 1990, I went on a sort of Pilgrimage there in my clapped out old banger. I parked on that one lane I had never experienced. Looked tentatively over the cliff, and took some photos as a memento of that bit of road's amazing history.
I love stuff like this. Be assured I have subscribed, as I really enjoyed this little M49 (wasted number, absolute troglodytes running the road numbering world), and will be checking out your channel for other fun road stuff! All the best my friend, Brad.
Went there to pick up a new road sweeper from Dawsons Hire, it took ages to find their unit, only to eventually find it was on a separate part of the industrial area
Thank you for this of course!!
Do the M32 Next!
Quite interesting is the fact that they built the junction before even being sure that Delta Properties would build the link roads 🤔
It's like 50 meters of road, I'd personally assume they'd build it too.
yeah like it seems like a no brainer to link up cos it would make everything so much easier
It should have been part of the planning permision.
I think it’s down the West Country somewhere I’ve forgotten, there’s a stretch of dual carriageway that doesn’t go anywhere but a dead end. It seems film/TV companies use it for filming.
Yeah, it's in Yate, South Gloucestershire, at the western end of Rodford Way. I've no idea why it was never connected.
@@nickbrown5457 that’s it, thanks. I’ve been meaning to pop down there and have a look myself. It stops near a train line and seems the council thought the bridge over it too expensive thus the road just stopped and left.
@@nickbrown5457 The route stops at the railway line. Due to a national steel shortage at the time it was built in 1974 they were unable to construct the bridge needed to cross the railway. Couple of reasons why it was then never completed after this. The County of Avon was created in 1974, they inherited a lot of projects without the funding to complete them from the former local authorities. High inflation of the time resulted in a lot of cuts in capital projects.
What do they say? Privatise the profit, nationalise the loss. Familiar story.
0:21 The power station chimney that's too hot for CZcams!
That answers the question I had driving past it yesterday
I drove past it today and most days. I don't know why they had to build a junction at all. It could have been 2 slip roads from the Tesco side to access southbound, and slip roads from near Amazon to go north
I was just cycling around this area last week (literally where you are stood filming), didn't know about this
It's being sorted this year I am told. I lived in Severn Beach for years
three words spring to mind: "Compulsory Purchase Order".
Which is no doubt exactly what the landowner wants. Get paid for a tiny bit of land, then the works can be done at taxpayer cost, not theirs.
Council should add some bumps or width restrictions around all other roads
And a weight limit.
MrPsychomonkey, Why? It's not the road users fault this has happened yet they're the one's who you wish to punish..
They have now been given the go ahead to link this junction up to the local road network. Construction has not yet started but is expected to commence soon. Watch this space!!
It was rumoured at the time that Amazon contributed £80k towards the junction as they would benefit greatly by it.
Those tax dodging tossers should fund it entirely.
Tesco wanted to fund a junction, but only if it was for their exclusive use. Naturally Highways England turned them down.
Just "Severn Beach", not "Severn View Beach". It's like Bondai Beach with a bridge.
And mud.
A whole lotta mud!!
You should look at the distraction of houghton le spring to build the road between Durham and Sunderland
Bloody developers land-banking and then refusing to fund infrastructure
If you want to investigate the worlds most bofing motorway, you should visit the M32, nothing more than 2 lanes of glorified A roads
Can't wait!
Motorbike kneedown practice!!
Looks like a Planning Officer / Planning committee mess up when granting planning permission
I wonder how much 100 metres of standard 2-lane road costs. Can't be all that much in the grand scheme of it.
This needs some sideways e36 action if you ask me
This did cross my mind :D
Amazon could pay for the 200 yards of link Road, then, charge a toll on all non amazon vehicles.
Sounds like a case of.unjoined up thinking .. the developers who built the site should have had the requirement to complete the link put into the planning for the site if we are investing £19 million in a junction for that development for acces, and then weight restrict the local roads. Sounds like a local council issue to me..
From Google maps - it looks like only 20-metres of road needs to be built. If there were no fences, any 4x4 could drive toi it in a few seconds - crazy. 😖
Isn't this the junction they blocked access to because people were using it as a racetrack?
I love motorways myself. I go up them a lot. Mostly its the M4.🤣
Quite partial to the M42 myself ;)
Here's one of the secrets of the M4 - I got as close as I was allowed on a bicycle!
I was actually doing a homage to the Fosse Way, but was curious whether the Highways authority had c***ed up the signage and technically allowed pedestrians onto the M4. I was pleasantly surprised to discover the nice little "motorway restrictions" sign without a number. czcams.com/video/CWD1oSBuys4/video.htmlh45m
Never even heard of the m49 before
It was built when the Second Severn Crossing was built. Takes traffic from the south to it.
It's a brilliant road. It cuts a massive corner off travel from South Wales to Somerset, Devon, and Cornwall. The only problem is that it joins the M5 north of the Avon - another pair of carriageways over the river would be really useful.
The land owners must make a fortune out of renting the site, so they can afford to get it done and it will be a selling point to new tenants. Maybe Amazon can pay some of it in some sort of deal.
A much easier fix would be the local council making planning permission for the next warehouse conditional on the developer paying to complete the road. There you go, problem solved!
Alternatively the local authority should have checked that the land owners had no intention of building the link before they built the motorway junction! £50 million wasted, what a cock-up. This has irritated me and I don't even live near there!
The local authority weren’t the ones who built the junction.
Well whoever it was then!
The council should close all access roads to industrial estate, perhaps except for cars width restrictions, then the link road should be tolled until all costs are recovered namely the £15m and legal costs. As a consequence the companies might leave the industrial estate resulting in loss of jobs? The property company would be at the greatest loss with an unsaleable white elephant on its’ hands.
That's not going to happen.
Firstly, the companies operating from that business park are the ones that will suffer the most. They (probably) didn't cause the problem.
They're also paying a lot of money in VED. Tesco alone have somewhere in the region of 50-100 trucks based at the site.
The "property company" won't lose anything - the park is already well developed and most of the sites are occupied. The tenants (if they're still leasing the premises rather than buying outright) won't be moving out for something as trivial as that.
The cost of administering a toll would be huge for the amount of traffic on the site.
The council would be sued to oblivion.
@@misterflibble9799 Administering a toll would be relative easy, hardly any human labour involved these days, even MacDonalds manage it, ever used the autoroute in France. The council is free to limit access on its roads, although major roads are a problem. I’m sure the local residents would be more than happy for all heavy traffic to be diverted to the motorway. The fault lies with the local authority that gave planning permission, it should have been stated in the permission that the developer paid for the link road to the motorway, I would have made them pay for the motorway link as well and the motorway link should be completed enabling site access during construction, otherwise no planning permission. It’s up to the local residents, I’m not familiar with the area, they maybe entirely happy with the current arrangements of hundreds of HGVs passing through their locality daily.
@@jeanjacques9980 The cost of administering the autoroute tolls in France is spread over many more vehicle movements, and many more tolling locations. Setting up a tolling system that (a) is only going to be tolling LGVs and (b) is only going to be for a limited period, is going to be prohibitively expensive.
I /am/ familiar with the area, and whilst I'm sure that the local residents are not exactly happy with the situation, the current LGV traffic is not going down residential roads. It's still a relatively significant A-road. Even when the link road is built, there will still be LGV traffic using the existing A-road for access to/from different locations.
@@misterflibble9799 It’s for local people to decide, the local council fundamentally failed to tie staged planning permission to the completion of the access roads. I suspect that local residents would prefer all HGVs and lorries use a direct access route to the motorway. Personally I think the developer should have paid for the motorway junction, too late now. Council has little authority over A Class road.
Get one of the trucks to accidentally crash through the barriers and no doubt they wont be repaired
There's about a 5 metre drop from the roundabout to the privately owned land, that would seriously fuck up what was left of a truck after it had rammed the temporary concrete barriers.
Wish you could do a video on the M48 (old M4)
We can
The fuck!!! Lol
If i was the land owner I'd put in a toll road £1.
South Glos Council should put a £200 tax per lorry out of the current roads in a fund for the new link road. Then for shiz and giggles, make the current road 10mph safety zone.
and they need to complete like less than a 200 meters of road, almost 100 of which is already there-ish, just need repavement according to gmaps. what a bullshit
When they meantion the Two Severn Road Bridges in traffic reports they meantion their respective Motorway numbers. Fine if your familiar with which is which but why not label them the North Bridge and the South Bridge
Ive visited hear. Xxx
Why was the power station chimney blurred?
Because youtube thinks it's a pen1s?
I was there today
What a ridiculous state of affairs - looking on Google maps, there’s only a couple of hundred yards of road needed to join with the Amazon etc warehouses to the west 🤦♂️
Any disused roads Manchester please
drone footage would have been nice, unless it is a no-link road and a no-fly zone too.
I didnt have a drone at that point... There's some drone shots in this video though... czcams.com/video/ZKE0DNs0j0g/video.html
And still no sign of building works as of October 2023..
I thought you were James Corden for a moment.
He's much fatter.
And considerably less entertaining.
Penny pinching cheap arse developer waiting to be bailed out by the public purse they definitely saw a loophole and went for it, but you have to ask did the pens run out of ink on contract signing day. That’ll be the contract that’s supposed to allocate responsibilities and contractual obligations, incompetence personified.
😢
Esso motorways services Lanchester
What they should do is scrap it as a motorway build a few dozen farmhouses and create livestock there. And turn that money into profit towards our national income atleast that could be one of many ways that liz truss can further increase the yearly national budget and reassuring these other deals. Tbf i dont have any kind of trust in her what so ever
But that would be a good approach. Showing the public changes are happening atleast.
Our country is embarrassing. Ive watch a few of your videos and that all I can take from it. This one, im guessing they companies won't build it as they're quite happy for their trucks to roll along other smaller roads to get to the motorway, so they don't feel they need to build to the new junction. What sort of uncommon sense are we running here?! Why wasn't it set in concrete that the park to the junction has to be built, no get out clause. Who's reading and writing these contracts?! And why foes it take red tape and bureaucracy to "draw up and plan", when its flipping bit of tarmac about 50m long that's needed?
Another video, a developer (that probably gave to took a backhander goes bust after building a road. Then we (the council, and our tax) has to pay £300,000 for report on what the road needs to be working.....and I bet that report in 10 years will be looked at and the decision will be its out of date, and another is needed! Its a road! Its been built already, why do you need a report!
So britain has abandoned roads? 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Ah, this is one of those "private-public partnerships" that the tory wankers tout so strongly. Isn't capitalism great?
Aren't those the same "private-public partnerships" that Bliar and Brown began saddling the country with back in the late 90's?
You know the ones where schools and hospitals are basically renting the services from the lenders so that in the end they will wind up paying 2 or 5 times the cost than if they actually built and own the property.
It's not about left and right anymore so drop the tribalism we are being screwed from both sides it's been like that for a while.
What a complete joke how many other jobs are like that
They have no legal obligation so why would you expect them to pay? this should have been sorted before work started, whoever paid and did the work should have done the link road as part of the project, if someone wanted to build a bridge over my property I would say crack on but if they stopped short of my property and said I had to build that part of the bridge I would say on your bike, jog on lol
No legal obligation but could make life better for the tenants of it's business and industrial park. But will not because who wants to make the place easy and attractive to tenants
@@damiendye6623 I think the issue is with a land owner who sits between the Highway and the industrial park and has nothing to gain from putting a road on his land but has no issue in others doing it, think that is the issue, nothing to stop the industrial park paying the bill for the road or the council but I think they were hoping the land owner would do it, but like I say they are not the industrial park and so why should they,,
I live in the area, and do part-time work as a truck driver for one of the companies based in the park.
In truth, this should have been paid for by the developer(s) under a Section 106 agreement when planning permission for the distribution park was granted.
I'm not sure what the true story is, but various rumours I've heard are:
1. The s106 agreement exists, but is worded such that the developer doesn't have to build the link road until the entire park is developed.
2. The s106 agreement exists, but someone at the council messed up when specifying the link road and/or roundabout such that the two parts don't meet in the middle.
3. Someone assumed that, when either the link road or roundabout was built, that the construction company would make the two bits meet up, but since the required link road needs an embankment (with a non-trivial amount of imported fill), they only built exactly what was contracted (which doesn't meet up).
Who knows where the truth lies. The exact details of contracts are not public (commercial confidentiality), so it's likely we'll never know.
In the meantime, everything has to go via the A403 to Aust or Avonmouth.
@@misterflibble9799 this man nails it.
OK, so they built a motorway, only 2 years Old, and aboanded it. Seriously?!?
By default it became abandoned after developers sort of didnt do as planned. It will eventually open but no one seems to know when. Thanks for watching!
No they built a motorway junction
@@GWJUK In them meantime the Severn Road A304 can be nose to tail with HGV's
@@keithjenkins7919 I think you mean the A403? The A304 is in London
@@totnestrainspotter8536 Correct