Jantra
Zach wrote: It amuses me some other Welsh road schemes in the middle of nowhere get built even though they are hardly used e.g. Brecon dual carriage way by-pass being one example. Nobody used it, so the built another inner bypass in Brecon!!
The original Brecon by-pass is the most ridiculous road scheme ever but it's an object lesson in how planners can derive precisely the wrong lessons from previous failures.
It was built at a time when the Welsh Office highways development was obsessed by 'future proofing' following the discovery of just how much it was going cost to upgrade the A465 to dual-carriageway status.
It goes without saying that upgrading a road while keeping it open is far more expensive than building it to that standard in the first place. So for a short time it was decreed that any new A-roads in Wales should be built as dual carriageways - regardless of current or possible future traffic needs.
Brecon is the most egregious example of that policy being taken too far but in other areas it paid off. You only have to travel from Shrewsbury to Wrexham to see how the road improve the instant you cross the border. God only knows how many accidents there have been on the Oswestry by-pass over the years - but it's a lot.