Thursday 2 September 2010

A grand day out

A once in a lifetime chance to walk in a road tunnel.

People will be able to walk through one of the country's longest underground road tunnels before it opens to traffic. Hindhead Together said people would be able to walk the 1.2 miles (1.9km) of the A3 tunnel on an open day on 14 May next year.

Thousands of cars and lorries are expected to use the £371m tunnel on the London to Portsmouth route each day.


The dual carriageway tunnel is set to relieve traffic bottlenecks in the area

You will almost never see a cyclist on the A3 in Surrey and Hampshire, because it’s an utterly terrifying road. It wouldn’t have cost £371m to provide Dutch-style cycle paths beside this route (much of which is attractively wooded), but then the CTC doesn’t believe in campaigning for segregated cycle paths. And if you don’t ask, you never get. So while a vast sum of money is expended to ‘relieve’ one small bottleneck, cycling continues to stagnate.