Mum Lucy Powell has had two cars written off and been clipped by a wing mirror. These are just some of the issues she has had to deal with living on the A464 in Llanbedr, near Harlech, Gwynedd. The village has been congested since the 1950s but local residents are saying that in recent years it has become unbearable.
Now members of a campaign group called Llanbedr Nightmares have compiled a library of photographs and videos showing the regular traffic gridlock. Lucy told NorthWalesLive: “I’d often get sworn at by motorists too. There are no pavements there and it’s dangerous. This is a village with an 18th-century road that’s trying to cope with 21st traffic.”
Problems peak during the busy summer tourism season but HGVs, buses, and campervans can bring A464 traffic to a halt at any time of the year. Residents claim it is only a matter of time before someone is seriously hurt. There is also concern about a potential lack of access for emergency vehicles.
Read more: Some of Wales' biggest road building schemes scrapped
In the low season, around 3,000 vehicles pass through Llanbedr each day. In summer this can treble, said Jane, also vice chair of Llanbedr Community Council. In just four hours last August Bank Holiday residents recorded 5,013 vehicles passing over Pont Afon Artro, the village’s narrow bridge. Located on a bend in the road, it poses problems for HGVs and other long-wheelbase vehicles.
Concerns have also been raised about the amount of air pollution generated by idling vehicles waiting for queues to subside. With some A464 residents forced to keep windows closed during summer villagers claim the Welsh Government’s decision to jettison a promised bypass violated its wellbeing goals.
The £15m bypass, green-lighted in 2020, was the first casualty of the Welsh Government’s review of road-building schemes launched in 2021. This week the Labour-Plaid administration announced the outcome of the review and a slew of major projects bit the dust across Wales. For a while Llanbedr’s 60-year battle for a new road was tantalisingly within reach. Despite the setback the community says it “won’t go down without a fight” and they are continuing to press for solutions.
A walking protest, designed to block the A464 for around an hour, is planned for Saturday, March 25. This, said Llanbedr Nightmares, will be the first of many. “We will keep protesting until someone listens,” said a spokesperson.
Fed-up and disillusioned villagers have also vowed to block access to a planned space observatory and planetarium on nearby Llanbedr airfield. They fear the project will generate more traffic through the Eryri (Snowdonia) village from space tourists and coachloads of inquisitive schoolchildren.
This week the UK Space Agency announced two tranches of funding to support the growing space sector in Wales. The largest, £200,000, is earmarked for a space cluster development manager, with a further £36,000 allocated for a scoping project at Llanbedr airfield.
This will enable Snowdonia Aerospace Centre (SAC) to explore the potential for a space observatory and planetarium, part of the UK’s most extensive dark skies reserve. First test flights of a sub-scale prototype rocket are also expected at the airfield this year.
Pobl Llanbedr, another local campaign group, claimed the village had been sidelined by the Welsh Government and patience had worn thin. While it backed the Spaceport Snowdonia concept, this was predicated on the construction of a new bypass and access road.
The 2021 cancellation of a scheme that, villagers say, had already begun, was a disaster both for Llanbedr and the spaceport. “We visited the airfield on Sunday to discuss our plans,” said Pobl chair Jane Taylor-Williams.
“They told us Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic would have loved to have come to Llanbedr airfield as it was such a good site. However the bypass was ditched and all that potential investment, and job opportunities, were lost.”
Parents worry about their children walking or cycling along the road, and concerns were heightened last year when an older resident was struck by a vehicle. Another was said to have bought a car to visit the village convenience store just to avoid dicing with passing lorries on foot.
Pobl member Lucy Powell moved to rented property in Harleck for personal reasons and let out her Llanbedr property as a holiday home. As the owner of two businesses in the village, she wants to return but is apprehensive.
“My daughter goes to the village school and I have to commute in every day to run my businesses,” she said. “My Llanbedr home was much more convenient, just two minutes from work.
“But I’m worried about going back. I would never allow my daughter to walk to school, the road is too dangerous, and we have three cats too. We need this village to be made safe. We need to make it safe so that our kids can walk or cycle to school, and so that elderly people can walk to the shops without fear of being injured or worse.”
When the traffic is bad, which is more often than not, queues stretch a third of a mile back past Lucy’s businesses on the village outskirts. Trade suffers badly. “No one wants to come to the shop for fear of losing their place in the queue,” she sighed.
On-road parking by residents adds to the problems but alternative sites within the village are elusive. It’s all added to congestion in a village that claims its carbon footprint is being forced up by government transport policies.
Neither is public transport a viable alternative. Each day just a handful of buses pass through Llanbedr and the prospects of an improved service appear small at a time when the network is shrinking.
Speaking in the Senedd this week, Mabon ap Gwynfor, Plaid MS for Dwyfor Meirionnydd, accused Cardiff of cutting Llanbedr adrift when axing its planned bypass. “It was the wrong decision and it came as a very bitter pill after decades of promises,” he said.
Lee Waters, deputy minister for climate change, professed himself “slightly gobsmacked” by claims of inaction. Instead, he pinned the blame on Gwynedd Council for not engaging with the Welsh Government.
The appeal was knocked back last month, leaving the authority’s Ardudwy Green Corridor scheme up in the air. Had funding been approved, it would have seen walking and cycling safely improvements in Llanbedr as well as more bus stops, rail links and electric car charging points.
Mr Waters, who is due to meet a Llanbedr delegation to discuss options, this week revealed he wants to treat the village as an “exemplar rural scheme”. Details of what this entails have not been released but parallels with the Ardudwy Green Corridor scheme seem likely.
The original bypass was knocked on the head because it was predicted to increase traffic flows and speeds, so hiking carbon emissions by 60%. Even small-scale development of Llanbedr Airfield was forecast to increase traffic and therefore emissions. Also counting against the scheme, cruelly, was the Spaceport’s appeal to highly-skilled specialists who, living further afield, faced longer commutes, adding to the village's carbon footprint.
A key idea offered by the Roads Review was to cut holiday traffic. Central to this was the provision of free park-and-ride hubs in Barmouth and Porthmadog. Visitors, it was surmised, then only need to hop onto a train and steam into Llanbedr, ready to catch a “last mile” minibus to Shell Island campsite, the largest in Europe.
Problems were soon identified. Chief among them was the lack of room for new hubs in surrounding towns already grappling with parking issues of their own. Another was a question of practicality. “The trains only have two carriages,” said Jane Taylor-Williams.
“Shell Island attracts 80,000 day visitors-a-year - how are they going to cram them all in? As well as all their camping gear, they’ll be bringing their kids, grannies and grandads along too. And their dogs!”
Ruffling local feathers was the suggestion to rename the local railway station, still known locally as Talwrn Bach (“Little Cockpit”, a nod to the airfield). It was to become "Llanbedr for Shell Island Station". Locals were aghast. “Over my dead body,” fumed Jane.
The review also advocated a fleet of Fflecsi buses serving tourism destinations such as Shell Island. Travel discounts might also be offered to tourists arriving at the campsite “by sustainable modes”.
If all the options outlined above fail – as they appear to be doing – the “last resort” solution is to “move the road sideways”. Instead of a shiny new bypass with 60mph limits, a cutting, embankment and junction, a new “slow” road is proposed. Drivers currently tootling along the A496 at an average 39mph wouldn’t notice the difference.
The old A496 through Llanbedr would be closed for general traffic, with only local access and cyclists permitted into the village. This is the option villagers are now pushing for.
As Gwynedd Council is wincing at the “significant” cost involved residents want to press their case by gathering emissions data. This, they claim, hasn’t been done since 2010. If they can prove emissions exceed legal limits, as they believe, they will argue for the new road on health and wellbeing grounds.
They've even offered to pay for their own emissions monitoring system on Afon Artro bridge. This might be mounted next to a CCTV camera to provide an early warning for approaching motorists of gridlocks ahead.
The Welsh Government’s new hardline transport policy, which has “raised the bar” for new road-building, will make their task harder. But the village is determined to press on, motivated by the memory of a bypass that came within weeks of being built.
"The road review considered only schemes where spades had not gone in the ground,” said Jane. “To prepare for the bypass, a building was erected for bats displaced by the works, and we argued this constituted a start to the scheme. But we were ignored and now we have a bat house with no bats.”
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