Somerset's bid for 'The Worst Road in Britain'

Back in early August, another top transport blogger - Christian Wolmar - labelled the Devon/Somerset A396 Tiverton to Minehead road as being the worst in Britain.

He cited that Dunster has the "worst traffic management system" in the country, as the narrow streets "encouraged" drivers to see "how quickly they can accelerate up to 40 MPH.

"Since there is virtually no other way to get from one side of the little town to the other, pedestrians therefore have to cower in doorways as the traffic, which never seems to slow down for them, hares past," he wrote.

Ok, on the face of it, this may seem a fair point. I often agree with most of Wolmar's post, but this one I couldn't support.

In counterance to his argument that it is showing the need of the car is above all else, perhaps it is in reality, the opposite - the town is winning the battle against the car. If these streets have been like this for over 400-odd years, why change them now? And how exactly are you going to alter the Grade 1 Listed properties that overhang the area in question? Cut them back, or demolish them completely?

In addition, the competiton to see who can reach 40mph the fastest simply doesn't exist. With myself having actually lived on this section of road, all of us locals know two things - that drivers actually intend to set their quickest time from the top of Dulverton Hill to Minehead, and that Dunster is a mere inconvenience - and secondly, that the grockles actually cause the problems, as rather than "cower" in shop passageways, they really wander all over the road, in complete oblivion to the cars who may actually want to occupy the same bit of space. Therefore, local drivers are able to rack up a very high score in Hit the Grock, when assuming that it is 50 points per individual. Incidentally, we all know that the quickest ever time set from point-to-point is unlikely to be beaten - 12 minutes 42 seconds to drive the 18.8 miles, which was set by a Radio Rentals engineer in 1997, in a Vauxhall Astra estate equipped with the 1.7 turbo diesel engine from Izuzu. And yes, it was white.

Wolmar also indicates that the area around the Yarn Market is "terribly difficult to walk on", because of the cobbled streets. Is he really suggesting that we should actually have the Edwardian cobbles ripped up in the name of political correctness?

Instead, maybe Dunster should be simply demolished and have a nice dual-carriageway put through it. At least we would then be able to set faster times and finally beat that stubborn old record.