'Monnow Rail' and a ring road - fixing the Hereford city roads congestion situation

For congested cities, a Monorail is a transport solution

Hereford has grown like many cities in the response to the economy, that also brings its own problems.

Traditionally, many towns and villages were set out way before personal transport became such a widely owned and used situation. Towns and villages were often just not built with a personal transport culture in mind.

Take many London streets, even those built in the Edwardian era when the car was a rare sight on the roads, were built without anyone considering the expansion of the car ownership possibility. Or, perhaps, those planners and the overseers were of a mindset that the working class might not own cars?

Whatever the situation, that creates a problem for modern society to solve. 

Hereford is like many places, it has grown and essentially grown from the historic centre to fill the land available.

It needs to manage the traffic that comes into the city and that which only passes through it, on the way to other places.  With expansion of former industrial areas like Rotherwas, Hereford is unable to cope with rush hour traffic.   

One main bridge over the River Wye is the pinch point that causes a problem, an older second bridge is not sufficient to cope with traffic over large delivery van size.

There are two solutions needed. Firstly a park and ride system out of town that would traverse the centre of town and then continue out to Rotherwas.

This solves two problems, congestion into Hereford centre and a solution that is not subject to the constrictions of the already overcrowded road system.

To achieve this is straightforward, an overhead Mono Rail system would need to be built. Perhaps starting at the Hereford race course and ending at Rotherwas, it would need a two line system with two sets of rail cars.

This 'Monnow Rail ' The Monnow being a local river, is the perfect solution and provides a superb opportunity for a park and ride system that is manageable and expandable as required.

That deals with one set of problems, that of getting in and out of Hereford centre and for those who work in Rotherwas which is a nightmare to get to in the rush hour.

Secondly, a bypass is needed to take traffic not needing to enter Hereford centre, away. This essentially would be a ring road, set out from the urban conurbation.

Land owners may object but it is the only way forward to this problem. There is no way that the centre of Hereford can cope with more roads, the name of the game is to take traffic out of the centre of the town. 

Thankfully now that we are out of the EU, we can use some of the 14 billion + a year we were wasting paying to the EU to fund drastically needed infrastructure systems like this.