“Avoid travelling completely or find something to do at home: decorate the bathroom or something” – so says Jonathan Wade, senior project manager for National Highways, ahead of the first weekend closure of the M25.
London’s orbital motorway will shut in both directions between junctions 10 and 11 in Surrey from 9pm on Friday 15 March to 6am on Monday 18 March while improvement work is carried out “to make journeys safer and improve traffic flow”.
Junction 10 is the key intersection on the southwest quadrant of the motorway, where the M25 meets the A3 to Guildford and Portsmouth.
Normally around 5,000 vehicles per hour would use the five-mile stretch of the M25 at weekends.
National Highways has prescribed a diversionary route that more than doubles the five-mile distance between the two junctions.
Speaking exclusively to The Independent’s daily travel podcast, Mr Wade said the M25-A3 junction, designed in the 1980s, “simply cannot handle the volume of traffic that it’s currently being asked to to handle”.
He said: “There’s unfortunately a very high collision rate.”
To reduce congestion and the number of accidents, National Highways is increasing the number of lanes. To enable this to happen, a bridge must be demolished.
Mr Wade said an overnight closure would not permit enough time to remove the bridge.
“Neither can we just partially demolish it and come back the following night, because we can’t leave it in an unsafe condition with the risk of bits falling off it onto the traffic during the day.
“So this is one occasion, I’m afraid, where we really don’t have any choice.
“It’s not going to be a particularly pretty picture over the coming weekend: there aren’t any immediately obvious diversionary routes.
“Please, if you can either avoid travelling completely, find something to do at home – decorate the bathroom or something or play in the garden.
“If you must go: travel by train, walk, use a bicycle. I don’t mind really, what you do.
“Avoid driving anywhere around those diversionary routes around Painshill, Byfleet, West Byfleet on on the eastern side of Woking. It will be in your interests.”
Mr Wade vowed that the planned reopening at 6am on Monday would happen.
“If in the very early stages, we see things for any reason not going to plan, we have the ability to pull the later…
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