By Neil Cullen
Early enabling activity at Dawsons Corner has started in earnest with the construction of a ‘bellmouth’ entrance off Bradford Road for the primary site entrance, and the arrival of a heavy duty bulldozer.
Pedestrian and cycle routes have been diverted to permit this work, conducted mainly at night to minimise traffic disruption.
An information event at Pudsey Civic Hall on 15Â May was attended by some 150 members of the public and the expected timetable was published. Enabling works are proceeding as planned. Completion of the full scheme is expected in Winter 2026, around 18 months away.
Residents in nearby streets have been treated to a grandstand view of machinery arriving through the temporary entrance to the former Calverley Charity Workhouse Allotment land. The latest arrival was a gigantic Caterpillar D6 machine (which has been evolving since 1935). This had to be skilfully shoehorned through the narrow entrance.Â
Deliveries usually occur in early morning to avoid disruption to residents. Any mud which inevitably migrates to the road is promptly cleared by a faithful contracting road sweeper machine.
“Enabling Works’ may seem a trivial term, but most civil engineering projects involve a lot of it. At Dawsons Corner this involves locating all the buried vital services: Cable TV, telephone lines and electricity cables.
We all rely on these to run uninterrupted. So credit is due to the contractors who have been carefully locating these, delicately digging them out and relocating them away from harm.
To this end, a huge remote controlled vacuum cleaner was deployed each night to scoop up the fragments of concrete and soil as they were dislodged from shovels and drills, and loaded into a waiting dump truck for disposal. Dentistry on an industrial scale.
To facilitate safety of road users, the pedestrian and Leeds-Bradford Cycle Superhighway on the south side of Bradford Road were blocked off, including pedestrian crossings on the Stanningley Bypass.
This caused a significant extra distance and time for users heading to and from ASDA, New Pudsey train station, and the X6 bus stop. Cyclists were advised to dismount and use the Bradford Road pedestrian crossing and the north side cycle route.
Longer-term planned pedestrian and cycle diversion routes for the full scheme have been promised to all residents in the next couple of weeks, and the plans will also be available on the Leeds City Council website.
Further information can be obtained from the Connecting Leeds website.
Presumably the Yorkshire Water works at Thornbury roundabout are all completed now? It would be madness to introduce disruption at Dawsons corner, on the same major route between Leeds and Bradford until Thornbury is back to normal.
So then everything is going nicely , Well Done
It just goes to show that when things need doing ” US UP NORTH ” gets things done With NO PROBLEM!!!
18 Months of disruption coming up I don’t think after that anyone on average will get anywhere quicker, total waste of money (£40m?). The money would be better spent on proper resurfacing of many of the local areas A & B and residental roads with potholes left right and centre on many of them.
Consider Armley Gyratory as example of whats to come.
a) it looks nicer (if you can say that about such a thing)
b) in my experience so far in various directions/exits its no quicker on average
c) we’re still getting disrupted with further work, what 2/3 years on from the start?.
So on Dawsons Corner add up time lost sitting in EXTRA traffic for 18-24 months due to work and lane closers, then add the fact there’s still at most only 2 lanes on the ring road and at rush hours you can’t really up the capacity even with a slightly smoother flowing roundabout/junction.
Who did the maths and working out if £40 million spend will be change anything much due to capacity limits of the dual (and in some places single) carriageway on the ring road?
BUT it’ll look a bit nicer