Keighley businesses this week welcomed the proposed start date for the long-awaited Bingley relief road.

Work on the road is due to get under way in the year 2001/2, much to the delight of leaders at Keighley Business Forum. The forum has played a major campaigning role in getting the government to agree to the scheme.

Iain Copping, director of the Forum, says he is 'delighted' about the news and sees the new road as being a 'great benefit to Keighley's economy'.

David Petyt, of David Petyt Menswear in Hanover Street, Keighley, is a member of the forum's transport committee. He says: "I am really pleased to hear that they are going to start work on the road, but I feel that it's two years too late. We were hoping that it would begin next year and I am very disappointed to hear that it's not. But at least it will get done."

Keighley MP Ann Cryer has also expressed her disappointment. "I really did think that the building of this road would begin by the year 2000 and it could now be up to another two years on from then before anything is done," she says. "But at least we have got a date which shows that the government is not going to backtrack on its plans."

However, the Aire Valley Conservation Society has condemned the new bypass as an opportunity for additional house building and greater traffic congestion.

Penny Ward, secretary of the group, says: "We have resisted this scheme because it will open up the valley to more and more development. New traffic will rapidly fill up the road and it will just push congestion further down the valley.

"Small traders will also suffer as road users will be prepared to travel out of town to do their shopping and Bingley will soon become an extension of Bradford. It will be an urban motorway which cuts through the valley and will be a burden for the area, not a relief. It will do nothing at all to regenerate Bingley."

And Professor Richard Butler, secretary of the Bingley Environmental Transport Ass-ociation (BETA), says: "This road does not make economic sense. Its objectives are to reduce congestion, achieve greater integration of transport, improve the environment and support economic development in Airedale and Keighley. But it will not achieve any of them. All it will do is push the traffic jam two miles nearer to Bradford and increase problems in Shipley and Saltaire. There will also be increased pressure to build on green-field sites. We need to develop a better public transport system using the existing roads and make improvements to them instead."

Professor Butler has calculated that the Bingley relief road will cost £30 million per mile to build.

The news was announced by Lord Whitty, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, last week as well as by transport minister Glenda Jackson.

The road will go from the roundabout at the current end of the Aire Valley Trunk Road at Crossflatts, round the Gilst-ead side of Bingley town centre near the railway before ending at the Cottingley Bar junction.

The scheme aims to improve the environment in Bingley town centre and reduce traffic delays. It forms one of many projects outlined in the government's Targeted Program-me of Improvements (TPI) which followed the announcement of the outcome of the Roads Review, made earlier this year. The TPI is listed in A New Deal for Trunk Roads in England, produced by the government.

In July 1997, the proposed length of the new road was said to be 5km, with a capacity to carry 38,000 vehicles a day. The cost of the project was expected to be £13 million.

Meanwhile, dates for imp-rovement work to start on Keighley's congested A650 Hard Ings road and the A629 Skipton-Kildwick road have not been set because both schemes are up for a downgrade and no final decisions have yet been made.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.