Ben Lowry: ​The Belfast to Londonderry road has been transformed

When NI was created in 1921, very few people drove so you would not have expected the route to be of a high standard.

But by the 1930s car ownership was rising relentlessly and parts of the province were already experiencing significant congestion, such as the Holywood Road, connecting North Down to Belfast via the east of the city.

Engineers travelled out to Germany to see how Hitler was pioneering the construction of wonderful new roads called autobahns, and work began on just such a route, the Sydenham bypass, in 1936. But it stopped at the start of World War II, after which there was no money, and it did not in fact open until 1959. That is why to this day the narrow, straight, and rutted Sydenham bypass still has something of the feel of an early German motorway.

But on the route from NI’s capital city to its second biggest it took 50 years before there was a significant stretch of dual carriageway or motorway: that came in 1971 when a 6.5 mile section of the M2 was opened between Templepatrick and Dunsilly roundabout.

By 1975 that had been linked up to other stretches of the M2 to create a 22-mile motorway from Belfast to Randalstown. But for most of the next half century most of the Belfast-Londonderry would be the A6 single carriageway.

I said above that the road throughout this period was a poor one. In fact many sections of it were constructed to a high standard for their time, the 1970s and 80s, but only with one lane in each direction. This meant that fast-moving intercity traffic was always getting caught behind tractors, and thus tempted into the most dangerous manoeuvre on the road – overtaking in the face of oncoming traffic. The obstacles of slow-moving vehicles including lorries became more and more intrusive as traffic levels on the road grew.

I remember that route back from the 1970s, from travelling on it in holidays to Donegal, and by the 1980s, in my teens, began to wonder why it was so basic.

There is an almost entrenched theory in the Northwest that it was due to unionist discrimination against Catholic areas, but as I got older and began to write about road infrastructure I came to see that it had relatively low traffic levels compared to routes in the east of Northern Ireland.

The Sydenham bypass was carrying more than 50,000 vehicles a day back in the 1990s, while some of the quieter rural sections of the A6 are even now only carrying a fraction of that – and have barely reached 20,000 vehicles a day, which is typically the level at which a cost benefit analysis shows a road to be worthy of upgrade to expressway (a road that has two lanes in each direction with a barrier in the middle).

Even so I have been a longstanding advocate of upgrading this road to dual carriageway or motorway, as I was for the Belfast to Dublin road. This was for symbolic reasons, as the two most important intercity routes out of Belfast, and for safety reasons – motorways and dual carriageways slash death tolls because they eliminate deadly right turns across oncoming traffic, and they make impossible the aforesaid overtaking in the face of such traffic.

Progress on both routes has been agonisingly slow. I remember, for example, noting with dismay the stupidity of opening the Newry bypass, on the Belfast-Dublin route, in 1996 as a single carriageway with three roundabouts. It soon became utterly inadequate to its needs and has since had to be replaced by a dual carriageway of almost motorway standard.

Belfast-Dublin has been largely complete since 2010, with the last sections of single carriageway around Newry replaced in that year (albeit by, in another stupid move, a dual carriageway north of that city that has dangerous gap junctions that still allow right turns across a fast moving dual carriageway). But it has taken much longer to get significant improvements on the Londonderry route. Until recently there was only one notable improvement, the two-mile A6 bypass of Toome in 2004 (which, again stupidly and short sightedly, was constructed with roundabouts that one day will have to be replaced at great expense).

Now however, in the space of two years, the A6 has suddenly been radically improved by two long new stretches of dual carriageway, which are close to motorway standard, with no dangerous gap junctions in the central barrier, no stupid roundabouts in the middle, and with 70mph limits.

The first stretch to open did so in 2021, made up of two shorter sections of dual on either side of the Toome bypass that completes a stretch of dual carriageway of, in total, about 10 miles that runs between the western end of the motorway at Randalstown to the roundabout at Castledawson.

The second stretch opened in April of this year, a 16 mile stretch of dual carriageway from Drumahoe, on the outskirts of Londonderry past Dungiven, where the Belfast-bound route begins to climb up the Glenshane pass.

I drove all of this 10 days ago on my return from a visit to the Northwest. While it has only added 25 miles of new road to a route that is 74 miles in total distance, and while it still leaves a long 19-mile single carriageway stretch on the sloping approaches to both sides of the Glenshane Pass, the overall route has been transformed. Driving it is far less stressful than before.

We could have had major improvements on the routes between both Belfast and Dublin and Belfast and Londonderry decades ago if we had accepted tolls to help fund them. It is almost two decades since I quoted a senior AA official who said that that motoring organisation was not keen on tolls but if it was a choice between no road for 20 years or a new road being built now with tolls, it would go for the latter.

Our politicians did not follow such a course and now, decades late, we have the road to the NW that we should have.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor

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