New road system makes traffic worse - businesses

Come Friday and Saturday afternoon "you just pull the plug and go home".

That is the view of a Hackney cab driver who operates at Shrewsbury railway station. Despite the town's gyratory system being completed after more than a year of work, traffic has not improved, Simon Bendall says. And conducting business at certain times is "no longer viable".

Changes include Chester Street becoming two-way for traffic, new pedestrian crossings, wider pavements under the railway bridge resulting in one lane for vehicles instead of two, and changes to the entrance of the railway station car park. But Mr Bendall says none of that has aided the motorist, or his customers.

Shropshire Council said a new system was set to be installed that would sync traffic lights and adjust signal timings, using vehicle detectors and wireless technology.

"It's not good for the fair-paying passengers," Mr Bendall explained.

"A five-minute job out, say, a mile and a half, could be a 30-minute journey back to the station to try and pick up the next customer."

Anika Saxton told the BBC customers complain about getting into town

The work began in June 2024, and finished in summer 2025, with the council saying that it would improve accessibility and ease movement for people.

Anika Saxton, part owner of Shrewsbury Coffeehouse, said: "We've kind of gotten used to it, but we do have a lot of customer complaints about the amount of time it's taken for them to get into town... they're also wondering why [the work is] even happening because it doesn't seem to have improved anything.

"That must have a knock-on effect on whether they will want to come into town.

"To have literally the entry gate to the town being such a nightmare, it is really frustrating."

Jay McDonald believes rush hour goes on for longer than it should

Jay McDonald from bar The Alb said he felt that rush hour was going on "longer than it really should do".

"We're finding there's still a lot of cars around at 8pm in the evening.

"The new traffic system that they've put in is just delaying cars, keeping cars on the road a lot longer."

Shrewsbury Business Improvement District told the BBC: "We are continuing to feed these comments to Shropshire Council and hope that optimisation of the traffic light phasing due to be completed shortly will help to get traffic moving more smoothly."

It added that it had begun collecting hourly car journey time data on key routes in and out of the town centre, including the gyratory system - information which it said would be shared with the council regularly and would become publicly available.

'Congestion to ease'

Shropshire Council said: "During the work in the station gyratory area, Shropshire Council and our contractors have worked hard to minimise queues and congestion where possible, with regular visits by signals engineers to adjust timings on both the temporary and permanent lights.

"However, congestion is set to ease when new software is installed on the traffic lights in the area."

The system, it said, used vehicle detectors and wireless technology to assess traffic conditions and adjust signal timings, minimizing delays, and also allowed the lights to be synced.

"Once the lights have been upgraded it is likely that congestion issues will ease, though the council will continue to monitor the situation for a short time afterwards," the authority said.

It added the upgrade was set to be carried out from 29 September.

The authority also said that it was aware of concerns over potential delays to emergency services due to congestion issues, but said it was not aware of any issues raised by any emergency services in recent days.