M12 motorway (Northern Ireland)

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Template: Infobox high-ranking road / Maintenance / GB-M
M12 motorway in the UK
M12 motorway (Northern Ireland)
Basic data
Operator: Roads Service Northern Ireland
Start of the street: Kilvergan
End of street: Portadown
Overall length: 2.7 km (1.7  mi )

Countries :

Northern IrelandNorthern Ireland Northern Ireland

The M12 motorway ( English for 'Autobahn M12') is a continuous four-lane motorway in Northern Ireland , which branches off the M1 in a southerly direction at Craigavon .

history

In the 1960s, plans arose to avoid Belfast overpopulation by creating a new, planned metropolitan area outside of Belfast's borders. Ultimately, the project was to be implemented in the space between the existing locations of Portadown and Lurgan . In order to avoid traffic problems from the beginning, a city freeway was planned in a west-east direction along the new city. When the construction of the M1 began near Belfast, it was initially planned to connect the M1 directly with the planned city motorway, so that the city motorway would have become the western end of the M1.

However, the route for the M1 was finally moved a few kilometers further north in order to be able to continue west to Dungannon . In order to still connect the planned city motorway with the M1, the M12 was built as a connecting motorway, which was opened in November 1967, in parallel to the expansion of the M1 in the Craigavon ​​area. When it became more and more apparent that the Northern Irish population would not grow explosively as expected and the artificial city could only record slight growth, the plans for the city motorway were completely discarded in the 80s. Nowadays, a simple country road mostly runs along the planned route of the city motorway.

Expansion plans

At the beginning of the 1960s, there were still considerations to extend the M12 as a motorway or expressway south to the A3. Already at the end of the 1960s, the plans were abandoned and instead only a simple country road was built on the planned route. Since then, there have been no further expansion plans for the motorway section, which is meanwhile relatively insignificant in terms of traffic. In 1991 an additional ramp was completed on the driveway to the M1, so that you can now switch to the M12 when coming from the west.

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