TOWN councillors in Dorchester will not back Colliton Street residents in their plea to keep the road traffic free.

The one-way street which runs from North Square to Colliton Park has been closed for a year while building work continues on the County Museum. Residents have asked to keep the road closed to through traffic, rather than re-open it in May as planned, when work on the museum finishes.

They had called on the town council to support their plea to Dorset Council.

But town councillors say that to permanently close the road would cause problems elsewhere, especially in Friary Lane.

They will now ask Dorset Council to take another look at traffic flows in the whole area, including introducing measures to deter drivers using Colliton Street as a rat-run to avoid congestion in High West and High East streets when travelling to the north of the town, or to County Hall.

Cllr Sue Biles told a town council planning meeting on Monday evening that all the access routes out of North Square, where she lives, were poor – at both The Bow, opposite South Street, and out of the very narrow Friary Lane, where some turns were difficult for larger vehicles. She said that if Colliton Street were to be closed it would impact on both of the other access routes.

Cllr Tim Harries said the suggestion of lockable bollards for Colliton Street would not work, pointing to problems which bollards, now abandoned, had caused in Trinity Street to stop traffic entering the lower section of South Street.

Cllr Susie Hosford said that while she understood the reluctance to have traffic once again in Colliton Street what was needed was a strategic overview of traffic flows in the whole area – and that now might be the right time for Dorset Council to carry out a study before the road re-opened. She said she accepted that if Colliton Street were to be closed it would put residents in Friary Lane in a worse position than they were now and that could not be allowed to happen.

Cllr Richard Biggs said the obvious solution when Colliton Street re-opened was to have traffic calming in place and to have a look at the longer term solution for all the roads which feed in and out of North Square and the High streets but he warned, that on past form, that might take ten years to achieve.