EAST Cambridgeshire residents are playing their part in helping to beat congestion across the county. Fifty people from Ely and the surrounding villages were picked to take part in workshops at Ely Community College designed to look at traffic problems al

EAST Cambridgeshire residents are playing their part in helping to beat congestion across the county.

Fifty people from Ely and the surrounding villages were picked to take part in workshops at Ely Community College designed to look at traffic problems along the A10 corridor.

The recent consultation exercise was organised by Cambridgeshire County Council which has received almost £1.5 million from the Government to study congestion and offer ideas on how to solve it, including investigating road charging.

The Government has set up a Transport Innovation Fund which is expected to grow to £2 billion by 2014 to tackle traffic congestion nation-wide.

It has asked the county council and other selected councils across the country to look at ways of managing traffic flow into their major cities by way of rising bollards, traffic lights and bus lanes among other ideas.

In return for managing traffic problems, the Government will make cash available for improvements such as cycle links, footpaths and other schemes.

A Cambridgeshire County Council spokesperson said: "By the spring of next year we will be reporting the findings of this survey and all the work we have been doing and presenting it to cabinet.

"All these schemes will be looked at in much more detail and information gathered around traffic patterns. We will see which of these schemes will have the most impact and produce the best results for the whole county."

Without intervention researchers expect there to be an additional 63,000 car journeys in and out of Cambridge by 2016. This will lead to worsening congestion and emissions, a negative impact on the local and national economy, the environment and residents' quality of life, they warn.

Congestion is growing on the A10 between Cambridge and Ely and, if unchecked, more traffic will be diverted onto the parallel B1049 causing increasingly severe problems for villages, they say.