CHARLES BANNERMAN: Stark reality is people are dying due to lack of action
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As I write, and I hope and pray that no more intervene, the latest fatal accident means that a disturbing total of 12 lives have been lost on the A9 between Inverness and Perth in just three months.
This is the biggest death toll since 2010, despite average speed cameras going live exactly eight years ago.
The impression was that the cameras were making a big difference, so how do we explain this truly awful figure?
It could just be a statistical blip, and this kind of number tends to be quite prone to them. Or might there be some kind of change in driver behaviour; are offenders perhaps becoming increasingly confident of getting away with it? Purely anecdotally, I do wonder.
But whatever’s happening, this death toll on the main artery linking the Highlands and central Scotland is far too high and once again highlights the Scottish Government’s alarming slowness in fulfilling its pledge to complete the vital safety feature of dualling by 2025. To regurgitate a familiar and depressing statistic, just three years before that deadline expires, only two of the 11 promised sections are in place. The prospects of delivery are therefore well into airborne pig territory.
As the schedule continually slips, the Scottish Government has got to understand that its tardiness is actually killing people.
Indeed, it’s conceivably now possible to estimate just how many lives are being lost as a result of the Scottish Government’s pretty clear failure to deliver on a categorical, vote winning promise. It’s as stark as that. People are dying due to lack of action.
Police confirm lorry driver killed on A9
Man identified after fatal A9 crash
Then there’s the connectivity issue. Inverness is no longer a county town of less than 30,000 with transport links to match. It’s a major city and tourism hub with over 60,000 in its immediate environs, but road transport has utterly failed to keep up with extremely rapid growth.
Inverness is listed as the 13th largest community in Scotland and the 12 above it all have immediate access to continuous motorway or dual carriageway.
But for us to access that, as opposed to the A9’s few short sections (with apparently very dangerous ends), you have to journey 100 miles to Dunkeld, or through 90 miles of frequent A96 bottlenecks to get to Inverurie.
Shocking, isn’t it? There’s no continuously dualled road within pretty well 100 miles of our large and quickly expanding Highland conurbation.
So what chance the pledge to dual the A96 by 2030, a project which hasn’t even started? And all that before even contemplating the convoluted death trap otherwise known as the A82.
Credit to local MSP Fergus Ewing. He’s certainly making the right noises and seems committed to campaigning for improvements.
However his difficulty may lie with his own party. Not only is it extremely intolerant of dissidents; in order to preserve a majority, it’s also deeply in hock to the anti-motorist Greens.
At a recent Academy Street consultation, also relating to traffic flow, a Highland Council representative was happy to admit to me that general Holyrood policy on emissions is to deny motor vehicles facilities to discourage them from using roads.
Sorry, but when government policy is in effect killing people and strangling Scotland’s biggest remote community along with its peripheral settlements, they need to think again and stop discriminating against us.
