COLIN CAMPBELL: Botched Highland Council plan for Academy Street in Inverness has run out of road
After all the sound and fury over plans to remove thousands of cars from Academy Street a mass of traffic still grinds along it and will continue to do so for the foreseeable if not indefinite future.
The most determined council drive to effect radical change there after 30 years of vague intentions hit a brick wall in the Court of Session when a judge ruled that the consultation process surrounding the scheme was flawed to the point of being unlawful. Highland Council has now lodged an appeal against that ruling, but where it all goes from here is anyone's guess. Nowhere fast, that's for sure.
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Whatever the defects in consultation, the scheme was flawed in other respects also, so much so that ultimately councillors were themselves hopelessly split over proposals which generated huge controversy.
Inverness councillors were divided after a narrow 12-10 vote in favour of the Academy Street changes. The full council brought no clarity or resolution when members backed the scheme by only the thinnest of margins on a 35-33 vote.
That was an unsatisfactory and unconvincing mandate for such drastic upheaval.
With councillors themselves unable to comprehensively support officials who devised these changes, there was no chance of public and commercial doubts over the trouble-torn scheme being allayed.
From the outset, it seemed a highly risky experiment driven mainly by idealistic net zero, carbon neutral intent. Of course many of us would like a city centre devoid of traffic, where people could stroll at their leisure amid greenery and street cafes. And if this relaxed atmosphere brought in a free-spending surge of shoppers, store owners would have welcomed it with open arms.
But in making their own assessment, the trustees of the Eastgate Shopping Centre believed it would be disastrous for trade and made the costly but ultimately winning gamble to contest it in the courts. And they had a lot more at stake than officials whose salaries would have continued flowing into their bank accounts uninterrupted, no matter the outcome or consequences of the Academy Street closure.
A significant number of people were firmly in favour of this going ahead. But in my own random consultation process, I seemed to come across far more who had at least some element of doubt about it. A nice notion in theory, but traffic can be chaotic enough as things stand, and it was difficult to fathom how that could fail to be worsened by the closure of Academy Street to thousands of vehicles a day.
Lord Sandison has now delivered his verdict on the legalities of the proposal and it may well be a conclusively crushing one. Officials will already have spent many hundreds of hours on this and questions will rightly be raised as to whether they should be allowed to spend many hundreds more on pursuing it any further.
The issue will be reviewed by the full council next week. But with so many councillors opposed to the traffic changes, the scheme as it currently stands looks to have run out of road.
