Highland Council: Academy Street plans allows necessary vehicle access for businesses

Highland Council bosses insist that the scheme has taken account of “all stakeholders” and have tabled a “really good compromise” that still allows access to parking, shopping and delivery for city centre businesses.

Malcolm Macleod, executive chief officer for infrastructure and environment, said: “This is not a project that is going to last five years – this is a project that will fundamentally change Academy Street, we think for the better and in the long-term it will fit with future transport patterns.

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“The important thing is that the scheme has also been designed to retain access to both of the main city centre car parks, so people can come in as they usually would do, and we see that as a real benefit.

“But there is also that wider part of this that we tried to explain that there is a proposal for park and ride sites around the city centre. It has not traditionally been part of Inverness but when you have projects like Inverness Castle coming along that will increase the number of people coming into the city centre we have a strategy trying to intersect traffic where we can in new park and ride sites.

“One of the big concerns appears to be that businesses fear it is a pedestrianisation scheme that will effectively halt traffic coming in and I think we demonstrated that is absolutely not what it is about.”

Craig Baxter, principal transport strategy officer, said: “We have taken a long time to develop this design, Academy Street has been on the cards for quite a number of years, we have listened to all the stakeholders and we think this is a really good compromise.

“It enables businesses to continue to get the access that they need but it also supports people to make more sustainable healthy travel choices across the city as well.”

Highland Council Inverness city leader Ian Brown said: “People can still stop outside the shops they always stopped at, there may be different routes to try and get to the shop but no parking is being stopped, loading is not being restricted so we see an improvement and see a larger number of people stopping and shopping rather than driving past.”

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