A9 Crisis Summit audience say ‘we will be dead before the A9 dualling is done’
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Confidence in the Scottish Government’s commitment and Transport Scotland has fallen off a cliff as audience members asked when they thought the dualling of the A9 will be completed said they expect to be dead before it is done.
While many were impressed by The Inverness Courier’s A9 Crisis Summit no one was impressed by what they heard from transport secretary Mairi McAllan or Transport Scotland officials Allison Irvine or Rob Galbraith.
Several prominent people in Highland public life attended including the convener of Highland Council and Badenoch and Strathspey Councillor Bill Lobban who was enraged by what he heard.
“My community is sick and fed up of seeing body bags being taken off the A9 – the actual cost of this road is not in pounds, shillings, or pence – the actual cost in this road is the number of people who lose their lives, for no reason.
“You should not lose your life on the A9 because you make a mistake and the way to prevent that is by dualling it from Perth to Inverness and beyond.”
Asked what he made of the some of what the officials had to say, Cllr Lobban said: “Not particularly good to be honest. I don’t think I have come away from this with anything concrete that I didn’t know about before.
“So I am not particularly impressed and I am now not convinced that the A9 will be dualled in my lifetime. I didn’t hear anything of substance, at least not from those who were responding to the questions.
“I think I heard a lot of platitudes, ifs, maybes, et cetera. What I heard was this nonsense about Brexit and Covid, we knew by the time that it came to Brexit and Covid the A9 was not going to be dualled by 2025.
“I want to see an exact timescale with a commitment but we have had those before so why should we believe the next line of commitments or do we have to wait until the next election when they need to gather votes in or do we have to wait for the next referendum so there is more votes to be had by dualling the A9?
“I think we deserve an accurate timetable now with no nonsense.”
Jane Cumming, former chairwoman of Highlands and Islands Committee of the SCDI thought it was “really interesting actually and I think the thing that was really marked was the passion and strength of the audience.”
“If ever Transport Scotland were in any doubt about the depth of feeling there is up here, then they are under no illusion now. It was very, very clear,” she said.
“I think that was a very important part of it because we have seen transport ministers come and transport ministers go – I can’t remember how many of them I have met in my time as the chair of the SCDI but certainly it was a lot.
“But I think often that it is the officials that you need to get to, the Transport Scotland people who frankly I think have been very intransigent and have rules that they follow and they don’t like it if things don’t fit the rules and that became quite apparent today.
“I don’t think I will be alive when it is dualled. I remember when they worked out that it would be 2025 and I worked out that that was going to more or less coincide by the time of my retirement because I used to have to drive up and down that road probably two or three times a week.
“And I thought, well it is never going to get dualled until I retire and now I don’t think it will be dualled until I am dead, I will be long dead and gone before it gets dualled.
“I like to think they might look at some of the short-term safety measures about the signage or the speed. I run a tourism business and that is probably the single most prominent question I get asked – what is the speed limit on the A9? – and that is not coming from foreign people who don’t speak English – that is coming from Canadians, Americans.
“It is just something so simple and they think they should be going at 50mph because it is the only speed sign that they see at any point yet that only applies to lorries so they don’t understand what speed a car can go at.
“It seems to be just a logical thing that it just doesn’t happen.”
Finally George Rennie, a retired consulting engineer, said the only way to move it forward now was to create an Inverness based agency separate to Transport Scotland charged with delivering the A9.
“Well, to be honest, I think the cabinet secretary speaks well but she'll be here today and gone tomorrow – there have been so many different cabinet secretaries,” he said. “Transport Scotland seems to be a bureaucracy and their processes are what controls progress.
“I think if we really want to see progress we should be requiring that our program management office is established in Inverness with the authority to drive this project forward on behalf of the government and its agency.”
