Meeting of the Parliament 17 March 2015
I congratulate Mike MacKenzie on securing the debate and thank him for bringing the motion to Parliament. Like David Stewart, I am a regular user of the A9 and the road is very important to my Perthshire constituents. However, people from across Scotland will have an interest in the safety of the road and what can be done to improve it.
It is essential that the Scottish Parliament debates issues that are important to the people of Scotland and I can think of few subjects that have generated as much commotion and heat as the question of average-speed cameras on the A9. The number of people who are members of online campaign groups that call either for the removal of the speed cameras or for speedier dualling totals nearly 30,000. Clearly, it is an issue that is very much in the public eye, and it is not going to go away.
When the A9 average-speed cameras were first suggested, I was generally open to the idea. Anything that can be done to improve road safety on Scotland’s most dangerous road should be encouraged. However, I was strongly of the view that the speed cameras could be introduced only in tandem with an increase in HGV speed limits to 50mph on the single carriageway stretches. That case was vigorously put by people in the chamber—David Stewart among them—and by campaign groups outside the Parliament, including the road hauliers. I am pleased that the Scottish Government listened to those voices and brought in the pilot speed increase. I understand that it is working very well and that the feedback has been very encouraging.
We are six months on from the average-speed cameras going live, as Mr MacKenzie’s motion indicates, so what now? I fear that Mike MacKenzie is being a little bit premature in celebrating success. One thing is clear: speeding has been reduced. That fact is almost indisputable. However, is the road safer as a result? I am not so sure. Scarcely a week goes by when I do not open the pages of The Courier or The Press and Journal and read about yet another serious crash or another deadly near miss.
Just two weeks ago, we saw yet another tragedy—a horrible double fatality on the Perthshire section of the A9 near Dunkeld as a result of a head-on collision. We do not know all the details, and we should not speculate, but sadly we continue to see people die on the A9 and we continue to see near misses.
The week before last, a video of a dramatic near miss close to Blair Atholl went viral—almost every major Scottish news outlet ran a story on it. Even the New York Daily News featured a different near miss from the previous week in its online edition. That is global recognition for Scotland, but of entirely the wrong kind.
Proponents of average-speed cameras claim that reducing speeding has ultimately made the road safer, but that assumes that speed is the primary factor in accidents on the A9. As has been mentioned time and again, road layout and driver frustration are responsible for a large percentage of collisions on the road. Therefore, until we have a full year of evidence and accident statistics, it is too early to celebrate the success of the average-speed cameras. The A9 is an important tourist route, and road traffic levels, and therefore the propensity for accidents, are much higher during the summer months than in the winter. Therefore, if Mr MacKenzie will forgive me, I believe that we cannot rush to judgment on the issue and that we need to wait until we have gathered more evidence. I hope that the Scottish Government will resist the urge to install more average-speed cameras on roads across Scotland until we have concrete full-year results and a proper opportunity to scrutinise them.
I strongly believe that, in creating transport policy, the Scottish Government should consult the people who use the road—the drivers—and those who live in the vicinity. Taking into account their views is a must. I am pleased to note that Transport Scotland is having a public consultation on the proposed Dalwhinnie junction and I ask it to take a similar approach if it is considering rolling out average-speed cameras to other trunk roads across the country.
Members are united in their desire to see the A9 lose its reputation as Scotland’s deadliest road. I hope that average-speed cameras are part of the cure, but we cannot make a judgment on that today. We will be able to do that only in due course. In the meantime, I still believe that the only long-term solution is a fully dualled road and I urge the Scottish Government to press ahead with its dualling plans.
17:22