New figures have thrown a stark new light on the positions of the two parties that until recently made up the Scottish Government on the case for dualling the A9 by confirming what many people already knew - dual carriageway is safer than single. Transport Scotland numbers show that A9 single carriageways - with 199 injuries and 15 deaths - are twice as deadly as dual carriageways which experienced 114 injuries and seven deaths. In a recent Holyrood debate, Highland Greens MSP Ariane Burgess claimed dualling the A9 would not make it that much safer while her colleague Maggie Chapman argued “road building is a subsidy for wealthy, usually white men”.
Then during a campaign event in Inverness at the weekend , First Minister John Swinney said “the government has taken forward the A9 dualling project, I think, in a timeous fashion given that we had a whole range of capital projects”. Ms Burgess tried to argue that “the argument for road upgrades, which is based on safety concerns, is more complex than it might seem. For example, on the A9, accident rates and injury collisions are higher per mile on dualled sections than on non-dualled sections.
” The new Transport Scotland figures detailing injuries and fatalities in the 2020 to 2023 inclusive – a period when there were eight deaths on a 25-mile stretch near Slochd in just three months back in 2022. That included a crash that took the lives of two grandparents and a grandchild from Inverness - David McPherson (68), E.
