The Scottish Executive is to press ahead with its pledge to scrap tolls on the Tay and Forth bridges, despite consultants finding this would increase traffic flows by 15-20% by 2015.
Steer Davis Gleave advised the executive that scrapping the 80p charge to use the Tay Bridge would lead to a 40% hike in southbound and 20% rise in northbound peak flows by 2015.
Dundee’s inner road would be ‘unable to accommodate’ this increase in northbound traffic to the A90 and Perth, which was on top of the 20% overall rise expected with the toll. While the extra southbound traffic ‘appears to be more satisfactorily accommodated’, it would add more vehicles during the evening peak when, even with the toll remaining, congestion was expected to be ‘severe’ by 2015.
Ending the £1 charge to use the Forth road bridge, already at capacity in peak periods in the peak direction, south to Edinburgh, would increase traffic by 10%, adding to the existing queues.
In both cases, it would ‘not represent good value-for-money’ to end tolling, a Scottish Nationalist Party policy endorsed by a Scottish Parliament vote. While Patrick Harvie, Scottish Green Party MSP, claimed that ‘pursuing policies which make congestion worse, is simply absurd’, Scottish transport minister, John Swinney, said it would be ‘an injustice’ to keep the tolls.
The Fife, Tayside and Lothians communities should not have to pay tolls, now that those using the Erskine and Skye bridges did not, Swinney insisted. Instead, the executive ‘will invest in initiatives which reduce congestion, such as improved park-and-ride facilities, and improved rail, bus and cycle links, to reduce traffic in and around the bridges’.
Ken Laing, chair of the Society of Chief Officers for Transportation in Scotland, and Dundee’s city engineer, said the two regional transport partnerships and Dundee, as the local highway authority, would need to examine whether current plans for park-and-ride, for example, ‘are robust in light of these predictions’.
Steer Davis Gleave also recommended that work to upgrade Dundee’s road network should be undertaken, including to the Riverside roundabout and junction of South and East Marketgait.
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