Rebuilding the A9 Trunk Road is a Great Opportunity to Invest in the Future

There are two very big changes taking place in road transport that require more thought before building new long distance roads. The first is the capability of many new vehicles to operate more autonomously, and the second is the removal of harmful emissions from vehicles. Although neither will necessarily require major changes to road layouts and configurations, new roads will increasingly help to connect vehicles with each other and require new energy systems.

The speed of change to these new technologies is very rapid. Over the next 20 years robots will increasingly replace people across many activities. This can be a good thing if humans can use these opportunities to enable higher quality lifestyle choices than undertaking repetitive tasks.

There is a real prospect that within my lifetime road deaths will become a thing of the past. For my grandparents, the death of construction workers or miners was viewed as something that society needed to tolerate for the greater good. Road deaths are still viewed in this way, but with connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) we now have the prospect of combining the skills of people with the verification of machines to virtually end the death toll on the roads. The carnage that kills at least three people every week on Scotland’s roads can become a thing of the past. With manually driven cars, more lanes have tended to improve safety and efficiency, but with future technologies it may well be that fewer lanes or simpler road configurations could speed up cars and lorries in zero emission road trains. A socially progressive country like Scotland could lead the way by creating a road environment designed to pioneer these new technologies.

We do not know precisely what these technologies will be, but we can ensure that investment is broadly consistent with emerging trends. The advantages of automated vehicles travelling without driver interventions in long distance road trains could be greatest on long distance routes like the A9 where the time spent travelling can be used more productively than driving, so anyone building a new long distance route like the A9 dualling project must plan for the future.

Anyone who thinks it is too early to be thinking about these things might want to refer to the debates that took place in the 1970s when the current A9 between Perth and Inverness was being planned. Mass car ownership was new and it seemed to be too bold a step to build a dual carriageway when traffic flows could be handled by a single carriageway. As a young civil engineer in the 1980s I can recall my bosses moaning about the short-sighted decisions on the A9 which translated into wider concern as the death toll on the road grew.

The retrofitting of the A9 started even before it was completed. Parts of the A74 between Glasgow and Carlisle were rebuilt as motorway less than 20 years after the A74 was built. The A9 currently requires a raft of safety measures such as average speed cameras to enable it to operate as safely as people expect of a modern long distance road. Dual carriageways and motorways might have seemed to planners as out of place in rural Scotland in the 1970s and 1980s, but short sighted thinking wastes money.

Already in 2017, about three quarters of new Volkswagen Golfs sold in Norway, the best-selling car, are plug in electric variants. Scotland has not reached that level just yet, but there is no car manufacturer in the world that is not expecting that electric vehicles will increasingly dominate vehicle sales. The complete decarbonisation of land based transport by 2050 is one of the Scottish Government’s goals but the precise technologies to be used for heavier vehicles in the future remain uncertain.

Internationally accepted systems for enabling vehicles to connect with energy systems will emerge early in the lifespan of an upgraded A9. These might include new battery designs that can charge much more rapidly, so that trucks can be recharged at speeds more similar to refilling with diesel. Alternatively they may include methods of charging on the move. Both induction systems built into the road surface and overhead catenary systems are currently on trial across the world. Whatever technology emerges will require significant retrofitting of motorways and long distance trunk roads such as the A9. The problem in 2017 is that nobody yet knows what system will emerge.

Perhaps new technologies could be tested on the A9 to help strengthen Scotland’s economy as a centre of excellence in future electric highways? Fixing the A9 could be an opportunity to lead the world, but rushing ahead with an A9 dualling programme to a 20^th century design could turn out to be a huge waste of money. Smart money invests in the future so with clever procurement Transport Scotland could capture value from those wishing to invest in innovation to help pay for a better A9 at the same time as making road improvements with more certain benefits. It might even be easier to attract the funding to build an innovative approach than funding a legacy approach to road-building.

2017 is a great time to be planning an experimental approach for the A9, but whether a future approach for long distance zero emission road trains will look more like todays single or dual carriageway roads, or even railways, remains unclear. In any future scenario, many of the current junction designs on the A9 will need replaced, since arguably they were never fit for purpose anyway. Each year that passes yields more insights. For example, the trials of lorry trains on English motorways will be particularly informative for junction design using UK road standards, and the testing of induction charging in snowbound parts of Norway will offer lessons relevant for operating in the Scottish climate.

The new roads we are building use government financing structures requiring payback over many years. Given that our kids will paying, it would be good to think that they will be paying for something they want. With so many uncertainties about the future, a good starting point is to work with what we know, and invest in that. It is already very clear that our grandchildren will not be expecting roads designed for manually driven vehicles with internal combustion engines. The poor decisions of the Scottish road builders in the 1970s and 80s have left a legacy A9 best known for being a generation behind the long distance dual carriageway networks built to remoter locations in the rest of Europe. This time round why not rethink the current road design specifications and go a generation ahead?

• 2 Comments
• Posted by derekhalden on 29 May 2017
• Topics: Blog