COLIN CAMPBELL: Challenge could force rethink on flawed Inverness city centre plan
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The combustible debate over the future of Academy Street in Inverness - essential traffic artery or urban green paradise - will flare back into life with an upcoming legal challenge to Highland Council's intention to remove a daily mass of traffic from it.
The owners of the Eastgate Shopping Centre, whose businesses like many others in the city centre fear a severe downturn in trade if the car restrictions go ahead, are due to take their case against it to the Court of Session in early May.
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Going to court is a costly undertaking and those involved presumably have been advised they have a good chance of winning. If they are successful, thousands of people who believe this is a foolish overstep by the council and will lead to inevitable traffic disruption and potential chaos elsewhere will heartily approve. And so, bizarrely, will many councillors.
I use a bike and don't have a car, and would in an ideal world like to see the permanent removal of all traffic between Culloden and Clachnaharry. And I quite like the idea of having the cycling freedom of Academy Street while a huge number of motorists are forced to use alternative routes. But you can't always get what you want. And our net-zero council has failed to convince many people that it's possible to change a main city centre route without serious repercussions for traffic flow with frustrated and angry drivers going elsewhere.
The court will be asked to look at the council decisions which resulted in wafer thin support for the traffic ban. The Inverness city committee backed it by 12 votes to 10 - hardly a clear and decisive mandate for such a drastic change going ahead. The issue was then considered by the full council, which supported it on a 35-33 split, with two abstentions thrown in. The narrowness of that vote emphasised the fact that the council is pushing ahead with a hugely controversial move many of its own members fundamentally disagree with.
How that factor will play out in court remains to be seen. But it can hardly be dismissed as an irrelevance.
Crown and City Centre Community Council has now joined those against the change, insisting that the streets in their locality will become "rat runs" for displaced drivers. Its members certainly can't be accused of making a rush to judgement. They're echoing a concern that's been reverberating around since the plans for a new-look Academy Street first emerged.
A legal challenge, delays, the potential for appeal, and further long delays pushes the timeframe for change even further down the road. And can the council really forge ahead with a proposal that so many people are opposed to, and which almost half of its own members tried to block? Whatever the court decides, nothing can change the level of opposition among councillors.
Changes may be made to Academy Street - they've been vaguely on the agenda for at least the past 20 years - but this scheme could end up back on the drawing board. And until councillors can actually agree by a clear margin on what will be of most long-term benefit to the city centre, that's where it belongs.
