COLIN CAMPBELL: Is Inverness city centre falling victim to green zealotry?

Plans to remove traffic from Academy Street in Inverness and turn it into a leafy, net zero, carbon neutral green paradise always seemed highly ambitious.

Now as hostility to them grows, the conviction firms up that they should be heading for the scrapyard.

Councillors have a democratic mandate to do what they think is best for the public good. That brought us the £300,000 riverside Gathering Place.

Council officials have a bureaucratic mandate to – well quite often it seems – do whatever they like.

But none of them have a direct financial or business stake in what happens in Academy Street or the city centre at large. They can afford to make their plans and mull over them with a sense of detachment.

If they work, all well and good. If they don’t work, for them it’s a case of nothing ventured, nothing gained.

It won’t cost them anything either way. Their salaries will still be paid
in full whatever the outcome.

City centre traders are in the polar opposite position. If the green paradise, net zero notions result in a serious loss of trade, it will be a personal and financial disaster for them. Without stores and shops we don’t have a recognisably functioning city centre. The area is just another dot on a satnav screen.

And these traders are coming out in increasingly vociferous terms to warn that the plans for Academy Street, and now possibly Queensgate as well, would indeed be a disaster for income and jobs.

There may be a tendency among some to assume the highly paid council “experts” have the correct handle on all this. That their analyses and flow charts and blueprints and surveys are superior to the views of those who run businesses in the city centre.

But the people who do run businesses will have studied the radical traffic-reducing plans as carefully as any official and more carefully than many councillors.

Theirs is not a half-baked, reflex opposition to change. Their livelihoods and the jobs of their staff depend on it.

The warnings from city centre traders are matched by a high octane level of scepticism from members of the public about these plans.

Yes, the trees and greenery and pristine scenario are nice to look at in an artist’s impression.

But the question is, why now? What’s changed in terms of new roads built or traffic reduction to make it feasible to close off Academy Street to the thousands of drivers who use it daily?

Nothing of significance has changed. So where do these vehicles go without causing even worse congestion or outright chaos elsewhere in our already traffic logjammed city?

Is this scheme in fact at least partly being driven by the net zero, carbon neutral idealism – or zealotry – that seems one of the few things to be thriving these days? Elsewhere, environmental extremists are glueing themselves to the roads to block traffic in the belief that this will lead to a car-free society and “save the planet”.

Councillors and officials may not be extremists with the magic glue at hand, but are their proposals being fuelled by a similar strain of thinking? “We’re going to clear all those toxic cars out of the city centre and transform it beyond recognition. That’s our absolute priority. And if that causes problems elsewhere, so be it.”

City centre traders want to avoid becoming the collateral damage if it all goes horribly wrong.

Their views deserve far more credence than the pretty-picture ambitions floating through the heads of those council “experts”.