Next week BEAR Scotland will commence work to widen 4km's of the A9 between Kingussie and Aviemore to a 3-lane road, in a scheme that has been widely condemed as cazy.

However to make matters even worse, in response to the uproar over the construction of a three lane carriageway, it's now been confirmed that it will consist of a single lane seperated by solid lined hatchings from two lanes, so unlike most crawler lanes on the A96 each section will only permit overtaking in one direction, only serving to increase frustration by wrecking one of the few good overtaking opportunities on that streach of the A9.

Three lane roads are a recipeie for chaos, but this is even more half-baked. Either you have a 3-lane road with dangers associated with it or you don't. What will happen here is people will cross the hatching to overtake slow moving traffic, and those going the other direction who don't know the road will pull out on the basis they have the right to overtake on that streach, perhaps without checking the lane is free off opposing traffic. Thus making it even more dangerous.

The biggest cause of accidents as the yellow signs indicate is frustration, this will only increase with this scheme, wouldnt the money have been better spent adding a couple of km's to the tiny Dual Carraigeway at Newtonmore?

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What a crazy idea! There used to be a three lane section on the A9, north of Perth and it was very accident prone... all it needs is a bit of snow on the road, the lane markings are obscured

BTW, was you ISP under attack again... the phorums were inaccessible for about an hour and I got the following error message...

"Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/winterhigh/public_html/phorum-3.4.1/db/mysql.php on line 160 Warning: Too many connections in /home/winterhigh/public_html/phorum-3.4.1/include/header.php on line 48 Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in /home/winterhigh/public_html/phorum-3.4.1/include/header.php on line 48 Could not connect to db"

The server suffered hardware failure... It's been fixed and all is ok again.

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I've driven to the alps quite a number of times and usually caravan in France in the summer. These 3 lane roads are very common on the continent and if the A9 road is marked the same way, I see no problem. You have two lanes in one direction for a mile or so then it changes to the other direction.
A cheap way to allow safe overtaking, if the drivers have a bit of patience. In some areas of France, virtually the entire road for miles is like this, equivalent of double white line the whole way, two lanes changing continiously.
A couple of sections of the A82 on Loch Lomondside are like this and I dont recall major incidents on those stretches. In fact the latest fatality was on a stretch of normal wider two lane where it appeared safe to overtake!

Just got back from 10 glorious days skiing in the rockies (Sunshine & Louise, tho Sunshine Rocked). We drove daily from Golden which is usually a 2 hour drive . One of things we kept remarking about was this 3 lane road business in relation to Britain. The main road we drove on was the Trans-Canada highway which wends its way up from Golden up the Kicking Horse Pass (see url=http://www.th.gov.bc.ca/kickinghorse/khc_project-facts.htm/url

There was ALWAYS snow on the road & we encountered at least two blizzards which would paralyse the A9, but they have rumble-strips where the divided lanes begin & also on the road edges. Easy to use in any condition & yer also pretty aware of the total lack of immediate help if ye wipeout, so 95% of all drivers we saw stayed on the speed limit.

Another wee thing we had a chuckle about was listening to the traffic update where the announcer started his report with: "no real winter news today , Revelstoke reports 15cm of snowfall last night but no need for chains yet...!!"

Prayin' for a good Scottish season, Rob.

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Post Edited (18:04 hrs on Mon 20 Dec 04)

Kaoshan Wrote:
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> What a crazy idea! There used to be a three lane
> section on the A9, north of Perth and it was very
> accident prone... all it needs is a bit of snow on
> the road, the lane markings are obscured

they usually make sure the lane markings are cleared so i think that'll be ok. they usually make a big thing of that.




Rory

the 3 lane on the A9 is pointless! they should have invested the money in making it dual carriageway. no point comparing it to the roads in the alps and canada as british drivers ar different to others and just because it works there doesnt mean it will here! the A9 has many death traps on it due to overtaking in wrong places and the 3 lane stretch on th a9 that has opened used to be a great safe place to overtake now you can overtake in one direction leading to fustration to those on the otherside who cannot overtake. fustration=accident!