By Professor John Robertson OBA

This is a constant chorus from the opposition parties but it’s not based on any scientific evidence.

From the London School of Economics in 2013:

In theory, transport improvements decrease transportation costs, improve access to markets, foster economic integration, stimulate competition, generate agglomeration economies and a number of other ‘wider’ economic benefits….Although road improvements are routinely subject to appraisal – predicting the economic benefits before the roads are built – they have not historically been subject to any evaluation in order to work out whether these benefits actually materialised!

So will road-building set the UK on the ‘road to recovery’? Overall, the economic benefits are relatively small. We also need to be careful in interpreting these changes as gains to the national economy. To some extent, jobs may be displaced from other areas.

^{https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/does-road-building-produce-any-economics-gains/}

As for safety:

From a Freedom of Information request – A9 incidents, accidents and fatalities between January 2020 – 2024, published today, we can report that overall deaths fell dramatically from 12 in 2022 to 4 in 2023.

2 of the deaths took place on non-dual carriage-ways and 2 on the supposedly safer dualled sections.

The FOI result was, I suspect a big disappointment to the opposition MSP or opposition journalist who wasted more than £300 of taxpayer money rooting for it.