Time to rethink Nairn’s road plan?
Work moves towards completion on the new Nairn Town and County Hospital, which aims to concentrate local health services into a new very expanded building.
While it’s great to see this continued investment in Nairn, I can’t help but worry somewhat about exist road planning – how will it cope with increased traffic routed through to the south of the town?
This isn’t a flippant concern either: the only ways to get to the hospital are either via the minor road from Cawdor – or else across Nairn High Street and past Millbank and Rosebank Schools.
The new community hospital is going to seriously concentrate health services and admin support – Lodgehill Clinic will be moving into the hospital, there will be at least one NHS dentist available, plus dozens of admin support staff are already moving out of premises around Victoria Street to the new building.
This means a serious increase in the amount of traffic that has to filter through the existing road system to the new hospital building.
The one-way system at Leopold Street means that the only way in directly from the A96 is via Waverley Road – but this is a residential street, and not really designed to be a major traffic throughfare.
This is especially underlined during school run times when traffic can get seriously gridlocked at the Cawdor Road end by the schools. And I mean seriously gridlocked.
So how is the existing road system going to cope with increased traffic due to expansion of health services?
And that’s before we even begin to address the potential Balblair developments.
The observation line is that Nairn was built to drive through, and that the existing town layout offers little room to expand traffic volumes within the town itself.
This could be just a general problem to ponder – but the fact that we’ll soon have an increase in health services traffic, sometimes clashing with major school congestion, all between the top end of the High Street and the schools, means a real danger of serious accidents – in my opinion.
So what’s to do?
In the absence of a by-pass, there is no significant ring road infrastructure to help create traffic access and easing measures. The presence of the railway and river mean any transport solution is likely to get very expensive very fast.
I had wondered whether it may be possible to set a new road through the existing farmer’s show field – but even then, it would still be in danger of simply hitting the bottleneck between Millbank School and Waverley Road.
In the meantime, I’m sure it’s great to see the hospital expand – but Nairn’s infrastructure may really start to creak under the strain – and the consequences of this could be tragic.
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Ah……..this is most definately one of the biggest probelms in the Nairn area, the lack of forethought in infrastructure.
It’s a total nightmare when there are any road works. Last year’s road works on the A96 left the surrounding country roads in a dreadful muddy mess. many still haven’t recovered and the council has done nothing to help this. Many roads don’t have designated passing places and too many motorists are in too much of a hurry to use the undesignated ones. I don’t know if there were any accidents on these back roads; it will have been a minor miracle if not.
Traffic jam into Nairn along the A96 tailed back as far as Delnies today…
Black Isle Show today – usually the worst queues of the year.
It is time for them to put double yellow lines from the Classroom to the hospital.
We will also need a full time traffic warden to monitor them and give out tickets on lodge hill road Cawdor Street.
This is not a time to loose the position of a parking warden in Nairn, as someone will have to keep the road to the hospital clear.
And time to say good-bye to all the people who just park wherever they like.