Green Party calls the A5 WTC a “vanity” project
On The Nolan Show yesterday, Green Party councillor Brian Smyth suggested redirecting funding away from the A5 dual carriageway project and instead spending £300 million on safety upgrades to the existing road, beginning a Portadown to Derry rail corridor and using the remaining money to plug Translink’s operational deficit.
On the surface, that may sound reasonable, but in reality it completely misunderstands the problem.
Firstly the A5 is not dangerous because it lacks cat’s eyes or slightly wider verges. It is dangerous because it is a single carriageway strategic route carrying heavy freight, agricultural traffic, and huge volumes of regional transport through dangerous junctions and countless crossing points. You cannot safety upgrade a road that is fundamentally unsafe by design and minor safety upgrades will not solve the problem, and the only credible long term solution is full dual carriageway segregation.
Brian Smyth also pointed to Europe to support his argument while ignoring the fact that most European countries invest heavily in both public transport and strategic road networks, while also treating modern road safety standards and grade separated dual carriageways as basic infrastructure requirements rather than optional extras.
Having travelled through parts of Eastern Europe with significantly better strategic road infrastructure than large parts of the West, it is hard to ignore just how neglected our roads have become. Anyone who regularly travels west of the Bann can see that large parts of the region remain connected by roads that are decades behind modern European standards and upgrading key strategic routes to dual carriageway standard should be viewed as the bare minimum, not some extravagant “vanity project”.