Time for talk on traffic problems

THE eastern distributor road to ease traffic congestion in Elgin may have been approved by a council committee, but it is far from the end of the matter.

Determined residents of Wittet Drive are not giving up the fight over the demolition of two homes, the loss of garden ground at six others, and the increased traffic flows that would disrupt their lives.

The two sides are poles apart in their views on the project, and surely it would be beneficial if residents, council officials and councillors could get round the table and talk.

Caroline Webster is chair of a new group combating council plans to build a new distributor road through Elgin.

The council’s acting chief executive, Roddy Burns, has already offered to meet residents, and the action group has expressed the desire for talks. Let that be the next step.

It would have been little comfort for residents to hear one councillor describe the western distributor route as "the lesser of two evils"; it hardly suggests a well-thought-out, positive policy.

This week’s public meeting called by the residents’ action group highlighted the continued anger of home owners who claim that "the scale of devastation to Wittet Drive is completely unnecessary".

There is no easy answer to sorting out traffic flow problems in Elgin, but the question has loomed large for too many years.

Major retail and residential developments have been allowed to spring up without a roads network fit to cope with them. Moray is not alone; Aberdeen, for all its oil wealth in previous decades, has found itself in the same position and is only now going down the bypass road.

Elgin, of course, did campaign for a bypass, only to be told by successive Labour and Labour-Liberal governments, and now the SNP administration at Holyrood, that its traffic flows did not justify it.

Politicians who had campaigned for it got into office and then conceded, disappointingly, that Edinburgh officials were right, the figures did not stack up.

Moray’s roads people were told to sort out congestion problems themselves.

What a pity there could not have been a national-local co-operative effort to draw up a plan to manage the A96 and town traffic movements.

Fochabers is thankfully well on the way to getting its bypass; Nairn is next, Huntly and Inverurie are bypassed already, leaving Elgin and Keith piggies in the middle.

Elgin’s need is far greater, but it seems to be offered little hope.

Let us hope that a bypass becomes a possibility again at some point.

In the meantime, Wittet Drive and the western distributor route will continue to be a controversial point. All the more reason for the council and residents to sit down and talk.

New hope in life science centre

THE plans for a new £6 million life science centre on the Moray College UHI campus, revealed in today’s ‘Scot’, should give the whole of Moray a boost. It has been spoken about for a long time, and now we can see how the bricks and mortar will come together and doors will open, hopefully, in 2013/14.

The centre will include a 140-capacity conference facility, community hub, new teaching classrooms and video conferencing facilities, and specialist facilities for life science and health.

Following hard on the heels of the announcement of a life science company – making medical devices – coming to Forres in a £4 million investment and offering up to 30 skilled jobs, it shows that Moray has so much to offer.

We already make the best whisky, the best soups and jams, the best shortbread and the best cashmere fashions; now we have the chance to develop a new area of expertise.

It all offers hope as we strive to regenerate the local economy and create new jobs.