Few infrastructure projects in Scotland are discussed as often and understood as poorly as the dualling of the A9 between Perth and Inverness. This is an attempt to lay it out in sequence.
The commitment
The route was to be dualled in full — roughly 80 miles, divided into eleven sections — with an original completion target of 2025. The case was principally safety. The road carries heavy freight, tourist traffic and local journeys on the same single carriageway, and the collision pattern on single carriageway trunk roads is characteristic: overtaking manoeuvres, head-on impacts, high severity.
What was delivered
Two sections were completed within the original programme. A third was in construction well behind schedule. The remainder had not begun.
Why it slipped
The main causes, roughly in order of impact
- Procurement approach — a bundled contracting model that did not attract the expected bidder interest, requiring a restart
- Contractor market — a thin field of firms able and willing to take on projects of this scale and risk profile
- Cost inflation — construction costs rose sharply from 2021, moving the whole programme’s budget
- Ground and environmental conditions — river crossings, protected habitat, and a live railway alongside much of the route
- Keeping the road open throughout — every section must be built while traffic continues to use it
The revised target is 2035. That date assumes each remaining section is procured and delivered without a repeat of the problems above, which is an assumption rather than a plan.
What happened in the meantime
Average speed cameras were installed along the route in 2014. Casualty figures improved afterwards, though attributing that improvement solely to the cameras is contested — traffic volumes, vehicle safety standards and enforcement all moved in the same period.
Freight operators and Highland councils have continued to press for interim measures: more overtaking opportunities, better junction treatments, laybys that are not also the only facilities for thirty miles.
“A project of this length outlives the ministers who announce it. That is not cynicism, it is arithmetic. Eleven sections, one road, and it has to stay open the whole time.”
An engineer who worked on two of the completed sections
The A96, briefly
The commitment to dual Inverness to Aberdeen has been through a review of its own, with a corridor study weighing full dualling against a mix of bypasses and targeted improvements. Anyone driving between Elgin and Nairn in August has formed their own view.
The short version: 2035 for the A9, no confirmed programme for the A96, and a great deal of traffic in between now and then.
