All 1,100 passing places on the north coast route are to be converted into full service areas, under a scheme intended to address the shortage of facilities along the route.
The problem is real and this newspaper has covered it. Nine working public toilets serve several hundred miles of road in peak season, and the consequences of that shortfall are visible in the dunes and forestry edges of half of Sutherland.
The response is comprehensive. Each passing place would gain fuel, EV charging, a coffee franchise, toilets, waste disposal, a small retail unit and parking for thirty vehicles.
The complication
The complication is that the passing places would no longer be passing places.
A passing place works because it is empty. Its entire function is to be a piece of road with nothing in it, into which one vehicle moves so another may go past. Filling it with a fuel forecourt, a Greggs and thirty parked cars removes the only feature it had.
The road between them remains single track.
“So it is single track for three hundred metres, then there is a Greggs, then it is single track again. Where do I go when a bus comes? Into the Greggs?”
A haulier who operates on the route weekly
The proposed solution to the complication
Officials have confirmed that new passing places would be constructed between the service areas.
Asked whether those would in turn be converted to service areas under the same policy, the response was that the policy applies to passing places existing at the date of adoption.
Asked what happens at the next review, the response was that this would be a matter for the next review.
The scheme
- Passing places converted: 1,100
- New passing places required as a result: 1,100
- Toilets delivered: 1,100 — up from 9
- Coffee outlets: 1,100, on a route with a resident population of about 12,000
- Average distance between service areas: 340 metres
On the central objective, it should be said, the scheme succeeds absolutely. Nobody driving the north coast route would ever again be more than 340 metres from a toilet. Everything else about it is a disaster, but that one thing is solved forever.
