NEWS RELEASE
Tuesday 17th November 2009
REPAIR THE FORTH ROAD BRIDGE - AND SAVE SCOTLAND £2,000 MILLION
The ForthRight Alliance [1], the campaign against the proposed Second Forth Road Bridge (misleading called the 'Forth Replacement Crossing' by Transport Scotland), have called for Scottish Ministers to save Scottish taxpayers £2,000 million by concentrating on repairing the existing Forth Road Bridge rather than pursuing an unaffordable, unsustainable and unpopular [2] second road bridge.
Lawrence Marshall, chair of the ForthRight Alliance and former chair of the Forth Estuary Transport Authority (between 2005 and 2007), said:
"Working to resolve the problems of the existing bridge should be the top priority of the Scottish Government rather than pursuing an unaffordable, unsustainable and unpopular second bridge.
"A second road bridge comes at the huge cost of £2,300 million. It would be financially irresponsible for the Government to commit to constructing a second bridge when the existing bridge can and should be repaired. Work is underway to repair the cables. Even were cable drying to fail, new cables would cost between £91 and £122 million. A new bridge is guaranteed to bring traffic disruption. New cables may not even be required and, if they were, the existing bridge would remain largely open for the vast majority of the time.
"It is our view, therefore, that any Ministerial decision to commit to an additional bridge costing the public purse up to £2,300 million would be, to say the least, premature - and would, moreover, damage the prospects for other more pressing public spending priorities in Scotland."
See <http://archive.transformscotland.org.uk/campaigns/FRA/docs/2008-12_FRA_briefing.pdf> for further details.
ENDS
CONTACTS:
[1] The ForthRight Alliance is a coalition of groups opposed to the construction of a Second Forth Road Bridge. The Alliance believes that a new road bridge is both unwelcome and unnecessary, as a series of reports have indicated that the problems with the Forth Road Bridge can be addressed without building a second bridge. See <http://www.forthrightalliance.org/> for further details.
[2] A YouGov poll earlier this month found that 57% were in favour of repair of the existing Forth Road Bridge. See <http://www.patrickharviemsp.com/2009/11/news-release-yougov-poll-shows-57-oppose-extra-forth-road-bridge/> for details.
END OF NEWS RELEASE