NEWS RELEASE
Wednesday 10th December 2008
Anti-Forth road bridge campaign rejects new plans
The ForthRight Alliance, which is opposed to the building of a new Forth road bridge, today (Wednesday 10th December) rejected the revised proposals for the proposed Second Forth Road Bridge. The alliance said the Scottish Government's attempts to reduce the massive cost of the project would do nothing to reduce its effects on the climate, and on other public transport projects.
David Hansen, on behalf the ForthRight Alliance, said:
"We welcome the fact that the government has now admitted that it never intended to build a replacement crossing and instead intends to build a second, additional road bridge. How a massive expansion in road capacity across the Forth fits with last week's Scottish Climate Change Bill is beyond us. If the government was serious about climate change, it would have announced the scrapping of the new bridge and instead spent a tiny fraction of the money on repairing the existing one.
"The £1.7bn cut in the original £4.2bn estimate is not convincing, and further undermines public confidence in Ministers' competence to handle the project. Given that their own engineers are confident of arresting the corrosion - which was the reason given for building a new bridge - we now call on the government to cancel it. Ministers should be committing funding to new public transport, not private cars.
"We note that under the revised proposal, public transport would be consigned to the closure-prone older bridge while private motorists would use the specially weather-protected new bridge.
The ForthRight Alliance policy position is available at <http://archive.transformscotland.org.uk/campaigns/FRA/docs/2008-12_FRA_briefing.pdf>.
ENDS