Council agrees to pursue safety improvements to ‘death trap’ Levenwick road
The council will seek more than £3 million of external funding to improve the safety of a road at Levenwick described as being a “death trap”.
Shetland South councillor Allison Duncan gave his backing to the proposal for a new 6.8 metre two lane wide road with safety barriers between the north and south Levenwick junctions.
He said the section of road had a higher accident rate than the local and national averages and urged the SIC to pursue improvements “before there are more accidents”.
But Catherine Hughson questioned why roads in the West Mainland are being overlooked in favour of others.
She echoed councillor Theo Smith’s concerns about the Haggersta to Cova road, raised last week, and said she was “frustrated” by the lack of progress.
Ms Hughson said she felt there needed to be “a fatality” on the road for the council to take action.
And she said the west side was becoming the “poor relation” of the rest of the mainland.
Councillor Stephen Leask said the stretch of road at Levenwick was a “busy highway” and one which was “incredibly important” to the whole island as it connected to Sumburgh.
Councillors approved the proposal to pursue around £3.317 million of external funding.
Oliver Peterson
Given we have declared a “Climate Emergency” and all, you might think that any and all new decisions made would give a thought as to how achieve these goals – especially in an instance like this where there is a clear opportunity to build active travel infrastructure/cycling paths into a major new road upgrade at a relatively small marginal cost.
I sometimes feel the word “Emergency” doesn’t do a lot of heavy-lifting at times.