OPINION: A5 project in “existential crisis”

By Wesley Johnston

THE A5 Western Transport Corridor (WTC) has been in gestation now for almost 14 years, yet nothing has been built.

On March 16, the Department for Infrastructure (DfI) published an interim report from the most recent public inquiry, which has recommended that DfI carry out further environmental assessments, which pushes back commencement of Phase 1 by a further two years.

This is not just a setback – I believe the time has come to admit that the project is in existential crisis.

Firstly, the costs continue to rise. From £560m in 2007, to £844m in 2009, £1bn in 2016 and £1.2bn today, the scheme was only considered by the Executive when Dublin offered to stump up £400m, over half the estimated total in 2007.

This amount has not increased since then, but the shortfall that must be met by the Executive has soared to £800m, more than the original cost of the scheme.

This figure is likely to increase further over the next two years.

With our limited resources, the project could now eat up Northern Ireland’s entire road building budget for years to come.

Secondly, the rising costs have eaten away at the benefits of the scheme. The economic benefits in terms of journey time savings, reduced crashes and benefits to the wider west must be greater than the construction and ongoing maintenance costs for the project to make economic sense.

And the more the cost goes up, the lower the benefits are.

In fact, the inquiry concluded that, other than the Omagh and Strabane bypass sections, none of the scheme makes economic sense any
longer.

In other words, the benefits would be less than the cost for almost all of it.

Thirdly, environmental law is such that the documentation for new roads must be both (a) up-to-date and (b) comprehensive, but these two requirements stand in tension.

The more comprehensive a document is, the longer it takes to produce. The more up-to-date it is, the more detail it needs to leave out. Both deficiencies can lead to successful legal challenges as we have seen.

DfI now has to carry out more new assessments, but by the time these are done, other documents may be out-of-date, while a single new legal challenge could reset everything again.

This cycle has been going round and round now for almost ten years and shows no signs of changing.

Given that the scheme cannot be completed in a timely manner, and that environmental requirements continue to scupper it, the DfI Minister must now take a different approach.

Firstly, break the project up into sections and focus on the two that are actually deliverable – the bypass sections.

Secondly, focus on more cost-effective options for the A5, such as single-carriageway bypasses of small settlements like Sion Mills.

Nobody doubts the benefits the scheme would bring to road safety.

But politicians need to decide whether they are going to stand over a project that is manifestly undeliverable, or whether they will focus on a scaled-down, but attainable, outcome.

Wesley Johnston is a well-known researcher and commentator on Northern Ireland’s roads and motorways. He is a former pupil of Omagh Academy.