Skip to main content

FTA supports A9 HGV speed limit trial

The Freight Transport Association (FTA) has given its support to the HGV speed limit trial which commences on the A9 in Scotland on Tuesday 28 October. The pilot project on the A9 will raise the speed limit on the single carriageway sections between Perth and Inverness from 40 to 50mph for heavy goods vehicles which have a laden weight exceeding 7.5 tonnes. The trial, which will last 36 months and is to be introduced at the same time as a new average speed camera system, is aimed at improving the opera
October 10, 2014 Read time: 2 mins
The 6983 Freight Transport Association (FTA) has given its support to the HGV speed limit trial which commences on the A9 in Scotland on Tuesday 28 October.
 
The pilot project on the A9 will raise the speed limit on the single carriageway sections between Perth and Inverness from 40 to 50mph for heavy goods vehicles which have a laden weight exceeding 7.5 tonnes.  The trial, which will last 36 months and is to be introduced at the same time as a new average speed camera system, is aimed at improving the operational performance of the route.
 
Malcolm Bingham, FTA’s Head of Road Network Management Policy, said: “FTA is in full support of the 50mph speed limit trial for HGVs on the A9 and we look forward to its introduction on 28 October.  We welcome the opportunity for such a trial as we believe the current differential in speed limits between HGVs and other vehicles increases the road safety risk.  This trial will provide some much needed evidence to help determine if there are any advantages, on safety grounds, in setting the speed limit of an HGV to 50mph."
 
The A9 remains one of Scotland's most important links. The 2112 Scottish Government is committed to dualling the route between Perth and Inverness by 2025 and the pilot is part of wider engineering, enforcement and education measures being delivered in advance of the dualling programme.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • City Safety reduces low speed accidents on Volvo’s XC60 and S60
    May 29, 2013
    It was four years ago that Volvo introduced its City Safety collision avoidance system which is designed to reduce the number and severity of low-speed accidents to the US market. However, a study in America by the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI) has shown that the results may not be as good as initially indicated by an earlier report. According to Volvo, statistics show that 75% of reported collisions occur at speeds of up to 30km/h (18.6mph) typically in urban traffic and in slow-moving traffic queues
  • Monitoring during construction reveals benefits of new expressway
    June 6, 2014
    David Crawford reports on how the authorities in New Zealand are using Bluetooth technology to monitor the effects of a new expressway as it is being constructed. New Zealand Highway Agency (NZHA) is using Bluetooth-based vehicle detection to assess the impact of its biggest road building project as the various sections are completed. The large-scale deployment of a Bluetooth-based vehicle detection system is making substantial contributions to traffic data needs in progressing the new Waikato Expressway, a
  • Communication: the future of machine vision
    May 30, 2013
    Jason Barnes asks leading machine vision industry figures what they consider to be the educational barriers to the technology’s increased uptake by the ITS sector. The recent rush by some organisations within the ITS sector to associate themselves with the term ‘machine vision’ underlines just how important the technology has become in a relatively short space of time. However, despite the technology having been applied in certain traffic management applications for some years, there remains a significant s
  • Demonstration of first German A9 motorway safety project
    November 10, 2015
    In the first project of the ‘digital A9 motorway test bed’ to show how vehicles on a motorway can share hazard information, Continental, Deutsche Telekom, Fraunhofer ESK and Nokia Networks have carried out a real-time demonstration of communication between vehicles via the Deutsche Telecom LTE cell network. The project, which aims to improve road safety and traffic management, involved upgrading Deutsche Telekom's existing LTE network at sections of the A9 motorway test bed with Nokia Networks’ mobile e