A96 Trunk Road Aberdeen to Inverness : EIR release

FOI reference: FOI/17/02080
Date received: 12 September 2017
Date responded: 11 October 2017

Information requested

I am dis-satisfied with the response to my FOIS as it advises that an "Engineer from our Operating Company visited site on 9 August 2017", however there is no information on the findings from this visit or indeed what was the intended scope of the visit. This information is critical.

Response

As the information you have requested is 'environmental information' for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with your request under those Regulations. We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with your request under FOISA.

This exemption is subject to the 'public interest test'. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption, because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes. This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

Visits are made by our Operating Company to proposed development sites to undertake a number of on site measurements which are then passed to Transport Scotland to make an assessment of the impact of the proposed development on the trunk road network. In this instance the site had been visited previously and measurements had been taken. On the 9 August 2017 our Operating Company confirmed that there were no changes at the location and that the previously taken measurements were still appropriate.

Please refer to Annex A, which contains the site measurements. An exception under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) applies to some of the information requested because it is personal data of a third party and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act 1998. This exception is not subject to the 'public interest test', so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exception.

You may be wish to note that the assessment of the suitability of the access was undertaken using the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges Volume 6 Section 2 TA 23/81 " Junctions and Accesses: Determination of size of Roundabouts and Major / Minor Junctions" which, based on the Average Annual Daily Traffic (AADT) of 9,400 vehicles per day at this location, indicates that the proposed junction will accommodate the 220 vehicle trips generated by the development every day (approximately 7 turning movements per dwelling per day). The generated trips are obtained from the Trics Database, which provides predicted traffic flows for developments based on a national database of traffic generated by different development types which can be filtered to match local circumstances.

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FOI-17-02080 - Annex A.pdf

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2 page PDF

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113.0 kB