A better connected country would also be a wealthier one, says IAN RITCHIE
Back in the Seventies, ahead of a first visit to Skye, I called the tourist information office to book accommodation and was offered a ‘B&B with evening meal’. When I said I would prefer to eat out the agent replied, “and where will you eat out?” In 1975, there wasn’t a restaurant anywhere on Skye.
Twenty years later, the bridge to Skye was completed and it was no longer an offshore island but effectively became part of the Scottish mainland. The population has grown by 46%, and it has moved from a declining, agriculture and crofting-based economy into a tourism and service economy.
Today Skye has more than 40 restaurants, including five listed in the Michelin Guide, one with a star. It demonstrates the importance of infrastructure in building a dynamic economy.
As it happens, in the last few years, I have visited Norway, Iceland, Shetland and the Faroe Islands and ambitious investments in key infrastructure have clearly been incredibly important in the development of these places, with the notable exception of Shetland.
On our cruise from Bergen up the coast of Norway to Kirkenes on the Russian border it is very obvious that the huge number of coastal mountains and fjords makes it a very complex country to traverse.
So, in recent years, Norway has invested heavily in transport, building expensive tunnels and bridges, to connect up the country.
The Lærdal Tunnel, opened in 2000, is 24.5 km long, making it the world’s longest road tunnel, and the Rogfast project is a huge subsea road connection which completes the E39 coastal route. Their current ten-year national plan allocates a further £45.3 billion of central funding to the national road network.
Norway, roughly the same size and population as Scotland, has progressively converted what were once isolated communities into integrated parts of its national community. Meanwhile we are still waiting for our much-promised dual carriageway to Inverness.
In the case of Iceland, its road system currently has 12 road tunnels totaling about 64 km. The Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration says tunnels are important not just for transport but because they: “greatly influence the connections between areas of employment, whilst also strengthening regional development”. The most impressive, the Hvalfjörður Tunnel, is a 5.77 km subsea road tunnel, opened in 1998, reduces the journey around the fjord by 45 km, shortening it from one hour to just seven minutes
Iceland’s road authority proposes a long-term programme in which 14 important tunnels will be built over the next 30 years.
But the gold medal for infrastructure development in the north Atlantic must go to the Faroe Islands, a small, isolated country 300 miles north west of Shetland. As an archipelago it is similar in size to Orkney and Shetland, each with around 18 inhabited islands. The Faroe population is just a little larger than Orkney and Shetland combined.
The Faroese have spent about six decades systematically integrating the 18 islands with four subsea tunnels. The Sandoy Tunnel, opened in 2023, means that more than 90% of the Faroese population is now connected to the main road network without requiring a ferry. An extraordinary achievement for a country with population of only 55,000 (up from 38,000 in 1970).
The Eysturoyartunnilin is an 11.2 km subsea tunnel network linking the capital, Tórshavn, on Streymoy Island to Eysturoy Island, significantly reducing travel time from over an hour to just 15 minutes. Opened in 2020, it is the second-longest subsea road tunnel in the world. When I travelled through it, I was fascinated to come across the roundabout – called the ‘jellyfish’ – in the middle of the tunnel, 188 meters below sea level, to connect the traffic to two separate ongoing routes.
The Faroes have effectively treated their islands as one economic system and invested in making that system function despite their geography. Today, people can quickly move across the whole archipelago.
The Faroese Government says these developments represent “a major advancement for Faroese society as a whole, both commercially, culturally and not least in terms of people.”
Partly because of these investments, the population of Norway, Iceland and the Faroes are all substantially richer that the Scots. The average Faroese is over 50% richer than the average Shetlander.
Not surprisingly, Shetland has been looking enviously at these developments and has decided it is time to be ambitious. On June 30th this year, the Shetland Islands Council approved the Inter-island Transport Connectivity Programme which proposes replacing the islands’ ageing ferries with tunnels. The first tunnel planned to be built under the strategy would connect Shetland’s mainland to Yell and then from Yell to Unst.
A Faroese geologist said “Back in the 1980s … I thought we were crazy, but look what we’ve achieved”, which inspired the Shetland tunnel campaign to call its report: “Subsea Tunnels: Are We Crazy?”
But they are not crazy. The tunnel to Yell is estimated to cost a total of £402m, with £327m expected to be spent on the construction.
It seems a lot of money, but by comparison the two CalMac ferries ordered for delivery in 2018 (but yet to be fully completed) has cost the Scottish Government £460m so far – up from the original estimated £97m. In the light of this, maybe the expense of a fixed link looks quite realistic.
A second tunnel linking Yell and Unst is estimated at approximately £345m. Together, the two projects would carry a combined price tag of around £747m. The Faroe Island tunnels were built with borrowed money paid back by road tolls and a similar system is planned for Shetland.
Andy Sloan, of Glasgow-based engineering consultants COWI, said Scotland is lagging behind countries such as Norway and Iceland in treating infrastructure for remote communities as a national priority.
A Transport Scotland review published in December 2022 also examined fixed links for the Sound of Harris, Sound of Barra and the route between Mull and the mainland, and said they “can improve reliability, connectivity, capacity and travel times.”
Surely it is about time that we caught up with our northern neighbours and brought our island communities into the 21st century.
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