'T-plate' plan for tourists driving on Highland roads

The T-plates are intended to alert other motorists to the fact that someone may be unfamiliar with the roads

Tourists driving in the Highlands are being encouraged to display "T-plates" in the hope it will reduce accidents.

The signs, which feature a green letter T and have "tourist" written at the bottom, are intended to alert other road users that the driver might not be familiar with Scotland's roads.

It comes after Transport Scotland warned earlier this year that the number of crashes caused by "inexperience of driving on the left" had increased sharply.

Kingussie-based hotelier Robert Marshall, who created the plates, said he came up with the idea after his own "awful" driving experience in Tenerife which he said left him "completely stressed out my head".

Mr Marshall described his own anxiety on driving in a foreign country on BBC Radio's Good Morning Scotland programme.

"Just reaching roundabouts, junctions, just starting the journey initially - I was on the wrong side of the road, every control and dial was in a different place - and I just was screaming at my partner 'I wish these people knew I was a tourist,'" he said.

As well as his own experience abroad he said he had seen first hand how stressful it can be for visitors driving in Scotland, and he hoped the plates would help.

"It's a simple idea but it's one that's really started conversations about road safety," he said.

Laura Hanser and Robert Marshall hope the T-plates will help people when driving abroad

Laura Hanser, a road safety campaigner with the A9 Dual Action Group, has helped Robert launch the T-plates and said she has seen results when testing it out on the roads.

She said: "I went out on a single carriageway at 50mph. I would let different vehicles catch up with me.

"You were very aware of a couple of seconds until they acknowledged that and there was a definite pull back... in acknowledgement that that plate was on your car."

She said she was hopeful the plates would help create space which would allow foreign drivers to "acclimatise to their surroundings, to the car and to the environment that they're in".

Ms Lanser added: "The infrastructure in the Highlands is under severe strain with the sheer influx of tourism, so anything that we can do to help prevent or create a wee bit more awareness about other people's driving and take that added stress away from them can only be seen as a positive."

Guidance given to BBC News from Transport Scotland confirmed that the plates are legal to display.

A fatal problem

Transport Scotland figures released in May showed the number of crashes caused by motorists driving on the wrong side of the road had increased by 46% in a year.

There were 35 collisions caused by "inexperience of driving on the left" in 2023, up from 24 the previous year.

There have also been a number of fatalities involving drivers from abroad in recent years.

Katie Strong, her brother Jared Bastion and mother Mary-Lou Mauch died in a crash on the A9 while on a trip from the US to visit the locations of their favourite TV show, Outlander, in 2022.

The same year, Italian naval officer Alfredo Ciociola was convicted of killing five people, including his four-year-old son, in a crash on the A96 near Keith.

Two years earlier, Gerrit Reickmann, from Germany, caused the death of his girlfriend Melina Rose Päprer when he was involved in a head-on crash while driving on the wrong side of the road near Drumnadrochit in the Highlands.