It has been shown time and time again that the SNP government just don't do public transport. Whether it's the Borders Railway which is still stuck in the sidings, or pouring money into the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route instead of relieving congestion by providing more buses and trains, or the Big One- the new Forth Road Bridge to run beside a Road Bridge that may not be falling down after all, the Scottish Government seem to have their mindsets stuck in the 1950s. The car is king, and no one can persuade them otherwise.
So it comes as no surprise to see a consultation document from Transport Scotland about the future of Scotland's railways which proposes cutting services, increasing fares and making more people stand. This on the same day that the House of Commons is debating fuel prices, and with peak oil around the corner there's not much chance of those prices ever falling. The very moment when we need more public transport, the SNP propose to scale it back.
Not only that, they want to split Scotrail up into different franchises. A separate company could run the Edinburgh to Glasgow services, the most lucrative part of the network. This is the route which is supposed to subsidise the rest of Scotrail, but the SNP want to sell it off (to presumably gain more revenue for the government). Hmm, I wonder which Scottish-based transport company would like to get their grubby mitts on the money-making Edinburgh to Glasgow trains?
You can read the document for yourself here, and we have until February to respond to it. One good thing is that it is only a consultation, so perhaps the government will do what it promised when it came to power, and realise that it does not have a monopoly on wisdom.
1 comments:
"pouring money into the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route instead of relieving congestion by providing more buses and trains"
Hmmm. More buses in Aberdeen? Ha! It's not more buses we need, it's more room for them to drive on! The place is already pretty much a car park in rush hour - all more buses would do is increase the congestion.
Don't get me wrong, I like the Greens, and I would dearly like them to become the main opposition party, but I really do wonder if you guys understand that BUSES drive on ROADS when you criticise road projects. It's very easy to blithely say that more buses or a non-existent rail network are the answers to Aberdeen's transport problems, but where would these extra buses go? Where would these trains appear from? Aberdeen's problem is it has too many bottlenecks, and is too concentrated into a small area. I don't know why, but it seems particularly badly set out for buses, something that doesn't seem to be appreciated by people in Edinburgh and Glasgow.
I should point out that despite owning a car, I take the bus to work, so I'm not a petrolhead. I have no love of the car - it's just a rust bucket for getting around in - and I would love to have a first class rail network in Scotland and decent buses. But where does the investment come from? You're going to say "from the money that is being spent on the new Forth Road Bridge and the AWPR", but would that really be enough to build the infrastructure we need? The massive cost of a single tram line in Edinburgh suggests we need significantly more than that to build the sort of rail network we need to get people to dump their cars in the kind of numbers that would justify the cost.
(I do think many of the ideas in this consultation are a bit loopy - but it is only a consultation, not a concrete proposal.)
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