Public transport: Traffic jam

The cost of Andrew’s weekly commute has just risen considerably. Most weeks he travels by train four days out of five from East Kilbride to Edinburgh, via Glasgow Queen Street.  

He uses a ScotRail 16-25 Railcard, which saves one-third of the price of a fare, but even with that, he says since peak fares were reintroduced at the end of last month, he has reduced the number of days he travels into the office.  

“I’m going from about £60 per week to what would be £110, I simply cannot afford that.

Thankfully my boss has allowed me to work from home an extra day.” 

The Scottish Government said when it announced it would not be continuing the pilot – which reduced return journeys between Glasgow and Edinburgh from £31.40 to £16.20 – that it could not justify continuing it as it had only achieved “limited success”. 

Transport secretary Fiona Hyslop said while there had been an increase of 6.8 per cent in passenger levels over the period of the pilot, a 10 per cent increase would have been required for the policy to become self-financing. 

Aslef, a trade union that represents train drivers, described peak rail fares as a “tax on workers” and said their reintroduction would “impact local economies all across Scotland as people see their disposable income reduced”. 

Its Scottish organiser, Kevin Lindsay, does not think passengers were given enough time to change the way they travel. 

“The Scottish Government did not give people enough time to make the shift from road to rail. Removing peak fares was shown to work and will work even better if given the time to do so.” 

But Andrew is not convinced the service that he has experienced travelling to work and into Glasgow at the weekend is likely to encourage people to change how they travel. 

“I can’t tell you how many times I have been on the train from Glasgow Central to East Kilbride and there’s only been two carriages on at a weekend. 

The last time it happened was a few weeks ago and I literally had to force my way onto the train it was that busy.  

“If you’re someone that only uses the train on Saturday night to get into the town and back, do you really expect them to want to use the train during the week to get to work if that’s the experience you think you’re likely to have? 

“It often feels like the train is more than half empty or completely rammed.”

Aslef agrees that rail services in Scotland need to “be made accessible, attractive and affordable” if people are to shift from cars to rail travel in order to meet the country’s climate targets.

Lindsay adds: “This short-sighted decision [to reintroduce peak fares] flies in the face of our ambition to develop world-class rail services and will undermine rail travel by pushing people back into their cars.” 

The pilot scheme, which began in October 2023, came at a £40m cost to the Scottish Government and public sector body Transport Scotland has said that the government would be open to “future subsidy to remove peak fares, should UK budget allocations improve in future years”. 

In the next two decades, the Scottish Government plans to drastically decarbonise transport and it has committed to almost completely decarbonising the road transport sector by 2045 as well as reducing the number of kilometres travelled by car by 20 per cent by 2030. This goal hinges on encouraging people to make more of their journeys by public transport. 

Already these targets are at risk. According to a report from the Climate Change Committee (CCC) in March, the country’s 2030 climate goals are “no longer credible”. And while it says there is still a path to longer-term targets, stronger action is needed to reduce emissions across the economy. One of the two key areas it highlighted was transport. 

According to the Climate Change Plan Update published in December 2020 by the Scottish Government, Scotland’s transport emissions must decrease by 44 per cent by 2030. This means the annual emissions reduction rate must increase by almost a factor of four. The CCC describes that as “an extremely stretching target”.  

Worryingly, the report adds: “A clear strategy on how this will be achieved is still missing.” And that has been followed by another stark wake-up call from Transform Scotland, an alliance working towards achieving sustainable transport in Scotland. It published a report in September that said the Scottish Government is failing in seven of the 10 key commitments made over the past five years to invest in and prioritise sustainable transport. 

The report says seven of the 10 commitments show “limited or no progress or appear to have been abandoned by the Scottish Government”. Increasing the budget for active travel, bus fleet decarbonisation, investment in bus priority infrastructure as well as specifically on Glasgow motorways, rail service decarbonisation and car traffic reduction all are off-track or the target has been missed.  

The bad news does not end there for Scottish Government. As finance secretary Shona Robison wrangles with one of the toughest budgets in the history of the Scottish Parliament, she has cut the transport budget by £23.7m – and the entire sum has been taken from the active and sustainable travel budget, which the government says was necessary to in part fund the extension to the peak fares removal pilot to the end of September 2024.  

Speaking to the media after she announced the wave of cuts at the beginning of September, Robison said the decision was made because “there was a lot of programmes that were not legally and contractually committed” and “a lot of that was in the active travel space”. She added that it is a “key priority” in the 2025/26 budget. 

“Our commitment to green investment is absolutely solid. We believe in a thriving green economy, and we believe in getting people out of their cars, onto public transport, it’s all the same agenda,” Robison said. 

One of the areas in which the Scottish Government is making good progress, according to Transform Scotland’s report, is under-22s bus travel. Since it made bus travel free for those under 22, young people are taking advantage of the scheme and have made more than 100 million journeys, which, hopefully, is embedding positive sustainable travel behaviours for the future.    

However, Scottish Labour MP Scott Arthur, who until he was elected to Westminster in July was the convener of transport and environment at Edinburgh City Council, says “there has been so little done for bus priority in Scotland”. 

He points to the Scottish Government’s Bus Partnership Fund – a £500m pot available to councils via bids, that would help make travelling by bus more attractive by using the money to prioritise buses on roads and in turn reduce journey times and timetable reliability.  However, he says it has not achieved that. 

“What they have done is given us [local authorities] little bits of money here and there for feasibility and building business cases, but not the actual money to get the work done. And that is so annoying because there is so much low-hanging fruit that would really transform the operation of bus services. 

“For a city like Edinburgh, what that means would be reducing bus journey times on arterial routes by 25 per cent, ensuring buses stick to timetables, and, importantly, having those routes extend into surrounding local authorities because we know a lot of the traffic in the city centre today comes from outside of the city.  

“We have to make bus use more attractive to get some of the cars off the road and help deliver the national goal of 20 per cent car reduction by 2030.”  

And while local authorities wrestle to make bus services more reliable, there is an issue with the current fleet – over 70 per cent of public buses are still running on diesel.  

There has been positive news in this area recently, however. In June, the Scottish Government announced that a consortium led by Zenobē, an electric vehicle fleet specialist, would deliver 252 new zero-emission buses and coaches thanks to a £41.7m grant.

Zenobē will also deliver a Scotland-wide charging network for use by all buses, coaches and HGVs.

However, Professor Sean Smith, director of the Centre for Future Infrastructure at the University of Edinburgh, says there are many infrastructure challenges facing the Scottish Government with regard to how it facilitates fuelling decarbonised modes of transport. 

“If you look at the grid, a lot of the cities are currently restricted in terms of the availability of substations for the support and network of power.  

“For example, in terms of the amount of new electrical infrastructure that Scottish Power is saying it will need to have it is between four or five times the amount at the moment in order to facilitate this transition.” 

He adds: “With regards to hydrogen, governments around the world, not just the Scottish Government, are waiting to see the direction manufacturers go.” 

Smith says that if Scotland is to see behavioural change and have more journeys made by buses and trains there needs to be increased investment to encourage it. 

“Look at Winchburgh, we want to put people onto trains, but we still haven’t had the investment from the Scottish Government and other partners to build that community a railway station, despite it being promised.  

“We have told people there is a station coming, and investment has been made for 3,000-4,000 new homes. Those people who live there will have no option but to use cars.  

“How are we going to deliver other infrastructure priorities for electric and hydrogen vehicles, if we can’t deliver the basics at Winchburgh?” 

Arthur agrees that “not funding this transition” will result in more people driving in the cities and as a result it will be “harder to move around our cities, which harms our economy”.  

“There are lots of places, particularly in Europe that are ahead of us in the transition towards sustainable transport. I took a train from Edinburgh to Rome, travelling through London, Paris, Geneva and Milan. When I got back to Edinburgh it felt like I had gone back in time to some extent.” 

Arthur says the Scottish Government has “good policies” that will help facilitate a transition to sustainable transport, but it has “not been able to get the delivery right”. 

“I met with Fiona Hyslop, the transport minister, when I was the transport convener many times and I think she gets what we need to do, but my personal view is she is just not getting the resources to deliver it.” 

There is huge doubt that the government will be able to deliver what it has set out to do on time. Robison, who has been painting a very bleak picture of the public finances, suggested to the media after she announced the cuts to the transport budget last month. 

“When you’re in-year, you can only look at what’s not already gone out, and if you’re going to protect frontline public services, unfortunately, these difficult decisions have to be made.” 

She added: “We then have choices around what we do in the budget on 4 December. What I don’t know at this moment in time, though, is what’s coming down the line in terms of those Whitehall departmental cuts, because if it’s in, for example, net zero, then that will impact on those very same areas. At the moment, I just don’t know.”