I AGREE with Patrick Harvie’s article (This is why big road investment is not what Scotland needs, June 7), and just may sign up for the Greens soon. The SNP’s efforts to embrace at all costs the “muddled middle” seem to always bring us policy outcomes such as are outlined here.

I use public transit by choice. As a North American emigre, I was forced all my life to drive a car, and to support one. What a liberation it has been to have a functioning public transit system, as Glasgow does! Works brilliantly for me. But with more investment it can work much better.

I read a good piece recently regarding the SNP’s embrace of the automobile as the “way to go” in terms of transportation policy. There is an unspoken belief guiding SNP policy, which is that “buses are for losers” and “proper people” drive cars. Oh dear me!

Remember peak oil? It never went away, we just stopped discussing it. We’re scraping the bottom of the oil barrel now. The cheap and abundant oil that supported our romance with the private automobile is a thing of the past, and setting up mass transportation systems is the only possible out for us. Now ponder this: what a few Iranian missiles delivered to the Saudi wells will do to petrol prices! This is no longer a far-fetched prospect.

And then of course there is another wee bagatelle to consider: WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE FROM OUR CARBON EMISSIONS. No, not our grandchildren, please park that illusion. Our children certainly, and possibly us. The climate breakdown situation is truly dire. The scientists are screaming it from the rooftops – check out Peter Wadhams or Paul Beckwith on YouTube. The science is easy to find and even easy to understand, but “What about the convenience of my car? What about the status I derive from my shiny new Jaguar?”

Our house is on fire folks. Please pay attention.

Kevin Brown
via thenational.scot

PATRICK Harvie’s article is excellent. Words do not produce a sustainable transport policy on their own, action by party politicians is also needed.

Despite more than a decade to do so, the current Scottish Government has not authorised the electrification of even a centimetre of railway in Scotland. Not one centimetre. The electrification schemes which have just been completed were authorised by the previous government.

Since then nothing has been done to set up a rolling programme of electrification. Stop-start funding makes projects more expensive and wastes training.

Instead government has spent money on yet more large road schemes, despite their hot air about sustainability and now the climate emergency. I pay little attention to the words of politicians, until they are backed up by actions.

For those who are unsure about what actions are needed, point your web browser at Transform Scotland – www.transformscotland.org.uk.

David Hansen
via thenational.scot

UNTIL public transport can make it just as convenient for me to go from my house to a place I want to go to as I can in my car, I am unlikely to use public transport.

Currently 15 minutes’ walk to the nearest bus stop. 1.5 hour’s bus journey to nearest railway station. Another 15 minutes’ walk to platform, carrying luggage. I would be in Inverness by car before I was half way there by public transport, and been much more comfortable.

We are never going to go back to the days of the extent and convenience of the railways of the 19th and 20th century, and it is going to take a long long time for the world and the society we live in to fall out of love with the motor car. Meanwhile please just finish dualling the A9.

W M Nicoll
via thenational.scot