THE two consultations on the Edinburgh-Glasgow Improvement Programme (EGIP) and the ScotRail 2014 re-franchising both expose a major flaw in current transport policy.
When Strathclyde Passenger Transport Executive was stripped of its rail responsibilities in favour of Transport Scotland (TS), it was hoped that a larger, stronger body had taken over control of local rail services.
However, it is now becoming clear that TS has little or no interest in local transport, with all the emphasis on middle-distance inter-city transport. There is a huge vacuum developing in the planning and control of local transport not just in Strathclyde, but also in the other urban centres in Scotland.
The EGIP project gives an opportunity for not just faster services, but also for more stops, as electric trains excel at faster acceleration ("Campaigners press case for new stations", The Herald, February 2).
All the new stations listed are near good populations. There should be no question of closing well-used stations in the Glasgow area.
We still seem to be stuck in the "transport as a business and not a service" mode. This leads to the situation described, of eliminating half a local service to Anniesland, just to add one more service on the heavily-provided Glasgow-Edinburgh route, because there is more revenue on the latter route. There is no doubt that local transport will never be the money-maker that middle and long-distance transport can be.
With rail already the fastest route between city centres, I fail to see why speed in itself is so special. I suspect the majority of the car traffic on the M8 is there because it is going to somewhere not well served by public transport, so extra speed to city centres is not going to reduce it.
Gordon Casely neatly describes where the barriers lie in developing new rail services (Letters, February 3). We have several layers of policy making, yet all of these bodies combined do not have the powers and resources to get things done.
Contrast this with the situation at Transport for London, the Verkehrsverbunden in Austria and Germany, and similar bodies in other parts of Europe. The common thread is a single body, with all the powers and resources to get on with the job.
Much more intervention is needed in the market place than a few extra buses to produce the comprehensive system of local transport, which people need to avoid using private transport.
What is needed are Scottish versions of Transport for London, which would specify and control all local transport.
Arthur Homan-Elsy,
55 Deanburn Road,
Linlithgow.
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