WELCOMING shorter trip times on the East Coast rail route Transport Minister Humza Yousaf says “making rail more attractive is an ideal way to encourage more people out of their cars and on to greener transport”(Herald, 17August) yet your report welcomed trips up to 20 minutes shorter on the completed M8 as giving the economy a £1bn boost (“Faster journeys on upgraded M8 help to give economy £1bn boost”, The Herald, August 18) – but ignored the evidence that equivalent Glasgow-Edinburgh rail services are slower than 30 years ago with full completion of improvements to expand train capacity and restore trip times to just over 40 minutes again delayed to 2019 or later.

This contradicts the aim of the current National Framework to ensure that rail trip times on main corridors are lower than by car, encouraging modal shift from cars and associated gains from improved air quality and cuts in greenhouse gases. It also contradicts the facts that rail passenger use has seen record growth in the past 20 years while car use per head has stabilised or fallen. The National Travel Survey shows that annual mileage per household car is down from 9,200 in 2002 to 7,800 in 2016 (this Survey is now confined to England but separate Scottish data indicates stabilised car use per head of population since 2007 along with record rail growth).

Such contradictions show the strength of the case for more fundamental thinking on effective links between aims for the economy and society in the consultations now started on a review of National Transport Strategy, the related Planning Framework and accelerated action to improve city, tourist and rural environments by encouraging shifts from car use and ensuring both cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and much improved air quality.

Tom Hart,

Former Chair of Scottish Transport Studies Group,

81A kings Road, Beith.

IAIN M Barclay (Letters, August 18) suggests that Nicola Sturgeon looked very satisfied on the completion of the M8 motorway; well she might. Mr Barclay reminds us that the first motorways opened in 1959, but these were all down south, and it took until the mid-1960s for Scotland to get its first motorway. That was shortly before man landed on the Moon, before Ms Sturgeon was born, and before the opening of the Scottish Parliament, so Scotland's First Minister can surely be allowed to feel pleased that after decades of Unionist governments it was an SNP Government in the driving seat which completed the M8.

Ruth Marr,

99 Grampian Road,

Stirling.

IAIN M Barclay writes in praise of Spanish motorways. The motorways all over Spain, not just in Andalucia, were built with EU money, and usually run in parallel to existing, perfectly good National roads. Their construction was entirely unnecessary. They cost untold and literally unrecorded billions.

They are wonderful to drive on because hardly anyone uses them. They have done nothing to help the Spanish economy to develop. And the massive corruption involved in their construction has brought the Spanish economy and political system to its knees.

I am all in favour of studying other countries' experiences while planning our own. But any Spaniard will tell you not to follow what happened in his country.

Alasdair MacDermott,

Achnacone Farmhouse, Appin, Argyll.