What on earth has Glasgow City Council done to our city? Glasgow has become an enormous, seemingly permanent building site, disfigured by barriers, excavations, diversions and half-finished streets. The Avenues programme must surely be a contender for the most poorly planned, badly managed and extravagantly expensive public realm exercise in Scottish history.
The pace of progress is astonishing, and not in a good way. Work sites appear abandoned for days, sometimes weeks. When workers are visible, one too often sees several standing around, some apparently engrossed in their mobile phones, while little obvious work takes place. Who is managing these contracts? Who is monitoring performance? Does anyone at the council care how long this disruption continues?
Meanwhile, motorists, businesses, residents and visitors must negotiate an obstacle course of temporary traffic lights, inexplicable diversions and endless congestion. Frustration is palpable, sometimes spilling over into dangerous driving, including motorists proceeding through red lights. Such behaviour is unacceptable, but the chaos hardly helps.
And what of the streets already completed? Too often, supposedly improved public spaces appear poorly maintained, with weeds, litter, staining and deteriorating surfaces undermining the expensive transformations. What is the point of spending millions creating these spaces if the council cannot maintain what it has already built?
Hundreds of millions of pounds are being committed while Glasgow's magnificent architecture disappears behind fencing, cones and rubble. A city that should be attracting visitors, investment and commercial activity instead presents an image of neglect and disorder. It is embarrassing.
Yet the council presses ahead with more schemes, supported by consultations that too often appear designed to endorse decisions already made. There is a distinct impression that the views of a relatively small but well-organised and vocal cycling lobby carry disproportionate weight, while the practical concerns of businesses, residents, motorists and those who depend on the city's roads receive considerably less attention. A city of Glasgow's size and diversity surely deserves a more balanced approach.
This is not an argument against cycling or improving public spaces. It is an argument against waste, interminable disruption, questionable priorities and an apparent absence of competent management. At a time when essential services are under pressure, the lack of urgency, financial discipline and accountability is indefensible.
Councillors cannot simply shrug their shoulders and move on to the next grand scheme. They owe Glasgow answers about the costs, the delays, the apparent waste of public money and the dreadful condition of its streets. With local elections next May, those responsible will have to answer to the electorate. Voters will have the opportunity to decide whether this record of disruption, expenditure and poor delivery merits another term in office. I say that Glasgow deserves considerably better.
James Roxburgh, Glasgow.
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How much more can they take?
I wonder how much more reputational damage the royal family can sustain. For some time now we have had bad news associated with the former Duke of York’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, which has reached the stage of a police inquiry involving Balmoral, regularly used by and much loved by Queen Elizabeth ("Probe into Epstein visit to Balmoral", The Herald, October 31).
We have had the saga of Prince Harry – in and out of the Royal Family – with him lately seeking reconciliation with his royal relatives, but at the same time seeming to do his best to make that unlikely. Now we have the awful allegations about the conduct of Thomas Markle, the father of the Duchess of Sussex. It is likely for some time that details of the investigations involving him will occupy the attention of the world’s media.
The King must be wondering what he has done to deserve this blizzard of adverse publicity associated with some members of the royal family and those linked to them. I hope that the King is not distracted from taking care of his own health during these troublesome times.
Ian W Thomson, Lenzie.
• I thought that the most eye-catching newspaper headline imaginable was "Sex change priest in mercy dash to Palace". However, there’s a new contender: "Paedophile billionaire and sex-trafficking girlfriend joined prince at Queen’s favourite castle". I suspect we’ll never know more than a fraction of what went on around Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and their circle, but what we do know is unsavoury and tarnishes the reputations of all who associated with him.
Doug Maughan, Dunblane.
Radio Scotland: it's getting worse
Some weeks ago you published a letter from me which was most critical of the current Radio Scotland format.
As a simple listener it gives me no satisfaction to read that a professional journalist, Cameron McNeish, shares my views exactly ("Veteran host slams BBC Radio Scotland output as listeners fall by 91,000", The Herald, November 2).
Indeed, since my earlier letter, I find the fragmented and frivolous presentation to be ever more extreme which results in me switching off entirely.
Ken Cameron, Cupar.
Limited service would be ideal
Living as I do in a rural location, my mail is delivered by a man in a van. To get to me involves a round trip of approximately two miles with no other addresses on my road (two holiday homes, but they don’t count). I know of other addresses near me with even longer off-main-road journey times.
It’s my understanding that these trips have to be made even if the mail is only flyers for business or politics. Surely as a way of reducing costs, and as these trips are made by burning fossil fuel (tip: never buy a second-hand Royal Mail van), reducing CO2 emissions deliveries could a) be reduced to, say, two per week and b) never for flyers only?
I doubt that in the age of emails, texts etc many would be adversely affected. In my idea parcel deliveries would not be restricted so any small rural business wouldn’t be impacted.
Alastair Clark, Stranraer.
A different guise
So Halloween or All Hallow’s Eve has passed. Tumshies were carved and soup made from the inside of the turnip. I made a tumshie lantern for my grandchildren who were staying from Kent and the soup was made. Gone are the days of guising where children dressed up from their play clothes wardrobe, put a scary face on and went round performing songs or tricks for a treat, possibly a toffee apple or a treacle scone. There is no dooking for apples; too dangerous?
Now we have hundreds, nay thousands, of tonnes of pumpkins in our supermarkets for a tradition imported from the US. That together with "trick or treat" where children now appear on the doorstep expecting money for dressing up in supermarket clothes made for pence by some impoverished person in an unknown country and then discarded.
The carbonated drink industry is in full flow with pallets and tonnes of their products at the entrance to the same supermarkets.
Bring back sanity.
Steve Barnet, Gargunnock.
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