As I have mentioned, the initial plan was for the TIMES model to include its own transport model, so that it would be able to suggest sophisticated transport choices. However, because of time and complexity, that did not prove possible. It now takes input from Transport Scotland’s transport model, which means that the level of sophistication of the policy analysis is up to Transport Scotland—and it does not look like that analysis is very sophisticated. What has been fed in is that, up to 2035, road kilometres driven will increase by about 23 per cent; however, over the past decade, they have increased only by about 4 per cent, so the assumption that has been made is already a very big one.
The document mentions workplace parking charges in a way that suggests that the policy was once in but has mostly been taken out—occasionally, it says that a policy might interact with the proposed workplace parking levies, for example. However, no one is proposing them; in fact, no one can, because the primary legislation that would let them do so has not been passed. Therefore, what has been suggested can never actually happen until the Government acts.
It is not clear whether any of those policies have been fed into the transport model that then feeds into the TIMES model or whether they have just been ruled out by Transport Scotland or have been deemed unacceptable in some political discussion and never actually modelled—we do not know.
The policies in the transport chapter of the document are almost entirely about technical fixes, new emissions standards and switching to electric vehicles, and there is also a very amusing bit about how more people cannot use public transport because there is not enough infrastructure. If you applied the same thing to roads, you would say, “Well, there’s only so much road space, so there can’t be any more cars because there isn’t enough room for them.” That is not the Government’s approach, however; instead, over the next few decades, it is spending tens of billions on building lots more road space, so that there can be more cars. However, when it comes to buses or trains, that does not seem to be the approach; instead, the Government is saying, “Oh, well, they’re limited by capacity, so we can’t have any more.” Such an approach is utterly crazy.
According to the information that we were shown at the stakeholder event in December about the starting assumptions going into the TIMES model—including the 23 per cent increase in car kilometres that I mentioned—the figure for buses was absolutely static; there was no change at all. Moreover, trains, walking and cycling did not appear on the chart, so there seems to have been no thinking about them.
I can assume only that the world that we are living in is that of 20 years ago, because 22 years ago, reports by the Standing Advisory Committee on Trunk Road Assessment and the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution both said, “If you build lots of roads, traffic will appear to fill them up.” It is a self-fulfilling prophecy—a predict-and-provide way of running the world. That seems to be where Transport Scotland still is; it is saying, “There’ll be this much development and this many more people; more people will have cars; and so we’ll build more roads.”
If you build more roads, more cars will appear and more miles will be driven. If you say, instead, that that is unacceptable—or ask, as Andy Kerr has said, where the cars are going to go on Edinburgh’s congested streets, in Glasgow or in our other urban areas—you start from a very different presumption and you can ask how you can stop that happening: “What other things and what behaviour change can we invest in to ensure that we do not have 23 per cent more road kilometres being driven in 2025?”
We cannot accept such an increase, on climate grounds. It is just not good enough to say that there will be more electric cars or much nicer and tighter standards for diesel and petrol; we need to be braver and say that we are going to change how people make their transport choices. They will still be able to drive cars but, for many people, that will be the second rather than the first choice, because we will have changed the way in which we think about and do transport.