With the trains in such a state, small wonder we’re taking our chances in the traffic jams

AS maddening pursuits go, there are few more widely experienced in Scotland than the daily commute by car. Many thousands drive every day between Glasgow and Edinburgh, for example, and I don’t know how their dispositions endure it.

The journey might take one hour or two and a half and little rhyme or reason may separate these extremes. The stopping and starting, the eyes on stalks fixed on the brake lights ahead, the frayed nerves and muttered obscenities – all are part and parcel of the awfulness.

Drive too close to the vehicle in front and you flirt with carnage if the traffic suddenly slows. Drive too far away and men in white vans or – worse – BMWs will undertake you and you will probably have to do your breathing exercises again.

Yes, trying to get where you are going in a petrol or diesel-driven vehicle when your destination is 50 miles away and it matters what time of day you get there surely begins to resemble self-harm if you do it regularly enough in this country.

And yet, dismal as this and other commutes have become on Scotland’s choked and potholed arteries, they are still enthusiastically preferred, it seems, to the knucklegnawing misery of making the journey by rail.

Satisfaction

We learn this week that the Scottish Government’s campaign to tempt motorists out of their family saloons and squeeze them onto puban lic transport is stuck in reverse gear. The number of vehicles registered in Scotland rose by 1.5 per cent last year to 2.964million as satisfaction with public transport fell by 3 per cent in the same period.

Given Nicola Sturgeon’s 2032 target date for phasing out all conventional petrol and diesel cars in Scotland (eight years earlier than the UK Government’s target because we care more up here) it hardly seems the optimal direction of travel.

Then there is the fact the punctuality of ScotRail trains falls almost 4 per cent short of the government target and stands at a record low for the third year running.

Less than half of ScotRail trains arrive at Edinburgh Waverley on time and barely half of those destined for Glasgow Central pull in when the timetable says they should.

That is if the trains are running at all. Forced off the roads by injury, I hobbled into Edinburgh Haymarket on crutches some weeks ago and scanned the departures board for the service which is the station’s bread and butter.

Oddly, nothing seemed to be going to Glasgow Queen Street. Bafflingly, no notice was up explaining the oddness.

There followed a wait of half hour and a best-forgotten 90-minute journey in the recess between two carriages.

Naturally it was standing room only. In fact, the train was so overcrowded it felt unfair to resent the fact not one volunteer offered Hop-along here a seat. From where they were sitting, my balancing act almost certainly could not be seen through the throng of bodies.

Some lucky people who could bend their legs sank their bottoms to the floor and put their heads between their knees. With enough volume pumping through their ear buds perhaps they could block this whole thing out.

Me, I tried to count the stops like insomniacs count sheep. There were dozens.

Some of these coping mechanisms may be unfamiliar to a First Minister who has never learned to drive and who, for years, has been plonked at the doorstep of everywhere she needs to be by a ministerial limo. And while I neither suggest that, at this stage in her career, Miss Sturgeon invests in L-plates or hops aboard the first chugger to Waverley on weekday mornings, a measure of First Ministerial insight into the reasons for the choices commuters are making would be welcome.

Chaos

It should be galling to her and her Transport Minister Michael Matheson that anyone would willingly choose the lottery of the M8 over a supposed sub-60 minute service between the centres of our two biggest cities. And yet imagine the scale of the chaos on that line if more people were tempted away from their vehicles.

Similarly, we make more informed choices than perhaps Miss Sturgeon imagines when, only 14 years shy of the petrol and diesel prohibition era, we rock up at showrooms and buy yet more petrol and diesel-driven cars.

‘Electric vehicles are a tiny part of the car market,’ warns IAM RoadSmart’s Neil Greig. He says the biggest concern among motorists is the lack of charging points.

‘It needs to be as easy to charge your car as it is now to get fuel.’

I understand Miss Sturgeon makes many of her longer journeys by helicopter but does she understand that, here on the ground, many of our trips outside the Central Belt are to remote destinations and require transport we think is up to the job?

It seems a mite ironic that, in England, where fewer places are remote, they have eight years longer to switch to futuristic transport solutions than in Scotland where running out of electricity 15 miles short of Wick in mid-winter amounts to something more than a hindrance.

The obvious reality to those of us who drive is people will switch to the Scottish Government’s preferred modes of transport when the infrastructure is there to give them confidence in it.

Until then my conscience is clear and my journeys are powered by whatever inconveniences the least.