Transport

The sector has been turned upside down in the last 12 months, but there’s an opportunity for a reset and it must be taken

“IT’S PRETTY CLEAR A PANDEMIC is the most significant disruption to existing patterns of transport that we’ve had in the modern era – by quite some margin,” Professor Iain Docherty, one of the country’s leading transport academics, tells Holyrood.

It’s the first thing the Dean of the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Stirling says, as we sit down for a virtual chat and consider how transport in Scotland has been turned upside down by the coronavirus pandemic.

In an address in the Scottish Parliament in March last year, the First Minister said the country was on the “cusp of a rapid escalation in the spread of COVID-19”. Nicola Sturgeon advised people to reduce social contact, avoid crowded places and work from home, adding that they should use public transport as little as possible, a message which remains today.

“Where possible you should consider walking, wheeling or cycling, if you can, to reduce pressure on the road network and on public transport, where capacity will be limited,” guidance on the Scottish Government’s website says. In addition, we have seen travel bans introduced, preventing those who live in specific levels of lockdown – unless they have an essential reason – from leaving their local authority. The aim has been to reduce movement and, in turn, prevent the spread of the virus.

It has changed the complexion of the transport sector – the image of people piling on to a train or bus at rush hour has become a memory. Ralph Roberts, the managing director of Mcgill’s Buses, says demand dropped to 12 per cent at the peak of the pandemic in April last year. It increased to just over 60 per cent in August as the lockdown eased in the summer but since Christmas, with most of the country back under tightened restrictions, it’s been between 20 and 30 per cent.

“The government have kept the industry alive,” Roberts says. “This is a big employer but it’s the job it does, so the government have seen the bus industry as crucial, trains as well and ferries, they’ve seen public transport as crucial to keeping people around the country mobile during the pandemic.

“That’s one of the things about a society… The ability for people to be mobile in terms of getting to work, getting to the shops, getting to

the doctors, getting to education or whatever it happens to be.

“The government have effectively been negotiating with us on the level of service we need to put out there, the level of capacity we need, against that level of demand. And where there’s a gap between the revenue and your cost, they’ve made it up to break-even point in order to keep us afloat.”

So, as Docherty acknowledges in our conversation, it is evident the level of disruption the virus has caused in the transport sector is significant. But there have also been lessons learned during the pandemic, which will prove vital as the industry recovers POST-COVID and refocuses from survival to a climate emergency that hasn’t gone away.

There needs to be a two-pronged approach in reducing emissions from the sector, according to the experts, consisting of a focus on short-term actions and medium to longer-term proposals.

The situation is stark, but encouragement can be taken from the ability people have shown to adapt during the pandemic. The disruption has caused significant behavioural change – more of us than ever are working from home, making Zoom calls instead of travelling to meet in person and, as a result, many of us have cars lying unused in the driveway. The situation has shown people can change habits and adjust in the face of huge interruption to their everyday lives.

“Lots of people have had to change what they do very significantly, which shows there is potential to do it the rest of time,” Docherty says. “There’s a growing realisation among many people now that we’re not going to go back to what normal used to be, for a whole set of reasons – partly because of the economic shock that’ll happen once pandemic support unwinds – but also because we’ve got very used to using different tools and doing lots of jobs in different ways now, so we won’t go back to doing exactly what we did before.”

But why is this important? Simply put, it’s a chance to start again. The Scottish Government has a target of net-zero emissions by 2045, which may seem in the distant future, but crucially it has an interim target of a 75 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 – less than a decade away.