Limo-loving SNP ministers don’t see hell of trying to get from A to B

IT was a quiet Sunday morning and there was no shortage of seats on the train to Glasgow Central. There were no exhausted commuters with faces crammed into each other’s armpits – or Labour politicians squatting in the aisles.

But then the reason for those empty seats became apparent: the floor was covered in dried blood, taking up about a third of that section of the carriage.

The mercifully short journey began to resemble a scene from The Shining, though other stoical travellers were sitting nearby, trying to avoid the sticky stains.

One of the rather bleak if necessary rituals of today’s consumer is taking to social media to express revulsion over a corporate blunder or failing.

I tweeted an image of the blood-spattered carriage to ScotRail, one of whose representatives dutifully asked for details and said cleaning crews would be informed.

In fact, the company’s trains are routinely filthy, with discarded coffee cartons or food remnants secreted beside soiled seats and litter scattered on carriage floors.

Regular train-users all have their bugbears, including either ear-splittingly loud or completely incomprehensible Tannoy announcements.

One recorded ScotRail ‘customer information message’, played on station platforms, patronisingly begins: ‘Our phones can be smart – and so can we’, then entreats passengers to look up and be aware of their surroundings.

Unfortunately, when anyone does look up to see what’s around them, they are likely to find out from the monitors that their train has been delayed or mysteriously cancelled.

Some 19,000 people have signed a petition calling for ScotRail operator Abellio to lose its £7billion contract.

But as we reported yesterday, the company’s performance has declined even further since Abellio handed over its socalled ‘improvement plan’ to the Scottish Government.

Transport Minister Humza Yousaf has conceded the scale of public disillusionment is a ‘real wake-up call’ – as if it was somehow news that our rail system is in such a mess. Almost as patronising as a ScotRail Tannoy announcement, he recently tweeted a picture of a pile of papers his officials had given him to read on a train journey, describing it as his ‘homework’.

This is also the minister, incidentally, who took a holiday during the recent spate of industrial action, which caused chaos for passengers – though no doubt he had taken some ‘homework’ with him.

Much of this Government’s transport strategy, and indeed that of its predecessors, is based on encouraging Scots to leave their cars at home and use buses or trains instead.

But creaking public transport buckles under the strain, forcing many back onto pothole-strewn roads – more akin to Great War battlefields – or supposedly ‘flagship’ routes such as the M8, which are in dire need of massive upgrade.

Gridlocked

Among the many banes of drivers’ lives are ‘variable’ speed limits, meaning the limit inexplicably changes every few hundred yards of dual carriageway, and ubiquitous average speed cameras, nicknamed ‘yellow vultures’.

Arbitrary limits mean motorists are compelled to drive at needlessly sluggish speeds, or languish on gridlocked stretches which have been turned into vast car parks.

Hundreds of miles of relatively plain sailing on English motorways can end abruptly after crossing the Border.

The roadworks at Raith Interchange on the M74 in Lanarkshire have caused two years of misery for the 100,000 drivers who use it every day.

The public spending watchdog Audit Scotland said recently that our main roads and motorways are in a ‘significantly’ worse condition than those in England.

The condition of the entire network had deteriorated over the past four years, with SNP ministers and local authorities failing to spend even the minimum amount that experts estimate would be needed to maintain them.

The worst decline has been seen in motorways and main trunk roads, which are the responsibility of the Scottish Government, with 13 per cent assessed as being in a poor condition and potentially needing maintenance.

This compares with only 4 per cent of motorways south of the Border.

An Audit Scotland report found that Highways England spends nearly three times more per kilometre on maintaining its main trunk roads than Transport Scotland, the Scottish Government’s equivalent agency.

Of course, maintenance is frequently the cause of delays – although all too often the locations of advertised ‘roadworks’ are unmanned, with no visible work being done.

This doesn’t stop desperate attempts at milking drivers for cash. Temporary average speed cameras on long stretches of the M8 and M74 motorways leading to the roadworks have stung motorists for around £50,000 a month.

Long-term anguish for drivers may be lessened by these upgrades, which are vital, but all too often there is a lack of urgency about them that fuels drivers’ frustration.

The Office of the Scottish Road Works Commissioner was set up in 2005 to monitor roadworks companies and fine those responsible for shoddy workmanship and delays.

But it emerged last year that the ‘traffic cone tsar’ had imposed only eight fines in three years, despite the quango costing £300,000 a year.

This complacency is typical of wider official indifference to the plight of drivers already saddled with spiralling maintenance costs which are pushed ever-higher by craterous roads.

When their blood pressure has returned to something approaching normal levels after hours stranded in jams, Scotland’s commuters will rationalise that the gain will be worth the pain: you simply have to put up with it. But why on earth has it taken so long to implement these improvements – and why, when they are finally initiated, does it take quite so long to finish them?

Before the decision to give the go-ahead for the dualling of the A9 trunk road, it emerged that 88 people had lost their lives on it from 2004-2010.

But the £3billion project will not be completed – assuming that there are no delays – until 2025. That it took more than a decade of devolved government to wake up to the route’s shameful death toll is a sign of its low priority for successive governments.

Hectoring

No single administration can be held solely to blame for the appalling state of the A9 or any other major road: all are complicit in the failings.

Yet the current regime at Holyrood seems keener than its predecessors on hectoring drivers.

It has lain waste to the pub trade with its drastic reduction in the drink-drive limit and will soon introduce a law to ban smoking in cars carrying children – despite police concerns that it will be virtually impossible to enforce.

Infamously, despite being the person ultimately in charge of everything from bus lanes and safety cameras, to drinkdrive legislation and speed limits, Nicola Sturgeon cannot actually drive.

Even harder to stomach, perhaps, is that she has never travelled on a ScotRail train in her role as First Minister (though she has billed taxpayers for a total of more than £330 for two first-class tickets to London while in office).

None of this should matter – successful policy-making does not necessarily hinge on the First Minister having direct experience of problems on the ground.

But somehow it really does matter, because it shows yet another ‘disconnect’ between our political leaders and longsuffering commuters, whether on rail or road.

Chauffeured around at taxpayers’ expense, or mollycoddled in first-class carriages – presumably free of bloodstained floors – Miss Sturgeon is protected from the myriad miseries that her Government has imposed on the travelling public.