Policy advisor Nigel Bagshaw outlines five urgent steps to cut Scotland’s road traffic by 20% and meet climate targets.
Scotland simply has no choice but to decarbonise transport if it is to meet its climate pledges. Transport emissions remain the country’s single largest source of greenhouse gases, accounting for 36% of the total in 2018, and have only fallen by 0.5% since 1990. So, meeting climate targets relies on delivering meaningful reductions from the transport sector, and road traffic in particular.

Despite limited progress on Scotland’s ambitious target to reduce car-kilometres, there is now a chance to adopt a clear strategy for achieving it. We outline five ways to deliver a 20% traffic reduction now.
1. Publish and deliver a car traffic reduction route map
Cars are responsible for over one third of transport emissions and carbon-reduction modelling has concluded that it will not be possible to reach net zero emissions through technological solutions alone. Reducing car use is essential in order for the transport system to be decarbonised at a pace that meets the statutory emissions targets set by the Scottish Parliament.
The Scottish Government’s Route Map for meeting the 20% target presents a framework of measures to achieve the goal of traffic reduction by reducing the need to travel, living well locally, switching modes, and combining trips or sharing journeys. It also recognises the likely requirement for measures to ‘discourage car use’, such as road pricing, and commits to the preparation of a ‘Car Demand Management Framework for Scotland’ by 2025.
However, that commitment is now three and a half years old and no solid plans to meet it are yet in place.
Those plans need to be drawn up and implemented urgently.
2. Reinstate the Bus Partnership Fund
As part of its response to the climate emergency, the Scottish Government committed to providing a long-term investment of over £500m to deliver targeted bus priority measures on local and trunk roads. The intention was to reduce the negative impacts of congestion on bus services and address the decline in bus patronage. The investment took the form of the Bus Partnership Fund, together with the roll-out of infrastructure for the trunk road network.
The aim of the fund was to enable local authorities to work in partnership with bus operators to develop and deliver ambitious schemes that incorporate bus priority measures.

When it was launched formally in November 2020, the fund was hailed as a ‘landmark long-term capital investment of over £500m for bus priority measures’ and as recently as last October, Scotland’s transport minister, Fiona Hyslop, declared that it was ‘a key area of investment’.
Despite that, the initiative has now been cancelled with only £27m of the £500m spent.
The decision to cancel the commitment to bus priority undermines efforts to improve bus service reliability and speed, which are the main barriers to bus use.
Buses are most heavily used by lower income households, so moving forward quickly with bus priority would have the greatest benefits for those people most affected by the cost-of-living crisis and bus patronage has still to recover to pre-pandemic levels, and, as expected, this has led to cuts to bus services and frequencies, and increased fares.
The fund should be reinstated and bus priority delivered, with all the benefits which that entails.
3. Follow through on active travel commitments
The Scottish Government made a commitment for ‘a generational shift in funding for active travel over this Parliament’. It announced record funding for active travel in its draft budget proposal for 2023-24, with almost £190m allocated for active travel, and it was agreed that at least £320m, or 10% of the total transport budget, would be allocated to active travel by 2024-25.
In reality, the active travel budget is up by £100 million but it is well short of what was promised. Notably, a coherent plan and process for developing and creating Scotland’s network of cycle lanes has still to be produced.

The environmental and social change that can be brought about by proper investment in active travel is evident across Europe.
Paris, for example, has transformed its cycle lane provision. Since the coronavirus pandemic, it has invested heavily in expanding the number of segregated cycle lanes and more than tripled its cycle parking facilities. The city’s 2021-2026 bicycle plan aims to make the capital 100% cyclable to get more people out of their cars and cycling around the city. With a EUR 250 million investment, the bike plan aims to connect Paris’s suburbs with 130 kilometres of cycle paths being added to the existing network.
Copenhagen has ‘fully connected’ cycling infrastructure. Bicycles in the city outnumber cars by 5 to 1. It has innovative and connected cycling infrastructure made up of segregated paths and dedicated bridges which connect and form a cycling superhighway across the city. Its high investment in cycling infrastructure is paying off in multiple ways. The city has seen a significant drop in congestion and its residents are healthier as a result.
In Barcelona, the Superblock project has created an area of nine city blocks closed to traffic creating pedestrian-friendly thoroughfares and wide swaths of green space. In certain blocks motorised traffic is banned and more space is provided for active travel, people and green space. There are now plans to create 500+ superblocks which is estimated to prevent 700 premature deaths yearly in the city.
It is worth noting that active travel investment also saves money. Converting current short journeys made by car to active travel would save the NHS £17bn over 20 years. Doubling cycling and increasing walking would save £567m per year through improved air quality, and prevent 8,300 premature deaths.
In Scotland, action has fallen well short of what is possible and necessary. Examples from elsewhere show precisely what is feasible.
Scotland should rapidly follow suit.
4. Roll out flat-fare ticketing
Transport Scotland’s Fair Fares Review aims to deliver on the commitment to making our public transport system more accessible, available, and affordable, with the costs of transport more fairly shared across government, business and society. The review – originally proposed in 2021 to ‘ensure a sustainable and integrated approach to public transport fares’ – has now reported 2.5 years on.
Although the government’s acknowledgement that action is needed to address the cost of motoring relative to the price of public transport is to be welcomed, over the last two decades, public transport costs have not only risen relative to costs of driving, but considerably above the rate of inflation, which in turn has encouraged people to drive and discouraged them from taking public transport.

There can clearly be no transformational change unless and until it is cheaper to take public transport than use private cars.
Unfortunately, the review does not set out how this will be achieved, instead kicking the can down the road to the already overdue traffic reduction plan. It is imperative that new measures such as road pricing or parking levies be implemented, and the funds raised to be ring-fenced for funding improvements and subsidies for local public transport services.
Nor does the review commit to a trial of flat-fare ticketing and a national flat-fare ticket for use across all modes of public transport, modelled on successful examples of European-style integrated ticketing systems in countries such as Germany and Austria. The problem is that the proposal is vague, unscheduled and unfunded and potentially unnecessary given the evidence gathered from schemes such as Germany’s EUR 49 ticket and Austria’s Climate Ticket.
A Scottish flat-fare ticket needs to be planned in detail on the basis of existing evidence and rolled out in the near future.
5. Halt all road-building programmes
Transport Scotland reports that motorway emissions have increased substantially since 1990, with the 2018 level 81% above that of the 1990 baseline. This increase in motorway emissions since 1990 has coincided with a substantial increase in the length of Scotland’s motorway network. Between 1990 and 2017, Scotland’s motorway network increased in length from 312km to 645km. Motorway vehicle kilometres rose from 3,242 million in 1990 to 8,518 million in 2018.
The link between the provision of additional road capacity and increased road traffic levels (‘induced demand’) is long established and widely accepted by governments and experts. But despite road traffic being the biggest problem in transport, and climate change emissions, Transport Scotland’s priority for new capital expenditure remains overwhelmingly directed to the provision of increased road capacity. This will inevitably further increase road traffic levels, and thus worsen Scotland’s chances of meeting its climate change obligations.

As the Scottish Parliamentary Information Centre (SPICe) noted when considering how sustainable transport investment was dwarfed by new road-building, ‘new road building also generates significant greenhouse gas emissions during construction and locks in higher emission travel choices for years to come’.
Further road building has three essential flaws:
(i) it does not ultimately achieve its intended objective of reducing congestion;
(ii) it actually increases climate emissions, social inequalities and health problems; and
(iii) it draws funds away for the various public transport and active travel projects which would have very positive environmental, social and health benefits.
The only sensible option is to cancel the dualling of the A9 between Perth and Inverness and of the A96; declare a moratorium on all road-building projects so they can be assessed against Scotland’s climate policies and targets; and commit significant spending to develop sustainable transport options.
Five simple steps
These five steps would deliver a 20% reduction in traffic.
We already know what works and what does not.
The action that is required is entirely feasible, proven to be effective and ready to go.
The only thing that stands in the way is a willingness to recognise the facts as they are and the political will to act on them.
Transport is, and remains, a huge contributor to climate emissions, ill health and social inequality.
As ever, we already have the means to tackle the problems, we just need to put them into practice.