Looking at the year ahead, director Colin Howden poses a series of hard questions about the future direction of transport in Scotland.
1. Will we see even one mile of new bus lane laid down during 2026?
It’s neither fair nor realistic to expect car drivers to switch to buses for journeys into our towns and cities if those buses are stuck in queues of single occupant cars. It’s also a justice issue: those who rely on buses the most – older people, disabled people, and lower-income households – are hit hardest by under-investment and delays. But progress in delivering bus priority has ground to a halt. Will this change in 2026?
The current Scottish administration previously displayed great ambition in this area, with the £500m committed to a Bus Partnership Fund in 2019 the highpoint. However, this fund was scrapped in 2024 with only £27m spent and less than eight miles of bus priority delivered over the five years.
Its replacement, the Bus Infrastructure Fund, has been allotted a considerably more modest £20m, and the fund framed so widely that it has lost the prior focus on bus priority.
So let’s see whether 2026 sees even one new mile of bus priority delivered, or whether, as with the Bus Partnership Fund, the cash is again frittered away on consultants’ reports.
2. Will we finally see a national campaign put in place to deliver road traffic reduction?
Road traffic reduction has always been the centrepiece of Transform’s position: if you can cut the volume of traffic on the roads then all sorts of benefits result – economic, environmental and societal.
But this topic had been neglected for many years until the Scottish Government announced in December 2020 that it would need to bring about a 20% reduction in traffic levels in order to meet its climate targets.
Five years of inaction followed, with Transport Scotland publishing a series of bland policy statements absent of related budgets or realistic implementation plans. So it was unsurprising, if nonetheless disappointing, that the target was finally cut, in November 2025, to 4% (by 2030 on a 2019 base).
This is too severe a cut, but it’s at least welcome that a traffic reduction target of any sort remains in place.
But with five years wasted without any concerted action, the question is now whether the Scottish Government is prepared to come forward with a national campaign to deliver even this much more modest target?
3. Will we see any movement on traffic demand management anywhere in Scotland?
Significant cuts in traffic levels will require new traffic demand management measures to be implemented, whether that be congestion charging, workplace parking levies, or a national road user charging scheme.
The UK Government finally displayed some leadership on this matter with the announcement in November’s Budget that it would bring forward a mileage charge for electric vehicles, no doubt prompted by the ever-increasing hole in its revenues caused by diminishing fuel duty receipts.
So that turns the attention back to Scotland. The Scottish Government is aware of the options. Our largest councils, Edinburgh and Glasgow, have both made policy commitments to taking forward new schemes. But there remains no action in practice, and it’s just embarrassing that it’s now over twenty years (Edinburgh’s ill-fated congestion charge proposal) since any concerted action has been taken in this area.
So will 2026 be the year for change, building on the momentum of the UK Government’s new-found commitment to pay-per-mile driving?
4. Will any consideration be given to the economic viability of public transport services?
Affordability remains a key concern in public transport circles. Across the UK, bus and coach fares have over the past decade risen compared to both average wages and to motoring costs. And that ‘average’ is doing quite a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, as those whose incomes have not kept up will be more severely affected.
The political response to this has been a series of price interventions, including free bus travel for the under-22s, the scrapping of ScotRail peak fares, and the Regional Bus Fare Cap Pilot squeezed out just before Christmas. These build upon the national concessionary travel scheme, which has for the past 25 years provided free bus travel to the over-60s.
No doubt all of these schemes were introduced with very good intentions. But it’s far from clear that they’ve all been sufficiently analysed prior to their instigation (and we happen to know that some have been selected for narrowly political reasons). And some, the national concessionary scheme in particular, are probably no longer fit for purpose on affordability grounds given the large societal transfer of wealth to older age groups since its adoption. So it should be clear by now that much blanket price subsidy is ill-directed if affordability for lower-income groups is the prize.
But the larger issue is what all of these subsidies mean for the underlying commercial viability of public transport services – irrespective of whether public transport is operated by private companies, municipalities or the state – and the distorting impacts that will have resulted.
So can we please have some rather more intelligent discussion of the impact of blanket price subsidies? And can we see a refocusing on passenger growth, as this alone will reduce both industry costs & reliance on subsidy?
5. Will the new Scottish administration give sufficient attention to transport?
May’s elections will lead to a new Scottish Government administration being formed. Whoever leads the new government will have a lot on their plate. As the series of ‘transport tracker’ publications we’ve prepared over the course of this Parliament have found, the current administration has made a series of admirable commitments towards sustainable transport – but have then largely failed to deliver upon them.
Beyond sustainable transport, the new Ministerial team will have a wider set of more ‘day-to-day’ transport challenges to tackle, from troubled state assets (e.g. Ferguson Marine, Prestwick Airport), escalating public transport operating expenditures, spiralling capex costs for new infrastructure, declining bus patronage, and the resumption of car growth – both traffic volumes and in the size of cars.
Transport is one of the six large spending portfolios within the Scottish Budget. But transport hasn’t always been given sufficient prominence in the Scottish Cabinet, including a period in 2023 when ‘Net Zero and Just Transition’ was given a Cabinet-level role, and transport knocked down to junior ministerial level.
So the question remains as to what prominence the incoming administration will provide to transport?
Will it remain as a sole responsibility of one Cabinet Secretary (as with the post currently filled by Fiona Hyslop), or will there be a re-grouping with other portfolios? In previous years, we’ve seen it grouped with environment, planning, infrastructure, and climate, amongst other things.
Given the challenges that the incoming administration will face, a sole focus on transport would probably be wise.
6. Will the new Scottish Parliament do a better job of scrutinising transport?
In the new Parliament, Transform will continue to monitor the new administration’s commitments on sustainable transport, and hold it to account when it fails to deliver what it says that it will do. But, as an NGO with limited resources and no formal powers, there’s only so much we can do.
So that’s where a strong scrutiny power provided by the Scottish Parliament comes in. But the current Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee has failed to provide adequate scrutiny of transport in this session of parliament. During its five years, it has completed only one large-scale transport inquiry (on ferry services, in 2022/23).
It’s unclear whether the committee has had too large a brief, or whether its membership’s attention has been placed elsewhere. But for transport, one of the largest sectors of government spending, to receive so little detailed scrutiny is clearly a failing of this session of parliament and one that must be rectified in the next.
We’d like to see a more detailed formal examination of public sector spending on transport. We want to see a Parliament that questions why capital costs for new infrastructure have been allowed to become so grossly inflated. And we need to see Parliament provide scrutiny of the increasing skew towards high-carbon infrastructure spend in the face of the Government’s failure to meet its climate targets.
Fortunately, elements of the Fourth Estate in Scotland continue to do a fine job in holding the government to account. Martin Williams’ recent piece in The Herald highlighted the doubling of ScotRail’s cost base since nationalisation, and featured a quote from the convenor of the NZET Committee; while we’d agree with the content of his quote, it remains an aberration that his Committee has failed to provide adequate scrutiny of this topic or a host of others since 2021.
So will the new Parliament bolster the ability of a transport committee to do the role that we all need it to do?
