COLIN MARR: Could ScotRail scheme have been used to take cars off A9?
I had an interesting conversation with ScotRail last week about their trial to temporarily remove peak fares.
The trial was announced by Humza Yousaf in April and will run for six months from October. It will cost the Scottish Government an estimated £15 million.
Some of our local train services will benefit. If you travel between Inverness and Nairn before 9am you’ll save £3 on a return ticket. For Elgin to Inverness that increases to £7.60. For Inverness to Wick the saving will be just under £5. If you’re a regular commuter, then your savings will mount up.
ScotRail are interested to find out what people will do with the savings. Will the money be spent in bars and restaurants and help local economies, or is the cost-of-living crisis so serious that it will be used to pay bills and help reduce personal debt? Both of these are positive outcomes.
Of course, the real aim is to encourage more of us to use the train. I’m a great supporter of rail travel, so anything that makes it more affordable has to be a good thing.
But I have a real misgiving.
Someone commuting between Edinburgh and Glasgow will save as much as £14 a day, which is almost identical to the saving for the much longer journey from Inverness to Edinburgh and thanks to complicated rail ticketing, and LNER, hardly anyone pays that full peak fair. So the bulk of the £15 million will be spent in the central belt.
The government have heard loud and clear about the unreliability and danger of the A9, and they have been asked to make the train journey between Inverness and the central belt more affordable, and faster, so that fewer people use the road. But instead, the average train journey time from Inverness to the central belt has just got longer. To make it shorter requires more investment.
So, I wonder if this money could have been targeted better – at a scheme that increased the attractiveness of that train route, and helped reduce the traffic on one of our most dangerous roads.
Colin Marr is chief executive of Inverness Chamber of Commerce.
