Competition helping make public transport better than ever
Public services in the view of many are in headlong decline these days, in what is routinely termed "broken Britain".
There may be some truth in that, although the doom and gloom mongering over the supposedly sorry state of the nation often seems excessive.
But on our own patch there is one factor which is unarguably positive, and it involves public transport. For older folk there's never been a better time to have a bus pass which gives you freedom to roam anywhere in Scotland free of charge, and particularly between Inverness and the big cities.
I haven't travelled by bus to Edinburgh or Glasgow for quite some time. A year or two ago enjoyment of a summer journey down the A9 was at least partly curtailed by the Citylink/ Megabus experience often being a crowded and congested one. You had to book two or three days in advance, or even longer, to get a seat.
If you're travelling free of charge there are no reasonable grounds to complain about virtually anything. But any journey is undeniably better if you have a seat to yourself rather than being shoulder to shoulder with another passenger. Particularly if he or she is bulky - and let's face it, there's a multitude of bulky people around these days - and passes the time by stuffing their faces with sandwiches or other food items which are the special products of a pungent odour factory.
In my recent experience things on the buses running south and back north have changed, and much for the better.
On a number of journeys to the central belt I've found no crowding, no congestion, and empty seats scattered all around me. And that was on peak-time buses at the height of the tourist season.
On a sunny early evening I rolled up the A9 with the countryside looking at its best and had an upper deck pretty much all to myself. This was very close to travel on the buses being the embodiment of sheer pleasure.
What has changed to bring this about?
On one trip south my half full - or half empty - Megabus was overtaken on a stretch of dual carriageway by the distinctive greenery of a Flixbus, which must have left Inverness around the same time. I don't keep track of competitive developments in public transport and as a casual traveller I'm unaware of precisely when in recent times German-owned Flixbus arrived on the scene. But they're now running around eight buses to Edinburgh, as just one destination, each day and this means there are more buses travelling between Inverness and the major cities than ever before. How that affects the profit margins of the rival operators is unknown, but it's great news for passengers.
On my most recent trip I decided on the spur of the moment to head mid-morning to Farraline Park with the hopeful intention of going to Edinburgh. It turned out there were plenty seats available on the next Megabus. I know for a fact that in times past that would have been impossible at the height of the tourist season. The bus would have been sold out and packed, and the only options would have been to try and smuggle yourself into the baggage hold or opt to cling on to the roof.
The same day after a fairly brief spell in the capital I asked the driver of the 5.15pm back north, without a booking, if there were any seats available. "Plenty," he said with a cheery welcome, "only 13 people on board."
How long this state of affairs will continue is uncertain. But travel north and south on the buses has never been better for passengers. If you have a free pass it's terrific and if you're paying for a fare it's still a lot better than it was.
The journeys are swift, comfortable and pleasurable. We passengers can sit back and relax and enjoy. And from what I hear that experience is alien to car drivers facing a tiring stop-start journey requiring maximum concentration on the speed cameras and convoys stacked A9.