YOUR VIEWS: Criticism of city bus services and a view on Scottish independence
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Readers share their views on subjects important to them.
City’s bus service is ‘wholly chaotic’
How can we ever get people out of their cars and onto public transport when we have a farcical bus timetable ? Train travel is also not passenger friendly at present.
Today I (and a few others) tried to get a bus to take us into town. It failed to turn up.
Fast forward and to a similar group of would-be passengers trying to get home.
A double decker turned up but the driver informed us that the timetables had changed and we were on the wrong side of the road!
It clearly never struck the minds of the planners to post renewed timetable info on the bus shelters or lampposts.
As a fairly regular passenger of bus transport, (when I can get one that’s running) I and countless others are appalled by the wholly chaotic system in Inverness.
David Ewan
Inverness
Informed debate needed over independence
With reference to the Inverness Courier of July 5, I note that just one of the six letters supporting Indyref2 is from a Highland resident.
Moreover, only one of these gives any tangible argument for seeking independence – the assertion that “we get nothing more than scraps from the UK government”.
This misperception is probably based on figures contained in the Independence White paper “Scotland’s Future”, indicating that at the time of the referendum the proportion of UK tax raised in Scotland was fractionally higher than the percentage of UK spending in Scotland.
The SNP government dishonestly allowed people to conclude from this that we sent more taxes down to Westminster than we got back.
In fact, as the figure for UK spending was 20 per cent higher than tax raised, the situation was very much the reverse!
Incidentally, “Scotland’s Future” also included a comparison of Scotland’s increase in per-capita GDP with that of nine small independent countries, over a period which conveniently ended in 2007, such that it could be suggested that we would have done better as an independent country.
They neglected to mention that even over their selected period only three of the nine small independent countries actually did better than Scotland, but of course that might have led people to conclude that we were better off as part of the UK?
It would be good if we could have an informed debate, but this is not achieved by repetition of misinformation.
Chris Smith
Inverness
