Round Table 11 October – Fixing Buses, Air Quality, Fares, Ticketing, and Roadworks

With five current consultations from Transport Scotland many of the STSG community are thinking about how to respond representing a wide range of organisations across Scotland.

On Wednesday 11th October between 12:00 and 14:00 we are holding a Round Table discussion at SPT’s offices at 131 St Vincent Street, Glasgow, G2 5JF. The event will enable people to compare notes and calibrate thinking. STSG Chair Paul White is preparing responses on behalf the Confederation of Scottish Transport and will kick off the discussion by sharing his thoughts.

This latest of STSG’s series of Round Table debates may cover controversial topics but we guarantee the core values that make STSG events special: mutual respect for all opinions, open challenge and scrutiny of all perspectives, and a safe space to explore ideas with others.  STSG does not take any position on any topic and will not be responding to the Transport Scotland consultations. As Scotland’s transport think tank our role is to seek out promising new ideas and to facilitate their development with leading experts.

Lunch is provided free by STSG and the room is being provided by SPT, so there is no charge for attending, but numbers are limited. We need to ensure a good spread of people from across the industry so we may need to limit numbers from some organisations.

In two hours there will be a lot to cover, but we plan to explore at least:

1. How can the LEZ proposals be developed to clean up the air in Scotland’s towns and cities? How would people and businesses be affected by access restrictions, and financial penalties? What can be done to make the proposed LEZs a success?
2. These are challenging times for the bus sector which must evolve to recognise that customers have more flexibility and choice than ever before. How can public, private and voluntary sectors work better together to ensure that world class local transport is available across Scotland?
3. Concessionary travel is popular but the current national scheme needs to be refreshed. Do the latest Transport Scotland proposals go far enough?
4. Eight years ago STSG held a seminar on smart ticketing and published the results in STR46 – http://stsg.org/str/str46.pdf . At that time it looked like Scotland could lead the world, but the latest consultation from Transport Scotland talks mainly about catching up. Payment for virtually everything we now buy is smart. Do the latest proposals go far enough and fast enough?

STSG is fortunate in having a library of previous work to draw from dating back to 1984, covering many of the current policy debates. It is some time since we published a paper on bus policy but we have had a debate page on buses running for a few years. Please post comments including any questions or ideas you have so that they can feed into the debate.

If you wish to attend please register here (all we need is your name, e-mail address and phone number which are held by STSG until after the event and not shared with anyone). If numbers registering look likely to exceed the capacity we will let everyone know that some places could be in doubt, and final attendees will be confirmed about a week before the event.

• 3 Comments
• Posted by administrator on 2nd October 2017
• Topics: Events