 Welcome to the Scottish Parliament and welcome to this event. I almost made the mistake of saying good morning because we always have a committee meeting in the morning and we had one this morning that lasted quite a while and it seems to have been a day of meetings. If I could, first of all, I'd just go through a few practical points if I may. First of all, those of you that rely on mobile telephones, could you make sure they're on silent so they don't interrupt us at all? There are toilets outside and when it comes to the chance for people to speak, if you could try and catch my eye and I'll indicate you and what I'd try and do is get as many of you involved in the conversation as possible and I've taken the step of following the deputy presiding officer and if I wag a pen like that it means you're coming to the end of your time and if you ignore it it comes closer to you and eventually comes very close to you and that's the indication that you have definitely run out of time. If I could just remind those people who are sitting around the table the microphones are activated by the gentleman over there and you don't need to push anything and if you're not at the table and you want to speak there are raving microphones and I would ask you to speak very clearly into them. Could I also just say to you it really helps me because I'm appallingly bad at names and faces and remembering where you all come from and who you represent so if you could introduce yourself on where you are, sorry, who you're representing and who you are that'd be very useful. We will be taking photos during this event which we will be putting on our website it's part of the consultation process we like to show that we've involved people. If for some reason you don't want your photograph taken if you could let a member of the team know that would be good. Now just really if I may just explain briefly the background to the bill and the role the committee's doing in this event. The committee's considering the Transport Scotland Bill and our role really is to scrutinise the proposals that are laid out in the bill and we do that by taking evidence and considering different views and this event is really important to us to get a wide range of views as possible because it's not possible to get everyone in every evidence session. We don't come to a formal committee view on the bill until we give our to our evidence gathering is complete and we've drafted our stage one report which we then submit to the Parliament and that really indicates whether we agree the general principles of the bill. Now we've got seven members of the committee here this evening to hear your views and they're lined up there and you should be able to see their names. First of all as the part of the evening we're going to hear from four academics and they have been given a very tight timescale to talk to. First of all there's Professor Ian Doherty from the University of Glasgow they're not in the same order that just confuses me. The clerks do this occasionally just to keep me on my toes. Dr Kate Paramborn who's from the University of Leeds Professor Tom Rye who's Edinburgh Napier University and Dr Jonathan Cowey from Edinburgh Napier University and they're going to have five minutes to give their views and we'll just go through them I think in the order that they're sat here and then we've got about an hour and a quarter for discussion and to hear your views on the bill. Now I'd like to say if I may just without taking up too much more time the bill covers very specific topics and one of the things that we found quite difficult when taking evidence is there's a lot of things that people would like to see in the bill that aren't in the bill and they suddenly start talking about them and I will try if that happens to rein you back politely so we stay on the topic of the bill and we're going to concentrate really on the four areas that seem to be generating the most interest that is pavement and double parking, bus services, low emission zones and smart ticketing and if we've got time we might take an opportunity to cover things that people feel are missing from the bill but we'll do that at the end and we're aiming to finish at about aiming to finish at eight o'clock and if you want to stay and have a chat there will be some members of the committee who have to go to other events and other programme things that will have gone but there will be some members of the committee here and it's always a good chance to bend their ears but give them informed discussion of your views on the bill. I don't want to take any longer I'd just like to just ask each of the academics starting with the endocrity to give their five minutes worth and I will be watching you for your five minutes here because you're going to set the scene for the rest so Ian if you'd like to lead off. Thank you very much. Members, thank you very much for the invitation to come and talk to you for five minutes and stay relevant and on topic. There's two challenges for academics. I'm going to try and limit my comments to the four main themes that are listed in the documents. I should of course say that these are my personal comments they don't reflect any of the hats that I may wear in other meetings be that the ScotRail board is the non-executive director of that or the chair of the Strathclyde bus quality partnership or indeed the deputy chair of the Glasgow connectivity commission whose report is due in a few weeks and may have many things to say which are of relevance to the issues contained in the bill. Let me start with buses. I think that arresting the decline in bus patronage is probably the single most important thing we can do in the transport domain to help meet the overall social and economic policy aspirations of the Scottish Government and Parliament, particularly inclusive growth, access to employment and so on. This bill is an opportunity to do something about that and I think that we should not fail to take that opportunity. There are a range of views about the best structure for the bus industry, which is what is really at the heart of this bill and I think that reading between the lines that is where the conversation will probably go. I take a pragmatic view of this, I think, in that there is more than one way to organise the bus industry in terms of the mix of ownership and regulatory control between public and private sectors. I also think that it is probably true that the empirical evidence across the UK in the generally deregulated environment says that competition for the bus market has been generally more successful than competition in the market or on street. There are some exceptions to that rule, but I think that overall that position has some evidence to back it up. When I read the bill and the commentary on it, I am immediately drawn to the question of will we end up with something that looks more like a London-type regulated structure at the end of this process than we have today? I guess that that is the big decision that we have all got to make. I remain unconvinced, I think, by the evidence to date, particularly about whether that will be affordable to the public purse or not. I know that Tom has done some work in this and may have some more detail and expert views on that than I do, but one thing that does worry me about the transition to a more regulated system is whether our local authorities, who would be charged with operating that system, have got the skills to make it work and whether we should be asking them to take on the risk that might be involved to the public purse in so doing that. I am one of those people who come from the view that we should be doing a lot more, a lot more quickly to improve our environmental performance. When I read about low emission zones, my initial reaction is to say, hurrah, except then I look at the detail and think, well, how much difference is this actually going to make, given how many caveats already appear to be in the legislation. The two that I point out, first of all, are the length of the grace period. I am one of those other difficult people who still believes in the concept of caveat impator. If you have bought a dirty polluting diesel car and the evidence about its impact on public health becomes as strong as it has done, then we should probably be encouraging you not to drive that car more quickly rather than the five or six years that it might take for you to not be allowed to do so in a low emission zone in Scotland. Secondly, there is then the provision that says that LEZs must not apply to special roads or motorways. A city 45 miles away from here has several rather large motorways that carry the majority of its traffic and create probably the majority of its local air pollution. For the geography of Glasgow, I do not really think that that is a credible position for the bill to take. On ticketing, some of you may know that I was a non-executive director of Transport Scotland for a few years between 2006 and 2010. One of the responsibilities that I had then was to sit on the smart ticketing project board. I do not think that we are very much further forward to delivering the kind of smart ticketing that we all would like than we were then. That should probably tell us something about the regulatory complexity of the different networks and modes that we have across Scotland. Again, when I look at the bill, I think that this is all well and good, but it has a kind of 2006 to 2010 ring about it. Technology has somewhat moved on. The idea that a simple plastic card is smart is rather outdated, and I think that we should be much more ambitious with what we seek to do about ticketing. I do not, for a second, underestimate how difficult that would be given the different regulatory frameworks or different modes that we have, and the way that we price them. For example, given a season ticket between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the railways now costs £2,300—no, more than that—£3,200, we have created a gradient between different modes that makes genuinely integrated ticketing of the kind that we immediately think we would like, that we see when we travel to London or to the Netherlands or elsewhere, difficult to do in reality, but we should probably take some steps towards doing that. I have left the one that exercises me most to last, which is pavement or responsible parking. I would much rather see this couched in terms of pedestrians' rights, please. I do not see why a pedestrian should have any fewer rights to use the pavement than somebody having an Amazon delivery of a gadget that they do not really need. I think that tells us something about our priorities in society. I became militant about this when I became a parent and I started shoving my kids around in a pram. When you do that, you really begin to realise how little people care about the pavement and pedestrians and the ability that we have to walk around. I think about 20 minutes and I look at Glasgow city centre where I often am in the morning and the peak of the delivery cycle. I would see vans parked on pavements or in cycle lanes or elsewhere five metres from an empty loading bay. How will the bill stop that? We are not very good at enforcing the regulations that we already have, so how can we be confident that we will be able to enforce any new regulations any better than we currently have? That is one area where I would like us to be much, much bolder and much more ambitious. After all, we all know that at the very top of the transport hierarchy comes a pedestrian. My request would be that we should treat them with the respect that they deserve, please. You stopped me becoming too militant when you went over time, so we are going to move straight on to Kate. Kate, five minutes. Thank you very much to you convener and to members and visitors for inviting me to participate in this event. I am also commenting in an individual capacity, but I would like to point out that I am a Scottish citizen. I live in Aberdeenshire, so although my affiliation is the University of Leeds, I have been here for 34 years. Ian is very difficult to follow because he steals all my material every time, so I should do my best to say something slightly different. A lot of what Ian said I do agree with, but I might express it in a slightly different way. I am not sure where to start, but I think I would like to start with low-mission zones, and I think there are some key tests which I think this Bill ought to pass. Firstly, in relation to overall and with reference to the Elezeds in particular, will it deliver modal shift or low carbon benefits on a scale to meet the Scottish Government's climate change targets, which are very ambitious, and that is made all the more important by the recent IPCC report, which shows us that we have got a very short time globally in which to turn the ship around. In relation to whether I think low-emission zones are a good idea, notwithstanding the fact that the technical details of them are quite difficult, as the reviews of existing Elezeds show, they do not always deliver such a big reduction in emissions as might be hoped, and I think that there are a number of reasons for that. One is that the Euro 6 standard is not so good on nitrogen oxide emissions as earlier vehicle standards, although it is much better on the particulate matter. Particulate matter is a very important element of evolution to reduce both of them, but that one in particular, because I think that with relation to soot and black carbon, it has been recently showed that the smallest particles can cross the blood-brain barrier, which is potentially a very serious public health problem, but nitrogen oxides as well are also very seriously implicated in respiratory problems, and there has been a recent case that many of you are probably aware of in which an individual death has been correlated to spikes in air pollution. A child in London residence was in an air quality management zone, and her hospital admissions could be correlated to spikes in air pollution. I think that that is very sobering, and we should all be very aware of that. In relation to low emission zones, there are a number of issues that we need to be aware of. Firstly, for the technical reasons—the fact that Scotland has quite a small population—the setting of vehicle bans or exemptions needs to be done at a national level, so it is a single understanding across freight industry and individuals in the bus industry of what is allowed into an LAZ zone without contravening. The actual design of timings and all the rest of it could be at the local level, but the technical details of engine types should be national. Plus, the zones need to be embedded within a much broader geography so that the benefits do not just accrue within the zones that have the air quality problems, but that they do not penalise the people that live outside the zones, that they have enough time to make the adaptations. I take Ian's point about caveat emptor, but I would also point out that, from a social inclusion point of view, those with the least money tend to be forced to have the cars with the worst pollution attributes because they are buying second-hand vehicles. Measures need to be taken to ensure that they can clean up their act and are supported to do that, but it is not too expensive. The grace periods are the time that should be used to put in place alternatives for those people who live outside the zone so that they can get into the zone without contravening it, without being dependent on their cars, so that the benefits are felt outside the zone as well as within the zone. I think also that LAZs, frankly, are not just about air quality, they are also about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That is another kind of emissions. We should include reduction of those as objectives of LAZs as well as reducing overall traffic to improve urban livability and attractiveness. Is there a punchy point on each of the others? Are you happy to take a punchy point on each of them? I might get an opportunity to insert those later. I am sure that you will. Tom Okay. Thank you very much. I should also say that I believe that I am here partly on behalf of the Chartered Institute of Highways and Transportation, who were invited but could not come along on this occasion. First of all, low emission zones, all I would say is that the evidence from the literature demonstrates that this is shown in the consultation document that they have not made that much of an impact elsewhere in Europe, where they have been implemented, the best evaluations have been done in Germany, and we saw 4% reductions in the key pollutant concentrations. Clearly, it is not enough to meet the thresholds, which suggests that, while LAZs are welcome and indeed could be implemented under existing legislation, although this proposed legislation sets a national framework, they are very welcome. Clearly, there is also a need to reduce vehicle miles travelled if we are going to deal with these pollution problems. Secondly, smart ticketing. I may build a little bit on what Ian said. I think smart ticketing has its advantages, but if it is not coupled with attractive pricing, it is not really going to make the difference to the use of public transport that it would, if it is coupled to attractive pricing. The key things about countries that have higher levels of public transport ridership than ours is that those smart tickets where they have them are attractively priced, particularly for monthly, weekly or monthly season tickets. Why can they do that? Because of the regulatory framework that they have, because they are operating their regional and local public transport systems, usually on what is known as a gross cost basis, the public authority keeps the revenue itself and simply pays the operators to operate the service and give them some incentives, and that makes the integrated ticket far easier to deliver. I do not think that we should confound smart ticketing with integrated ticketing, or expect that smart ticketing on its own will deliver the benefits that integrated ticketing does and perhaps is what we really want. Bus services. There has been a stunning lack of the use of the powers in the 2001 Transport Scotland Act on Bus Services. That is information, integrated ticketing, funnily enough, statutory quality partnerships and statutory quality contracts. I think that there are a number of reasons that they have not been used, and those reasons will not go away with this new legislation. The legislation perhaps fails to take account of the power balance in the industry between local authorities and very large multinational bus companies, who will maybe enter into a partnership only where and when it suits them. I would also say in defence of the bus companies that it is not just the regulatory framework that is causing problems and reductions in numbers of passengers, it is also congestion. That is a major issue why bus services are having problems. Here I would maybe incur edsroth by mentioning something that is not in the bill but could be, which of course is a parking levy, which introduced in Nottingham has been shown to reduce congestion compared to comparable cities around England. There needs to be some form of demand management in this bill and at the moment there is not. The other thing is if local authorities or SPT wanted to franchise services, I think that they would need access to route-level data in order to build the business case for the franchising agreement. This was a major reason why nexus in Newcastle could not build a sound business case for their quality contract application and why it therefore fell. Therefore, the bill should incorporate some mechanism whereby that could take place for the business case to be built. Finally, on footway parking, the proposed legislation appears to have been lifted completely from the 1975 Great London Act section 15, which I am sure you all will have read, apart from the 20-minute loading exemption. I, too, have significant doubts about this. We did some research here in Edinburgh looking at the enforcement of existing loading restrictions not on the footway but just on the street and we found that a vehicle illegally loading had a chance of being moved on or fined of between 5% and 0% on main streets compared to 17% on residential streets. So there is a problem with the enforcement of loading restrictions and I think giving this 20-minute enshrining in law, the 20-minute thing, will make it even more difficult to enforce even where there are decriminalised parking enforcement regimes. How's my time? That's why the pens... Sorry, I've forgotten about a pen thing. All right, so that's pretty much... Pen things critical. All I've got to say for now. Okay, thank you. We'll move on to Jonathan Cary. I think he's just going to cover specifically bus regulation. Yes, that's right. I was going to talk about the actual buses. When I look at that, I mean, I guess I'll jump straight to the bus self-improving partnership scheme. When I read that, obviously the idea of partnership and I think bus companies and local authorities working in partnership is something that is to be very much encouraged. And certainly, but in terms of the actual bill, I mean, I accept that a law is maybe in the detail on how these things actually work, but the bill, when you actually look at the bill, it doesn't say a great deal about partnership. It does give a lot or potentially give a lot of statutory powers to local authorities to basically regulate bus companies. And that seems, I mean, like, if you're a cynic, I suppose you say that they'll basically tell them what to do and there's no real freedom there for actual bus companies to contribute to an actual partnership. It is full economic regulation. That's what is being proposed in the most severe terms. And I think I would like to see more in terms of genuine partnership and those opportunities because, since it's not on the bill, I say, I do confess, or at least I do admit, a lot of it isn't how these things may actually work. But in terms of the bill, it's not really about partnership. It's economic regulation. Now, one thing I get to incur your wrath is, one thing I like to see in the partnership is more kind of legislative powers outside of the bus industry. I absolutely agree with Tom, as in, I think more needs to be done in terms of traffic management, those sorts of things. And that is causing problems for buses. And I know that's an option. But in terms of a formal part of the partnership, I think it's something that I would like to see in the bill. In terms of the franchising, I'm not sure if I should say what I'm about to say, but I guess I'll say it. I am very doubtful about actual proposals. You can regulate an industry about what you can never really get away from are the basic economics of that industry and what's happening in that industry. And if you try and impose a regular framework on an industry that won't actually bear the kin economics of it, it's simply not going to work. And you are going to potentially have a lot of problems, a lot of operators leaving, those sorts of things. In terms of profit margins, maybe if you speak about profit margins of bus companies, it's an Alan's briefing paper, is 8%. There's some variability in that in different companies, but there's not a lot to squeeze out there. And I think the realities of providing bus services in Scotland are very different. Well, in Britain, outside of London, are very different to how they were in 1985, and things have moved on. I mean, I don't know if I should say this again, but the happy times for the bus companies have gone. That's not the case anymore. It is, in some environments, a very challenging environment. And if you try and impose a regular framework on top of that, it's just not going to work. And I suppose to actually pick some things out. I mean, 13A5B, not that I've read the bill at all, says that, at the actual basis of these franchises will be on the making of payments by persons undertaking to provide themselves to the authority. That assumes there's excess profitability, which there isn't. There's also issues there about, well, even if that was possible, is that the best way to do it? Because that's a tax on bus users, so that's actually potentially a regressive measure. I just don't see franchising work. And then I guess the last thing is that it also can play ignores the idea of bus territories. You can remove the market, but you're not taken by the territory. If we're in Edinburgh, if you want an extensive bus contract in Edinburgh, there's one bus company in Edinburgh who will bid for those contracts. That represents a major bidder to entry. No other bus company is in a position to actually do that. So I guess the question is, would you end up with anything better than you've got already? And I would strongly suggest answers, no. And then to agree with Ian and Tom. In terms of financing abilities, skills, you're taking the whole kind of planning function, the whole kind of strategic function, you're taking, I take that out of the private sector where it is at the moment, and bring that into the public sector. Again, that's going to be extremely costly. And if anything, I would predict bus fares. I mean, bus fares have risen in this country, but they've risen for a good reason, and it's not excess profitability. So I think I'll stop in five minutes. Absolutely, you're on time, the only one that was. So congratulations. You don't incur my wrath, which, despite what you and Tom have said, is not that fearful. Can I just say, in advance of this session, the committee received quite a lot of input from you as attendees, which outlined questions, comments and issues and challenges that you had in relation to the bill. And so to try and make sure we covered all those as best possible, we've tried to summarise them within a set of discussion points, which I think have been circulated to you all in advance, and there are actually copies here. So we're actually going to deal with parking, bus services, low-mission zones and smart ticketing as we discussed. And what I'll do is at the start of each section, briefly explain what I believe the bill does, and then we'll select a discussion point from the list to get us started and then open it up to the floor. I want this to be as free-flowing as possible, so the committee members can hear as much of what you've got to say as possible, and if they want to further question, I'll obviously look to bring them in. But really, it's your meeting's discussion point. So let's start with parking. The part of the bill that would introduce prohibitions on parking on the pavement and double parking. There are a number of exemptions, which you're aware about. Perhaps just to kick things off, we've heard about the fact that, in the bill, there's an intention to give an exemption for delivery vehicles in relation to pavement parking. Who has views on this, and do you think enforcement will be required relating to that? Now, that gentleman was so quick, I couldn't but miss his hand. So, if you could stand up and say who you are, or stay seated, say who you are and who you represent. Okay, thank you very much. I'm David Hunter. I'm one of two representatives here from the Mobility and Access Committee for Scotland, Max, which advises Scottish Ministers on Disability and Access Transport Issues. I just wanted to say that it's the one part of the bill that Max has formally requested to be changed. As many of you know, and some of you have been involved in disability organisations and walking organisations have campaigned for years to have a ban for pavement parking, for reasons that I probably don't need to reiterate. To allow waste bin lorries and loading to park on pavements seems to drive a coach and horses through the principle that pavement parking is wrong. What we'd really like this legislation to do is to send a signal that pavement parking is anti-social and in practice what I'd particularly like you to consider is a parking attendant coming across a vehicle which is parked on a pavement. Instead of just saying, okay, there's a vehicle that needs to be ticketed, they think, could this vehicle be parking? Could it be loading? Has it got its hazard lights on? Shall I come back in an hour and see if it's still there? What it will actually mean is that it will legitimise, as your note said, short-term pavement parking. To say that it's a missed opportunity would be an understatement, so we hope that that's removed from the bill. John, you wanted to just question the road haulage association in this morning. They said that our roads are so badly designed that there's absolutely nowhere for a lorry to park if it's delivering to a pub or a shop or anything in the high streets. How would you answer them? Llorries are probably, along with bin lorries, probably the last things you want to park on pavements because they trash the pavement apart from anything else and make it a hazard for pedestrians, particularly disabled pedestrians. I've heard it said that this would mean that people have to load three streets away. I actually think that's just a total exaggeration, and normally there are places where you can park to load. There could be a distinction between the double parking and the pavement parking aspects of the bill which are all treated together, and I'm particularly talking about pavement parking. We don't think that pavement parking should be permitted at all for loading purposes. The other thing I'd just say is that the bill doesn't talk about delivery vehicles, it talks about for the purpose of loading and unloading. I think this would be used for people shopping, people delivering their shopping. If people got tickets I think they would appeal them and say that they were loading, and I think that they'd win a lot. I think that all of this hugely incentivises pavement parking rather than banning it, which is what we'd like to see the bill do. David, there's a gentleman over there that would like to come in. Sorry, the gentleman at the back, and then I'll come to the guy in blue. Am I on? Thanks, convener. I'm Walter Scott. I work for Angus Council. I'm also a member of the Society for Chief Officers for Transportation Scotland. The views that I'll represent, I think, I think are representative of that organisation, and particularly in terms of the comments attributed to the Road Haulage Association, they are quite correct. Our streets are not designed for HDVs. Many of our streets are not actually designed. They have just built up over history and generations. What I would suggest in that regard, rather than thinking it's purely an infrastructure issue, that we need to be designing our services, we need to be designing our means of delivery around the infrastructure that we have available. Otherwise, the actual cost of making our roads and streets fully accessible for such deliveries would be disproportionate. I think it's a case of designing our services, including our delivery services, around whatever is in the build. Thanks, Walter. The gentleman there. Could you introduce yourself and say if you represent an organisation? It's Dave Duffer from Spokes, the Loathing Cycle Campaign. To further follow up on John Mason's question, with regard to large lorries delivering, of course, one of the options is that you have what they call transmission stations near the centre of the city, where big lorries can deposit their stuff and then it gets transferred into e-cargo bikes or small electric vehicles and so on, which greatly reduces the difficulties of delivering to local shops. The second point on this is David, in his speech, mentioned about double parking. Of course, double parking is covered in the bill as well. Although we talk about pavement parking, we forget that the bill covers double parking as well, and it's essential in our organisation's view that that is retained. If, as we hope, the 20-minute exemption for a pavement parking is removed, the same should happen with double parking, because double parking is very hazardous for both pedestrians and cyclists. If you're trying to cross the roads of pedestrian, obviously it's far more difficult to push the chair or whatever if you're double parking. Similarly, with the cyclists, you have to go out right into the stream of traffic, and there's the danger of the double park vehicle opening its door. John Mason wants to ask a question. Thank you, convener. I'll follow on to the gentleman from Spokes here. I think that the figure that we heard this morning—I don't know if the gentleman's here tonight from the Road Hology Association—was that one heavy goods vehicle would require 28 vans to deliver its cargo, so it is about the unintended consequences sometimes with the distribution service and small vehicles. Does anyone want to—sorry, the gentleman there—is it a grey shirt? Yes. Much of the transport bill covers grey areas, I suppose. I'm Derek Young from the Community Transport Association. We talked a good bit about goods vehicles, but there is also a class of passenger-carrying vehicles who don't have access to bus stops, and that's community transport vehicles if they're not running a community bus service under a section 22 permit. Very often they are demand responsive, and they provide a door to vehicle service. That's very often a condition of the contract they might have or the grant funding they have, and that will require very short-term parking in a place where there might be no ability for a larger vehicle such as a minibus—not as big as a heavy goods vehicle—to be able to provide that support for individuals who are vulnerable, who might be older, who have mobility challenges to their door and sometimes into their house as well. We at the organisation don't think that that should justify pavement parking, but we think that there might be instances where there is double parking, where that should be treated in a regulatory fashion, which makes sense notwithstanding the points that Spokes has made. Does anyone else want to come? I'm Sandy Taylor. I'm Sandy Taylor. I represent the National Federation of the Blind, the UK, and you'll notice that I couldn't make eye contact with you, convener. The situation of pavement parking has been exacerbated by the introduction recently of Shared Space, where pavement kerbs have been removed or reduced in height. That has made it very easy for cars and vans to bump up on the pavement and park. As someone else said earlier, those pavements were never designed for heavy goods vehicles and they will break up the pavements very easily. For visually impaired and other disabled people, pavement parking is a real hazard and we would ask you to ban it totally. Thank you. Does anyone else want to come back on pavement parking? What about there's a lady at the back there? Hi, I'm Sally Hinchcliff from Pedal on Parliament. I've pedalled on Parliament today. I just picked up on something Ian Docherty said about you mentioned footway parking and a point that's been raised is that we're now starting to see separated cycle tracks as well as footways and does the law, we need to make sure the legislation covers parking on those because the new wide segregated cycle tracks that are being built where they're being built to quality have become very tempting targets for parking and we need to make sure that we don't move parking off the pavement and onto the cycle paths and then lose all the benefits of segregated cycle ways. People have mentioned about what should be and what shouldn't be allowed. Does that rely on lots of enforcement officers? Is that going to be an issue? Tom, do you want to come on that? The evidence that is out there demonstrates that if you move from a police enforcement regime to a decriminalised enforcement regime, the level of enforcement goes up and I would suggest goes up very significantly and I would therefore suggest that if there's any hope of enforcing these double parking and footway parking regulations then decriminalised enforcement of some form will be required all over Scotland which we do not have at the present time. On the loading issue, there's an absence of evidence from the London case to demonstrate whether the permission of loading on the footway does actually cause significant problems at the current time in that regime. In the legislation in London, loading is permitted on the footway but we don't know what problems that's causing. What is not in the legislation is the 20 minute rule and it would seem there's a lot of support for getting rid of that around the table. Jeremy, do you want to... Thank you, convener. A few comments. I'll start with the one that you've just made first, that on enforcement. Given that we already have substantial amount of regulation around parking in general, which is not being enforced, there is a genuine question as to by adding further regulation how enforced that regulation will be and whose job it will be and the cost of doing so, especially the local authorities where there is no decriminalised parking at present. It could say a bit of a free-frawl in many places, so whilst we may have a national approach to it, local on the ground level in the communities that you live in, how much of this will actually be enforced and there's a serious question to be asked of the bill team. We're going back to the issue of pavement parking, double parking. I think one of the problems that's coming out from the discussion this evening and previous discussions is the fact that it's being lumped together and there are actually quite two separate issues in some ways. The restriction of access to pavements due to vehicles is a separate issue in terms of accessibility of the pavement users, but the 20-minute exemption I think probably was geared around the double parking or side by side parking, the sense that vehicles turning up outside your door that want to deliver your shopping that night or your Amazon delivery, they need to stop outside your door to get the goods in and out, they're very unlikely to park on the pavement in the majority of instance, they're more likely to double park alongside existing parked cars and I think that's perhaps where there's been an acceptance that how do we accommodate that without setting up an environment where people take advantage of it and there will be a continuous 20-minute temporary parking by a number of successive vehicles that then means you just have an eternal stream of double parking. I think the Government has had a difficult job on this to be fair to them so I wonder if the current approach of the bill to lump pavement parking and double parking together maybe could be separated to look at the two that you could for example have a blanket ban with no exemption on pavement parking but there may be some mechanism to allow temporary double parking for the unloading of goods and what type of vehicles is another discussion so I do wonder if the bill isn't really meeting those needs. I'd like to bring in the gentleman at the back there in the middle. Terry Higgarty in this capacity, Ross of Mull and Iona community transport scheme and I'm guilty of pavement parking to help an old lady out of her vehicle without blocking the carriageway to buses and other traffic so that I can get her into the house on her Zimmer frame and I'm guilty of double parking because in Benesson on the Isle of Mull that all have it breaks loose between half past 11 and half past 12 when the post arrives and if that coincides with a spa lorry being there as well and I've got to get a blind lady into the bus or a frail lady out of the bus then I'm guilty on both counts. If the motivation for the legislation is to say well we're actually in favour of taking care of those people and that's what it's all about then bear my dilemma in mind on the Isle of Mull rather than making me a criminal for sticking up for the people that we most want to look after. Okay and I'm going to bring the gentleman in there and I mean certainly we've heard this on the committee before sorry the gentleman at the table it's fine that we've heard this before that some pavements are designed for parking in some areas I think John there's some places in your area where actually it's encouraged sorry the gentleman there. Jim Savage from Aberdeenshire council just picking up on the point that's being made really in terms of the viability of enforcement two matters really firstly the huge diversity as members all know in terms of the mix between rural and urban areas and how to find the right balance in terms of what provision will be and linked to that again is I think that practical reality in terms of the capacity needed to be able to enforce effectively and the viability of getting the right number of people in whichever organisation it is to make it commercially and financially viable certainly from a rural authority particularly hard we have a real mixture of different areas which need different provision of enforcement and that can be quite difficult to to make work and be viable and all authorities in very practical terms don't currently have the financing and the funding to be able to subsidise this matter so it needs to be a fair amount of work and probably flexibility to be given to see what the balance is struck into how to make it viable how to fund this how to finance this and to meet the needs that the bill is seeking to achieve and to account for that diversity in different communities okay on that particular point john if you like so is there enough money in the bill to finance your council and other councils to carry out these responsibilities i think i'd raise a question about that to say within more what needs to be done to be able to answer that question we think that some of the work is probably needs a bit more diligence to be able to actually answer that one okay i just for because i know gail ross who's the deputy convener of the committee has got a particular issue that she'd like to raise but can i just say it really is your discussion say if you want to be included just raise your hand and i'll acknowledge it as i see it and i'll bring you in because i'm very keen to hear as many views as possible but gail you had a particular point you understand. I did convener thank you good evening everyone one of the things that is missing from the bill and several of my constituents have contacted me about it is it's more inconsiderate parking but it's the issue of parking on dropped curbs and i wondered if anybody had any views on that okay there's a gentleman there yes you yeah okay Keith Irving from Cycling Scotland i've been involved with this legislation going back to 2008 when Ross Finlay proposed it my understanding as an external stakeholder is that dropped curb parking will be included in associated secondary legislation so that there will be a restriction on dropped curb parking and we would fully support that it's absolutely essential i can i bring tom in and then there's a lady at the back i'm sorry i've forgotten your name but i'll bring you back in again sorry tom clearly you may be aware the ban on dropped curb parking was introduced in england and wales through the 2004 traffic management act in england and has been operating since about 2007 successfully uh whether or not there's any kind of parking restriction at that curb okay sorry yes sorry sally again from pedal on parliament just just to say as well as dropped curbs there's also again as we start to build better cycling infrastructure it's access in and out of cycling into cycle infrastructure which may not be dropped curbs so for instance where you've got a modal filter in a bollard which allows bikes to pass through but not cars if there is a car parked right across it that's equally as an issue especially if you're in a bike where you can't easily get on and off like a cargo bike or an adaptive cycle it does seem odd that if we've gone to the thing of having dropped curbs that we we we obstruct them but some people when they came when they were raising this some talk about income or from surplus fines for or off street parking uh and radio improvement project it should be used to improve cycling and walking does anyone want to comment on that uh you can't come in again there must be somebody else i'll let somebody else come in so uh yes kate do you want to come in on that um yeah i don't think fines should be used as a substitute for proper funding okay no fines not for uh tom um the research that's been done on congestion charging suggests not that i wanted to suggest that should be in the bill we've already got legislation for that but the research that's been done on congestion charging suggests that it becomes more acceptable and parking charge it becomes more acceptable when people know that the money raised is being used to fund alternatives and improvements okay now now you can come in if you like again i only just wanted to say yeah that that was our point that it it should be part of driving a modal shift rather than simply providing more parking which will just obviously create generate more demand um okay does that does anyone have any other yes helvingdale community council over the past 10 years has been a great big awareness in the general public about subjects such as biodiversity and recycling so on this particular subject of payment parking as well as legislation don't forget we can also have education as well educate the public they're not as irresponsible and thick as maybe we think they are maybe if you just tell them that it's inconsiderate it's not to be done they might take the hint that's my point okay so encouragement as well there was another suggestion and i'm keen to hear any views on this is that bill might be amended to allow for private non-residential parking levies which could be applied to workplaces and other car intensive destinations so anyone have a yes that's actually my question see we did read them all and well i was delighted that that got slipped in because it does refer to an amendment but since ian and tom have both raised it i feel justified also it relates to buses as well ian began his very first sentence was that if we really the best thing this bill could do would be to stop the decline in bus usage and tom then pointed out that although the measures in the bill such as integrated ticketing and regulation etc will be beneficial the number one problem is demand management and congestion on buses and similarly the increasing disparity between the cost of using a bus and the cost of motion so i also found in local transport today an article saying that the scotch government is themselves considering amending the bill to allow workplace parking levy i don't know where that came from but it's in the local transport today magazine and what spokes would like to put forward is that if the bill is amended in such a way it should not just be workplace parking levy but a wider private non-residential parking levy so in other words local authorities would have powers it's not compulsory but local authorities would have powers to charge premises for the number of car spaces and they could choose to do it at workplaces they could choose to do it at leisure centres or supermarkets it would be entirely flexible we had a talk at transform scotland by one of the instigators of the nottingham parking levy which tom was tom was present to this meeting and she said the english legislation only gives them powers for workplace levy but her ideal would be there were powers to local authorities for all types of parking levy and so possibly tom would like to comment further but this is very much what we would like to see in in the bill tom and then ian forgive me if i've already said this i'm having a bit of a senior moment but the research and evaluation that's been done by colleagues at loughborough university of the nottingham workplace parking levy demonstrates that it has had a beneficial visual impact on congestion whilst the economy of nottingham has continued to grow sorry just say that again just i didn't quite catch that it is had a benefit has it yeah it has had a beneficial impact they've controlled for other factors and demonstrated that the workplace parking levy itself which by the way only applies to employers with 10 or more employer parking spaces employee parking spaces has had a beneficial impact on congestion in the city this has provoked quite a lot of arms being raised just just raising the thing perhaps when you're considering this is that those areas where they don't have bus services and correct levels of public transport they probably have to rely on cars to get to some of these places because there's no alternative ian and then i'm going to come to you and then to the gentleman at the back say i just wanted to express furious agreement with dave's important point that such a levy should be about non-residential parking and not limited to workplace parking an example of that at the moment is that there's a secondary kind of wave of out of town retailing competition which is appearing because as consumer habits become more sophisticated than the trip to the shopping mall becomes one of a little bit of shopping and more of a leisure activity and if you've been to these places recently you'll see how there's an explosion of kind of keds entertainment and cinema development and all the rest of it there's a renewed threat on town and city centres from that new wave of out of town development and that's exactly the kind of issue that would not be captured if it were a workplace parking levy rather than a non-residential one sorry yes hi everyone is this on yeah it's on don't worry he's watching you very closely it's just on your right i'm ellie harrison i'm from the get glas go moving campaign and we're volunteering campaign for a world-class fully integrated and accessible publicly owned public transport network for everyone in our city um and i'm hoping to come back in and speak a bit more when we get on to the bus sections of of the bill um but really i guess our issue with the bill um in general is the fact that it doesn't seem to take a sort of holistic overview of the whole transport infrastructure um and i guess we support a workplace parking levy we support um a low emission zone and a potential kest congestion charge anything that is going to reduce congestion um in glasgo city centre and potentially raise revenue that can be reinvested in improving and expanding the public transport network so we what we want to see is a joined up governance structure for the city which is going to ensure that something like the low emission zone a potential congestion charge and a potential workplace parking levy that money is going to be reinvested in expanding and improving the public transport network i've lived in glasgo 10 years before that i actually lived in nottingham for eight years and in that time i saw them build an entire tram network and then bring in the workplace parking levy once it was up and running so they had that world-class public transport network starting to be built so people could see it and they could see well actually i don't need to drive to work because the alternative is there you just got back on track on time and you mentioned trams and parking otherwise i might have had to pull you up but the gentleman there and we're coming on to buses next so you'll get a chance there water scot angus council and scott um yeah you've kind of picked up my point there in terms of of any workplace levy you do have to have the provision therefore alternative means of of transport and therefore to jump ahead and think that's necessarily going to be able to address the other is going to be hugely challenging and then just a uh i'm not sure whether this is a plaintiff plea from a from a humble council officer uh it's just clarity in terms of of what you're asking local authorities to do whether you're asking them to do it in which case it's a power or whether you are requiring them to do it and it is a duty or responsibility we'd be very careful there in terms of how we are giving powers to local authorities when we may be very different okay that's a very good point jami you answered a quick question i think that that's a really interesting point and that's what what is the bill doing is it enabling local authorities to do what's right for their area is it empowering them to do is it forcing them to do it is it asking them nicely to do it and are we going to see different schemes in different parts of scotland the point that's been raised a few times is what do you do with all that money that's raised does it get sucked into a big black hole of local authority funding or will it be ring fenced and will it be put to good use to benefit pedestrian cycling improve to build trams i'm not saying the sort of revenues would be of that scale perhaps to do that but you make a really valid point is that if people would be more inclined to pay the fine the levy the charge whatever it is if they saw some tangible benefits if they knew they were improved bus services in out of town if there was a tram system if they could see some benefit to local infrastructure if traffic was moving more quickly and more freely if they're if commuting became more easy or cheaper but if it's just seen as a tax and a charge and there's no benefit you won't get that society buy in that you need to get the behavioural change that we need to make this work i'm going to do three more comments on parking and then we're going to move on to a very naughty subject so the gentleman is keith is it keith yes yes yeah agreeing with the the parking levy comments especially by Ian the one other issue parking issue that's not in the current bill is enforcement of zigzags at pedestrian crossings and outside schools it is legally difficult but i would encourage the committee to at least encourage that to be reviewed because if we're creating a clear consistent law on parking people would find it daft that you can park outside a school on a on a keep clear sign and actually that cannot be enforced by a decriminalised office it can't be enforced so zigzag lines can't yellow zigzag lines outside schools unless there is an associated order with them five council has an order so five council you could be enforced but most other local authority areas well i i'm i do you know i've learned something which is one of the great things about this meeting is i thought that if you want on a zigzag line of any description you you were socially unacceptable and and liable to a huge fine so the gentleman next year that i'm going to come to tom and then we're going to move on to the next one jim savage abedinso council just pick up on the point in terms of funding and the point in terms of duty and power certainly wish it to be a power rather than a duty and think that the funding i think as the colleague has said needs to be a holy separate matter away from the base funding for authorities very important for communities to see that there's a reinvestment back into the infrastructure for a number of different modes of transport and not funding that's going to be used to provide a completely different service or activity from local authority point of view tom do you want to come in briefly just very briefly responding to the point about the tram in nottingham the research that i mentioned from loughborough university controlled for the effects of the tram so the congestion reduction impacts of the workplace parking levee in nottingham are in addition to any effects that might have been brought about by the tram secondly just picking up on jamie's point there of course scotland already has transport legislation which would allow the hypothecation which is what you were talking about of revenue from a demand management technique 2001 transport scotland act the powers regarding congestion charging already say that that money raised should be hypothecated to transport related things so there's a precedent for it already in law okay we're going to go on with buses i'm afraid now we're quite limited on time i'm sure we could talk about parking all evening but parking is now parked bus service the bill will allow local transport authorities to provide bus service where there's unmet demand and no private sector position provision it also replaces bus quality partnerships with bus service improvement partnerships and it replaces bus quality contracts with local service franchises and requires bus industry stakeholders to make open data available to information providers it's quite an interesting part of the bill and it's caused the committee a certain amount of questioning about how all the buses and the different bus companies and things will run in scotland do you the question i guess that there's got to start this office do you think the bill gives local authorities enough of a range of options to help them to deliver a better bus service in their areas and respond to local needs now you said you were coming in on buses and in you come yeah so we on the third of october we handed in our petition with 10184 signatures collected from across glasgo calling for publicly owned buses and calling for a fully integrated and accessible public transport network we don't think that well we know the bill in its current state isn't going to deliver a public bus company for glasgo that matches up to what you have here in edinburgh with loathiam buses we want the bill to be amended so that publicly owned companies can run both commercial and non-commercial routes so again they can cross subsidise use profits from profitable routes in glasgo and which are currently all being run by first buses use that profit to subsidise le less profitable routes and in terms of franchising we do see that franchising could deliver huge benefits to glasgo if it was properly implemented but we're worried with having these two different options having the bus service improvement partnerships and the franchising option that local authorities will basically they need to be enforced forced as you said suggested jamey to implement the franchising frameworks and to make it work for passengers rather than for the profit making bus companies okay there's a couple of interesting points so the gentleman here would you yes you yeah my name is Brian Gordon i'm representing the tayside and central transport partnership and to boot i was a bus driver for 25 years and i've seen the excess of bus deregulation and i've seen how the companies over the years have cherry picked the routes and left the the unfavourable routes to community transports and things like that well we're going to have to get back to some something like the money going back in to what it's meant to be for and that's to pay for unfasnable areas where elderly people are not now stay and they can't get they can't get a bus near their door if as a councillor i speak a lot to the transport company in Dundee every time they withdraw from an area and we've got to have petitions and meetings and that to try and get them to come back the council come come back and pick up the slack by subsidising the route but it takes a lot of effort from the community to get that so this is not working at all when you speak to the companies what you've got since bus deregulation is we're a commercial company we know you're a commercial company but you've got to put something back in to what you're taking out so we're going to have to look at that and maybe go further we what we're saying in the bill to make sure that these communities across Scotland get the transport service that they deserve the transport service that they've paid for okay now that there are a few hands going up so i'll take you next if i may yes absolutely okay robert andrew managing director for scotland for stagecoach was very quiet during the parking discussion actually thoroughly enjoyed that and you know thinking the unintended consequences of legislation and whether it means buses might not be able to serve some roads and you know just the bottlenecks and congestion are caused by white van man are just passing comments for for committee members the bus elements obviously one that's very close to my heart i am old enough to remember the pre deregulation era gist i could bore committee members with what that meant in practice as opposed to memories which at times might be rose tinted you know about how things were but in terms of what's being proposed you know i think jonathan cowie you know gave a very accurate account of bus industry finances is stand today and the perception and the wrong perception that there are excess profits in the industry and that therefore there's this element of funding that could then be used across subsidised whatever you know i think that was very very eloquently put there's a other body of evidence out there you know chris cheeker could point the committee to you know a sort of can demonstrate the fact that the the whole ownership and regulatory model doesn't actually change the finances one job you know at the end of the day where it's about moving people it's about the cost to the industry which are largely fixed and it's how then that transpires through to to provide the quality of service that the the travelling public in scotland actually want and need in terms of partnership the biggest barrier to partnership under the old model has actually been local authority funding cycles and the difficulty that officers have had being able to commit to issues taking place over more than a one-year term you know there'd been a small number of statutory quality partnerships in Scotland generally in the South Clyde area you know there was one nearly came in in the Inverness area but again it's the inability of local authority to commit to measures over a sustained period that meant that that never saw the light of day so the subtle changes that are being made to actually talk about measures rather than infrastructure you know whilst in some ways that's diluting the potential impact of partnerships should actually break down a lot of the barriers and local authority thinking to bring these things in you know at franchising I can't say any more than than Jonathan Cowey said in terms of you know it just won't work you know we've been here before the decline is even worse than those days the challenge of the bus industry is not the bus industry the challenge of the bus industry is the growing congestion it's how we deal with the fact that people's habits have changed the way they live the way they work the way they shop has all changed over time we've had a discussion about workplace parking levy and you know parking charges at retail parks they didn't exist 30 years ago generally and certainly not the scale they are today so we actually need to get to the root cause and not have the debate about who owns it and who regulates it that's not the real issue okay there's a whole heap of things coming up that people coming up with with questions I mean we heard from transport for London and and they were saying that buses if you've got them regular and people can see them coming and they can plan their trip and and they know it's going to be on time that helps and lifts bus transport and the amount of people that prepare to use them tom do you want to come in and there's I think you you were looking at and there's a gentleman at the back and there's a lady there and and I'm really going to forget everyone in a minute but tom go for it I mean it may be a slight surprise but I would like to concur with some of what Robert has said I don't think we should see franchising on its own as any kind of panacea to the difficulties that the bus industry faces and sometimes when we think about what bus services could be like we of course look to some other countries in in Europe and I've I've got some data which sort of looks at a couple of four three countries where they have franchising and where they basically put more money in more public money into the bus network so in Scotland in 2015-16 the funding per head the public funding per head for the bus industry was 57 pounds if we look at all of Norway it was about it wasn't as much as you might expect about 79-80 pounds if you look at the Copenhagen metropolitan area it was 85 pounds if we get to Stockholm region it was 109 pounds per head so when we get to Stockholm we're getting you know up to twice as much per head of public money into the bus industry than than we have in this country and so franchising without extra public money is unlikely to achieve as much as people might hope it would I'm going to try and bring in some people who haven't had a chance to come in so there's a gentleman there and then there's a gentleman there and a lady there say say yes Andrew Jarvis I'm the managing director for first in Glasgow the average speed of our buses now in Glasgow is just over nine miles an hour 9.06 miles an hour it's got nothing to do with who regulates the buses it's got everything to do with congestion and the changes in people's lives that have happened over the last 20 years and they haven't I suppose those changes haven't the pace of changes quickened but you can see that the decline in bus patronage happens starting the 50s and apart from a few years where it's gone the right way it's continuing so whether it's regulated or unregulated though unless we actually change the fundamentals of what we're doing we're effectively rearranging the depth chairs on the Titanic we're doing nothing about the fact there's a dirty great hole so for me it's a very sterile debate about regulation franchising it's not going to make the blindness bit of difference to say that we don't cross subsidize is also completely wrong so for example if we have eat quieter evening journeys or quieter journeys on services on a Sunday we still operate those as part of the overall network we don't give those up for somebody else to fund okay thank you there's a gentleman at the back there who's now got the microphone yeah Ian Findlay from paths for all we are the national charity that promotes physical activity through everyday walking and active travel I'd just like to support very much Ian Docherty's opening remark about this the most important thing being increasing in bus pastrinage and I like to emphasize the link between bus travel and active travel because if you think of bus travel every journey starts and finishes with usually a walk if not a cycle so I think we need to look at the whole journey and not just the bus element of the journey although the bus element is very very important if we're going to change people's behaviour and the main behaviour change we're looking for here is to move people out of the private motor car and on to public transport I do fear if we just think of the bus element of this journey then we'll not bring about the behaviour change that we're looking for which is increasing bus patronage okay thank you and yes Sheila Fletcher from the mobility and access committee for Scotland my question really that I put to the committee was about rural transport and about the problem that we have in rural areas with the proportion of coaches we have on local bus services now I don't think really unless the local authority and the bus companies agreed that they wanted to introduce fully accessible buses then I don't think that this is going to be solved but it is a major issue and it means that in rural areas and as some of you know I have a community transport background we the groups that I used to work with were expected to fill that gap and I don't think that they should be expected to fill that gap I think we should have bus services including coaches that are fully accessible and that everybody is able to use and I'm not too sure whether the bill as it currently stands will enable that and it's really a big issue in rural Highland. Maureen, did you want to ask a question because there's a gentleman behind you but if you'd like to ask a question start with. It was just a few comments I mean I think most of the committee members are very aware that you know this is not a transport bill in isolation it's got to be looked at in terms of climate change and active travel and everything else and I do think you know franchising of buses is perhaps a bit of dead-end kind of discussion it is about getting more people onto public transport and we heard for example this morning that the young are more likely to book a taxi for a short journey they don't own cars to the same extent that older generations have done but rather than go on a bus they will book a taxi either a taxi or more likely to be Uber with with the young because they'll have an Uber account and I think that was really quite sobering I mean I think I agree that not just in urban areas but in rural areas congestion for the buses and more bus lanes are needed but you know there is absolutely a culture change we had an event in the new awpr a few weekends ago called go northeast and nobody was allowed to drive on the new awpr but we had to go to a park and ride and get on a bus and we were queuing for the buses and the number of people in front of me and behind me you know who were there for a sunday outing with you know their larger extended families were saying oh I can't have mine the last time I was on a bus and the other one was saying I'd think I've ever been in a bus so it's this kind of cultured which doesn't exist to the same extent in Edinburgh and the Lothians because even the old ladies the morning side will get on a bus but you know that it is something that we really have to change in Scotland. The gentleman sorry have you got the microphone Chris McGeach Easton Bartonshire council my point kind of goes back to what is the name of this part of the bill with buses and has to arrest the fall and patronage that's happened the last few years and buses are a major part of our public transport network 75 percent of journeys are made by bus so it's not a small issue it's something that's very important so if the main name of the bill is to reduce the fall and by doing that by giving local authorities more powers then I think it's important that we give local transport authorities powers that are feasible to use and right now within the bill I won't restrict them to services that would probably be loss making services they're restricting local transport authorities their powers and I take the commercial operator's point about it doesn't matter who operates the service it's about congestion and I agree it's we need to look at that through local transport strategies and bus service improvement partnerships which are in the bill as well but for the overall aim is to give local transport authorities more powers we need to make sure that they're viable and that this part of the bill is workable okay thank you I'm going to try and bring in a couple of experts and that I'm going to come to you so Kate did you want to say something and then I'm going to bring Ian in straight after okay yeah I just three quick points in response to various people I think that may be helpful the gentleman from paths for all uh wanted to stretch stress the link between active travel and public transport use and I'd like to to point out that there is in fact evidence that from obesity studies that people that use public transport are on average not as heavy as people who are dependent on their cars and that is precisely because there is an active travel element for most bus use and I'd like to pick up on Sheila Fletcher's point about the problems for rural areas it's not exactly her point but I think rural areas in general are not really served very well by this bill and they really need some commercial demand responsive services that can bridge the gap between fixed route buses and expensive taxes because I mean in the northeast of Scotland where I live we've got huge buses on our route but we only get them once an hour and they're very uncomfortable and we'd need something that bridges the gap that maybe goes a little more often and Maureen's point about the uberisation of the young I think that's a point that's very very important they don't know how to use buses so they bypass them entirely because the apps make it so easy and there's a lot of evidence in the United States that where uber get a foothold in the market transit use goes down dramatically and I think that that was echoed in the transport for London's thing that you can actually see where your bus is where it is on the route and that makes it easier and more beneficial to travel in and then I'm going to come to you thank you I am not philosophically opposed to the public ownership of services and assets but I think I'd agree with my academic colleagues in that it's really hard to find the evidence to say that more regulation is going to solve the problems that we're facing I think that's important to say however however and to counter that a little bit the bus industry does receive about a third in some operators cases about a half of its revenue from the public purse so you might expect our expectations of bus companies to be slightly different than other commercial companies on that basis and I'm sitting far enough away from my colleagues in the bus industry one of them is looking directly at me right now to say we do also have to recognise that as well as congestion being a big problem as well as the changing lifestyles et cetera that we all know about and there is research to demonstrate the product is too often poor now on the railways we have the squire quality incentive regime where there is a quality regulatory framework designed to make the experience of travelling by train as good as it can be and believe me if you travel around in the north of england on its regional railway network you'll see the difference that that makes to the passenger experience in comparison with the railway in Scotland so I do wonder if there is a legitimate role for some kind of quality regime and expectations given the amount of public money that goes into the bus industry however and to try and guarantee I get out of the room alive and I don't know the up-to-date figures for Scotland but I do for the UK because I was reading them for something I was writing the other day and in round terms we spend something like 12 times as much money on the railways as we do on the buses the railways account for only 2% of all trips in the UK and one of my in fact my favorite ever quote from any academic interview I've ever done from a former senior local authority officer in Scotland was that there are two definitions of policy policies either what you put in your documents or it's what you spend your money on so if we're serious about social inclusion if we're serious about the economy if we're serious about inclusive growth we do have to think about what we spend public money on maybe we should be exploring more whether the money should be collected by the local authority or regional authorities and distributed back out to the bus companies like they do in London I'm sorry Maureen you jumped in there and I'm not going to let you get away with it because it was set a precedent which is completely unacceptable this gentleman just having a drink out of his glass of water has been queuing up and then I want to bring Jonathan in and I've got Colin and I've got John and I've got a gentleman at the back and and I've got you again so sorry if you'd like to go first yes sorry I'm Paul White I'm representing the Federation of passenger transport which is a trade association for bus and coach companies in Docherty's intervention there was a rollercoaster ride for me with agreeing with parts and then violently disagreeing with others I would just actually just touch a couple of those points before I raise my point I had my hand up for and it's good we have Robert Sampson here from my transport focus to maybe talk about passenger satisfaction surveys and the quality of bus compared to in what my perception might be of actual the bus users where the scotland's bus companies are averaging about 90 percent passenger satisfaction and how that compares to other modes is it's maybe not the the poor service it may be it is a general perception on them on the amount of money that bus companies receive from the government I think that probably includes a concessionary fair scheme in there and that is a huge commercial intervention into the commercial huge inventions commercial market and means operators are receiving 57 reimbursement for every every journey so that has to be taken into account the reason I had my hand up was I was at a bus and active travel forum today organized by transport Scotland one of the speakers said no transport act in the last 70 years has including the 1986 act which deregulated the market outside London has effectively addressed bus decline and that's because the focus of those acts has been on regulatory models and strategies and hasn't actually put demand management at the centre and I think that's a fear of this this bill and I disagree with LA as you'd expect in a range of things but in about forcing local authorities to do anything but one thing I would like to maybe see is targets introduced so that local authorities are working towards reducing congestion improving average bus speeds improving modal shift cleaner modes is that something that the bill can look to include I note that the national the government's national performance framework has removed the indicator that measures congestion I'm not I disagree with that and maybe the bill has a role in putting something back in there which will look to help us measure the impact that we see and help address it okay jonathan your your moment yeah I think I think we need to be very careful smoke screens and to co figures that the bus is I think Ian said 33 percent it's actually 43 percent is funded by by public subsidy but for the for that level of revenue at least I'm not quite sure what Ian's proposing because he's a hundred percent funded by the public sector so maybe he's proposing the act he works from nothing for that funding they are there ourselves as are as provided and it's kind of smoke screens like that that I think distract from the real issues which is the kind of underlying economics to the market and I think of all the things that we're talking about it's all joined up with congestion traffic control those sorts of things and to look at the bus industry in isolation I think is is it's probably not what's required it is part of the whole package but I would guard against smoke screens the other thing I would guard against is cross subsidy it was mentioned that we can use profit making bus services to pay for socially necessary services so therefore it's only bus users that pay for socially necessary services not the taxpayer and I say should be a taxpayer that pays for socially necessary services so I think there was cross subsidy that something to be always very careful of John Mason okay so I definitely take you there was a gentleman at the back who's got the microphone he's he's got it so I've got now have to let him speak first thank you very much Derek Holden representing the chart introduced logistics and transport now we're the largest professional body trying to raise standards in the industries we're talking about like buses and the white vans that are clogging up the pavements and that sort of thing so when we sat down to discuss this bill we decided as many of the people have already said that legislation was absolutely the wrong tool to deal with these issues that maybe the topics are right but actually we're going to achieve absolutely nothing with the legislation and we keep coming back to this word of partnership and the you know what we find with our schemes like many of the bus operators here we have benchmarking schemes on things like to try and work out why are they doing so well in Brighton why are they doing so well in Nottingham what about Norwich or whatever and look at all the different types of areas how do we raise the quality of say DPD to meet DHL or whatever so these benchmarking schemes that we run to try and raise practice to the best are the sorts of things we look and then we keep coming back to words like partnership and we ask the questions well why are we not delivering these partnerships and actually we argued in our response to the committee that in a written response that actually one of the problems was actually making them statutory in the first place in 2001 they were actually doing better than that prior to then because of partnership as a voluntary arrangement where people work together to deliver shared goals and that by giving any individual stakeholder too much power we actually weakened the ability to work well together so there's some really important issues and it was really interesting to observe the passion around for example the workplace parking issue which you know comes out of an area that's doing very well like Nottingham with great partnership working cultures between the bus operators and the public authorities and so reinforcing what are the mechanisms that deliver that and you know we would observe and we think well actually there are things that need legislation I think every single one of the political parties in the last election manifestos to the Scottish Parliament had some form of land value taxation mentioned in the manifesto why don't we have a land value tax parking you know these are things that desperately need legislation desperately need enacted we've got apparently political commitments to do it and yet they're not even in the bill so these are the sorts of when we sat down we said just strap the bills anyway we've weighed our response but it could be like the education bill in the Scottish Parliament recently where actually the best thing the minister can do is say oh but a really great debate about this and the best way to go and do it is to do it by a different mechanism that rather than legislation but that's that that's our take on it and so it sort of applies to all all four themes but I thought I'd come in on the bus one because it's such an important one around this this partnership culture and let's let's go let's go to Brighton you know yes London's good but there's you know those great cultures existing partnership working between local authorities and bus companies around the UK let's go and follow them and work out why they work and that take and grow those cultures and make them work better okay we're definitely not scrapping the bill with the amount of work we've just put into it sorry you were you were wanting to say something yeah thank you convener robert andry stage coach just a couple of comments if i may you know i think it was fascinating that you know the discussion teased out you know the cost of franchising and the cost of the london model and how that compares to the current spend per capita in Scotland and bear in mind Scotland's a predominantly rural country so you naturally expect to spend per head of population to be higher there's not been a lot of discussion about passengers it's starting to come through you know in the last last couple of questions and you know picking up on Ian's point you know Paul quite rightly raised the you know the fact that customer satisfaction in the bus industry is actually pretty good you know it's 90 percent we're not complacent we want it to be better but a lot of sectors would would kill for that but you know in terms of how we make it better you know what customers value most is punctuality and reliability they want to have the peace of mind that when they leave the house and walk to the bus stop you know the vehicle is going to turn up on time yes they can check it in the app to know whether it's on time or not but that's what they want you know we get people commute into our cities from whether it's Yershire into Glasgow Fife into Edinburgh they don't know when to leave the house because they don't know what bus or coach to get because they don't know how long it's going to take to actually get through the traffic and into the the urban centres and that is a big disincentive to people actually thinking about how how they travel they'll sit in the car and listen to the radio and be more in the congestion not realise and they're actually contributing significantly to it in terms of Sheila's point of a may you know a lot of we operate a lot of coaches don't apologise for that on the longer distance services that gives the ride quality Kate's comment about vehicles being uncomfortable I don't know what type of vehicle she was travelling on but coaches are more comfortable for longer distance trips where coaches tend to end up on shorter trips tends to be because it's marginal services operating off the back of school contracts school contracts are generally specified by local authority trying to get the lowest price trying to get the most number of kids in and that's a sort of byproduct of that so some of those issues are actually in the gift of the current the current environment Colin did you want to come in with a brief observation I have to say there's been a massive breakout of unity I think tonight between even people who believe in municipal bus companies and the bus companies themselves I think everybody's united in the fact that the current transport bill wouldn't make one iota of difference to the decline in bus usage at the moment I think it's absolutely clear and what we need is some radical proposals to come forward and I was struck by the point that Ian made around but regulation was not the answer but then you proposed the sort of squire model that we have for real now with the best well in the world it's highly a ringing success with 60% of those targets not met in the worst performance figures today since since the current franchise was handed out so what do you specifically propose if that's not regulation what what is it what do you specifically propose if more regulation isn't the answer because the two best examples I suppose are are Lothians where we have municipal ownership of buses and London where we have regulation I mean every route is regulated so what is the specifics that you're saying should happen to reverse that if it's not regulation I'm going to let Ian in in coming and we're going to have to sort of be careful that buses don't dominate the whole evening Ian do you want to come back on that a response to that challenge could definitely take all evening I mean there is a difference between the economic regulation of the industries at all which Jonathan and Tom have talked about and a different regulatory framework which we already have for the traffic question for example for basic standards of vehicles maybe we could we could choose to have a different set of quality standards to permit operators to to operate and you know on the squire railway point I challenge you to travel around in any other regional railway in Great Britain and find a standard passenger quality that looks anything like scotrail with the exception of the railways that transport for london operate because they have the same the same kind of view and I think it's quite good we've got stretching targets we don't meet sometimes actually because that's what keeps people's eyes focused on the prize what I did want to say and come back to again what I said at the very beginning about increasing bus passengers being the single most important thing that we all have to do just a little bit of note of caution about passenger experience surveys whichever mode they're on and my academic colleagues will have the same view no doubt about university league tables they measure particular things because of the questions they ask in the questions they ask them off what we're talking about here is finding non-users of the bus that we need to get back on the bus and by definition asking people that are already on the bus doesn't capture them we need to think about that I mean think about why people are not using bus services when they're there and what we need to do to make them better so that they do you keep catching me out Ian I think you've come to the end of your point and you go on to another one so I'm going to take two more things on buses and then we're going to move on to low admission zone so the gentleman with the blue tie and then the gentleman with the yellow and blue tie Robert Samson transport focus three quick points one thing we've said in evidence to the committee and agree with what Ian said earlier there has to be a strategy going through whether structure you come up with to look at non and infrequent users of bus service and actually get them on to the bus actually improve bus numbers in the scot rail franchise you have the national rail passenger service you also have the square as you make looks at both quality of the quantity of mechanisms of the passenger experience the bus industry transport scotland regional transport partner so it's funding the bus passenger service 10,000 passengers a year actually looks at yeah I take the point existing passengers only it doesn't look at the people who aren't using the bus but also developing action plans of bus companies to actually take those results seriously and how to actually improve it and compared with the rail with only 2000 passengers a year being served there's 10,000 in the bus industry action plans being developed and what comes through in all the survey weeks what's the main what's the biggest criticism you've got about current bus services punctuality and wherever we use a survey what what's causing the poor punctuality congestion the number one thing that passenger stages now it can be improved is congestion that's the biggest barrier to punctuality congestion wherever we actually do this everywhere it's rural or urban areas congestion you're all ignoring my waving pen i'll encourage you that we've got two more subjects which i want to get through so yeah you're the last one on buses thank you convener richard hall managing director of lading buses subject of much debate i know through this rec committee hearing a couple points i think we need to get clarified firstly we need to start changing the language we use around bus and you know we talked about active travel bus is part of active travel we need to stop talking about passengers and we need to start talking about customers because we're evolving our models like the high street is evolving and we need to meet those challenges so as politicians and officers and commercial operators you know we need to change that there's a couple of key points around the the london model that's been talked about before i'll come very very quickly to the lovian model some key things around that london does not deliver quality bus services okay you know i speak with experience having worked down there for you know some three and a half years it delivers very poor quality bus services what it delivers is high frequency bus services okay and they don't innovate they don't deliver the quality that bus operators deliver in scotland you know that is very very clear so the customer experience is not great drivers that don't interact with the customers buses that are no different to buses that were built in the late 80s early 90s with the exception of you know technical engineering development tfl is facing a massive operating deficit in 2019 of £1 billion okay and currently it receives annually 591 million grant from central government to fund its operation of services we did some work in lovin some years ago and we presented its city of edinburgh council at the cost they would have to provide to us to operate the same level of service and they were quite scared by that and you know that's something we can update and present if wanted so 591 million to grant fund tfl to run bus services in london that's a massive massive number and you know where's that going to come from there's a couple of key things here we need to destigmatise bus the lady over there spoke about glasgo and actually glasgo is stigmatised socially people in cities across scotland stigmatised glasgo and that's not right that's not the bus operators fault it's not the public transport operators fault it's a societal thing that needs to change and change it must bus in scotland in the last figures produced by transport scotland themselves carry 380 million people per annum okay and rail carried i am waving i've given you a bit of leeway okay we're beginning to get into a bit of a thing that's going to stop us talking about lower emission zones one more point one more point and and and then you will definitely have missed the bus um the the final point convener thank you for that extra time much appreciated um is that actually the model the ownership model doesn't make any difference lovian is an entirely commercial business it makes the same commercial decisions that first group make that stage coach make that independently owned bus operators make it makes those for the right decisions for its customers and for its ongoing business security right and and and i did promise we'd move on with buses i'm really sorry coryn and i know i'll have to meet the wrath of you at the next committee meeting but we're going to move on to lower emission zones and we have a short time to do it this would apply this part of the bill would allow local authorities to create modify and revoke lower emission zones in scotland who has a view on this we've heard the the uh the academics on it does somebody have a view on it uh yes tom flanigan from very short sorry the point is very very short points i don't mean to be difficult because i would like to touch on smart ticketing tom flanigan director of tack tram uh just to pick up a point which i think cate made about uh making sure that the implementation of measures to support lezeds are across a wider geographical area at the moment funding is being made available to those authorities who have to deliver lezeds quite rightly um but if you take the case of dundee which is the first in the queue in the tack trainer it's a very compact city and quite a number of the measures that need to be introduced to support the lezed could be park and ride which could be across the tarot bridge or perhaps evening angus so we'd urge the government to make sure that the funding is available for measures not just in the lezed but on the wider travel to work area as well the second point is around incentives particularly for modal shift so we talked about charging i hope the lezeds will bring in the opportunity to actually think about incentives as they do in north america where there's a commuter tax incentive where people are given tax incentives to actually shift mode whether that's rapid transit public transport or in particular active travel so we start to think about incentives for people to shift mode particularly towards electric vehicles or electric bikes and similar such modes of travel thank you jimmy you want to start to question there's a gentleman at the back of the frame i'll keep it quick it's interesting the lez thing is actually been one of those few things that have had real genuine cross-party support and there's been some differences in terms of how we should operate the grace periods what type of vehicles and there's lots of discussion around the technicalities of delivery of it but it genuinely has had cross-party support that therefore i'm saddened and disappointed if there's any academic evidence and i do genuinely believe in evidence led policy that suggests that it won't make a huge difference and i'd like to think it did otherwise why are we doing it so what i would say is and i would ask the question is does the bill get it right what should central government decide and what should be left to local authorities because there's been a lot of discussion and i've heard so many different views from so many different panels and experts on this who i've apologised to on it who you know what what should be decided centrally what should be the standardized metrics that all local authorities in the five zones have to implement and what flexibility should be given to local authorities to make local decisions that are right for those cities and it's really unclear in my mind at the moment what we should centralise and what we should devolve jimmy the short point i think from cate in response and and and then i'll come to you john if you want to come on okay okay and then the the gentleman there's two gentlemen at the back okay thank you yeah i just um i would share um concern that the the the reviews of existing ellies eds are not glowing reports um but i think without access to concrete evidence on that it'd be something i would go to look up um i think there could be a couple of reasons for that one is that obviously transport is not the only source of our quality problems um and um those are perhaps not being tackled in the ellies eds so they're not being so the sources of pollution are not being fully addressed and i don't know this for a fact but i sort of surmised that perhaps the issues that we've had with car manufacturers trying to gain the emissions standards could have resulted in ellies eds not delivering the expected results in the period in question okay so i'm going to take the gentleman who i accused of wearing gray shirt and he told me it wasn't first well i said it was nearly gray um so it was actually in response to a point that dr pangborn made in her initial initial marks at the outset where she said that there's a there's an aspect of social progressiveness about this measure to take bear in mind which is that people who have the least money might have the oldest vehicles which are likely to be the least clean if that's true for individuals and private cars it is probably also true for transport providing organisations that those with the least money probably have the older and least clean and efficient vehicles and i mentioned the community transport sector again because there are a lot of minibuses in city centre areas where there are a equality management zones which are trying to get maximum use out of the assets they have from the minimum amount of money and it's over a fifth of community transport providers in scotland i have an annual operating cost of about £20,000 or less so all i would ask is that it's considered that the community transport sector has equivalent access to the funds that are being made available for retrofit and upgrade because otherwise they might find it very difficult to meet the euro 6 emissions that even if that's not the best standard in itself it's still quite demanding for vehicles which have a very long usage length and which maybe arrive second hand as well sorry is it gavin i see sorry you are hiding in the shadows and we saw you earlier this morning gavin and and then back to the centre hi everyone i'm gavin tomson i'm the air pollution campaigner of the ends of the earth scotland and i spoke to the committee this morning about low emission zones um and some of the points i was going to say were were just made actually about poor performance of low emission zones in the past were about um the euro standards not being as good this is going back some years and the wide skill fraud we now know about um Volkswagen are the only company but there's a you know uh deep distrust now about all main car manufacturers because many of them are using similar techniques about lab testing rather than real world testing which skews the air pollution anyway so i was just going to say that that um some of the evidence on low emission zones in the past hasn't been great but in terms of reducing air pollution in urban centres there's very few other policies that have been as effective now i think it needs to be implemented hand in hand with a lot of the policies we've talked about here this evening a workplace parking levy to reduce congestion and moving people on to buses um and just a quick point as well that electric cars aren't the answer i'm sure everyone knows this but electric cars aren't the answer to air pollution you get a lot of particular pollution from tyre wear and brake wear um we need to be moving people out of private cars walking cycling public transport um and electric cars are part of this solution but um certainly won't stop the air pollution and the final point on on low emission zones in the middle here thank you andrew jarvis again from first um in in terms of national local the technical standards definitely have to be national um particularly some operators will have vehicles that within the daily duty cycle will operate in two or perhaps even three or maybe even four of the low emission zones particularly when you think of the longer distance services so it's that that's pretty critical in terms of the local then i guess the the area and also the time restrictions seems seems most sensible in terms of the another reason why the low emission zones won't necessarily work properly or or could not work we've had a lot of data presented to us from seaper and that that's to do with you will only achieve the the reductions if the average speed is appropriate so if the average speed falls below a certain level a euro six bus or lorry doesn't achieve the level that it needs to the heat isn't there in the engine and the exhaust system and then finally in terms of commercial vehicles it's a it's a real world testing environment it's not a laboratory test and the vehicles then also record that in real time so if there's a fault with the system and the emissions fall uh or go higher than a set level the vehicle goes into shut down and stops so it the commercial vehicle euro six measurement is nothing like a a private car measure okay that's interesting thank you and we're now going to move on to the final session which is on smart ticketing and this bill would allow Scottish ministers to specify a national technological standard for the implementation and operation of smart ticketing arrangement it provides local transport authorities with additional powers to develop and deliver smart ticketing arrangements and schemes and there's a member of the committee who always when i we get on to smart ticketing produces his wallet not to give me money but to produce five cards to say that all of them work across scotland all for different reasons and why can't he have one so he's not here tonight Stuart Stevenson but he gets a mention so smart ticketing has been challenging the introduction who would like to start off yeah the gentleman at the back hi my name is Ralph Roberts i'm the managing director of McGill buses in the west of scotland but i also chair the scotish smart and integrated ticketing steering group where all modes are represented apart from air and tram in scotish government as well we already have the standard the standard is called it so and that is the standard that is used for multi operator multi model ticketing the standard obviously existed in london and tfl used it quite for some years and the problem has not been in that sense the technology the problem has been the commercial allocation and collection of the revenue and in the patchwork quilt that we have up and down the uk it makes it very very difficult because we have a number of sticking plasters around about the country in terms of service provision commercial offering most journeys happen locally within a network on bus and when you have a journey between railing bus you have multi model operation now you have in the east of the country in scotland a significant multi operator and multi model situation called one ticket and in the west you have zone card and both of these have existed for some time so there is quite significant multi operator multi model integrated tickets in existence in the country however they both differ in technology terms the difficulty is generally with the back offices and the integration of technology rather than the technology itself it's the adoption of it there are a number of difficulties there and in the debates that have happened in the evidence sessions that have happened i've been intrigued because i feel that what we're talking about is more the commercial model and how we can get fairs lower and how we can get uptake up and how we can get footfall up rather than talking about the technology technology is a barrier it's not all about a piece of plastic mobile ticketing is here and it is way beyond the uptake is way beyond what plastic ever was in scotland so mobile ticketing can do much more we have people standing at bus stops all over scotland looking at their phone to tell them their bus is there in two minutes five minutes seven minutes whatever so technology is moving on all of the time and i fear that when we talk about technology and pieces of plastic that we're looking backwards rather than forward okay and i think one of the points i think the gentleman wants to come in next to you was that there will always be a requirement perhaps for people who don't have mobile phones or or cards to make payments to have a situation where say in children's case they could have a plastic card with with prepaid to allow them to take buses so the gentleman yes Derek Holden again from churches to the districts and transport i mean this is an issue that has kept coming up time and time again and you know ian said 10 years ago he was looking at a scheme at which 10 years ago we're saying was grossly out of date designed irrelevant for scotland and surely 10 years on we've made no progress and so you know that it's about time to stop and say look these scheme designs were never going to work they haven't worked it's actually been a massively anti-public transport strategy as has been said already the youngsters just pick up the phone and get uber instead because they can't be bothered with the ticketing on the buses and this and the same thing we need to sort this out we actually need to have a scheme now that the public policy has a hugely important role at service design in terms of saying what should the fares be road equivalent tariff on the ferries or sorting out the rare fares across scotland these have been massively important and really positive fares design that the scotland government's implemented in recent years focus on that sort out the fares there's 101 technologies could be used by 101 providers to deliver those services in different ways across the country once we know what the social policy is commercial operators can then you know say right the price for delivering that isn't it can be delivered so you know let's get real let's let's let's just let's just move on from from that so it's really one provision that i think you know we need to look very seriously at in the bill and say is this needed okay ian's going to come in and prove me that's just Stevenson is here ian i wanted i think it was tom that raised the issue about definitions and terminology and ticketing at the beginning and Derek's just raised that and this is my wallet this is my ticket from when i was in holiday last week it's a magnetic stripe ticket that technology so many decades old that's smart i could buy that at literally 10 000 outlets in the city i was in it gets me on anything with wheels to go anywhere i want that's a smart ticket we can't even do that it's smart because it's integrated not because it's technologically advanced so we have to be very careful about the definitions and not confuse the dash for technology which is inevitably like to be out of date with the simple things we still don't get right ellie yeah i mean i just want to concur with ian and some of the other comments when we sat in on the evidence session on the 3rd of october the guy from the confederation of passenger transport was bumbling on about why it taken 14 years to get nowhere and we're not going to waste another 14 years to get nowhere we need to this bill to deliver integrated smart or not smart ticketing across scotland in glasgo the issue with the zone card is that it's impossible to buy you have to go to the bucan embustation it's more it's it's expensive and it always expires on a saturday so no matter which day the week you buy it expires on a saturday it's a complete waste of money and how do you get to the bucan embustation in the first place you need to be able to buy these tickets everywhere 10 000 outlets across the city but the most important thing is the cost and a daily price cap is absolutely essential and as far as we understand that's only possible to deliver that through a franchising framework that's an argument for franchising in itself if it will enable us to deliver this integrated smart ticket that is so long overdue and it needs to be affordable and in glasgo you could even be arguing you could sidestep the whole ticketing debate altogether if the public transport was free and they are doing that in other european countries in estonia for example and i think we do need to be looking at something that radical to shift people out with their cars and onto public transport to the extent that we need i was very good i was waving it quite emphatically uh tom you want to come in yes it reiterates a point i made earlier and kind of reiterates that point and takes us back to the bus debate there are certain things that it is much easier to deliver in a franchised regime so integrated ticketing and i think integrated ticket is what we really want it's not necessarily smart it doesn't have to be smart but it has to be integrated and it has to be price competitive and in a gross cost franchise regime that is easier to deliver different vehicles accessible coaches that you can actually get a wheelchair on without a lift they're easier to deliver in a franchise regime but i would also reiterate that that comes at a higher cost to the public sector and therefore you've got to think whether or not you can pay for it and where you'll get that money from andrew i mean already uh only 29 percent of passengers and customers in glasgo pay with cash so already we're at 71 percent of people paying with a smart means of travel now whether that's smart card for concessionary travel whether that's mobile ticketing whether that's we've got a universal thing called a credit and a debit card which can be on a mobile phone as well it's it's those methods of payment that people want they don't want another they don't want transport tokens in their wallet they want to just pay with their credit and debit card or their android phone or their apple phone that's what's happening in london but forget oyster oysters 10 years ago um so in in terms of daily capping or weekly capping our ticket machine systems can absolutely do that now um it's just a case of working on the commercials and we're working on a project to do that within scotland within the next 12 months um so it'll be just ourselves um but obviously we'll also talk to other operators as we go along so the the daily and weekly capping you don't need a regulated market and that's being delivered i think in the west midlands as we speak by commercial operators and i think that that's probably a good place to bring it to a close i'd just say on the oyster card i think it is important to remember that there are some people who will need oyster cards because they don't have bank cards and and telephones and i think that point's been made to the committee and we've picked it up on several occasions so we have come to the end of the event thank you very much for all your input i think the committee certainly i and all the committee members here have learned something and found this evening incredibly invaluable i would like to apologize now before we go off air as it were to say that i'm no david dimpleby i've tried my best to bring you all in for those that i didn't bring in i apologize for anyone who i cut short i'm sorry but there is a timescale and i'm 51 seconds over it so thank you very much and thank you very much for your time do stay and mingle if you want thank you