Hansard

I, too, congratulate Alison McInnes on securing the debate and acknowledge her work on sustainable travel in the north-east for many years; she was deeply involved with the north east of Scotland transport partnership—Nestrans—as an Aberdeenshire councillor.

Not many people will know this, but on our train journey down from Aberdeen yesterday, Alison McInnes and I were temporarily stranded in Kirkcaldy due to a signal failure. The chamber will be pleased to know that First ScotRail provided an emergency bus link to Edinburgh fairly quickly—and I must say that its customer care was exemplary—but I experienced at first hand the opportunities that can exist for journey sharing when a fellow passenger from Aberdeen offered to get me more speedily to Edinburgh in a vehicle that he arranged to pick us up. I accepted his offer to ensure that I got to my meeting on time. Such opportunities clearly exist, and in this era of modern technology a perfect real-time link between commuters could become the ideal way forward for reducing car use.

As has been mentioned, liftshare and getabout have already helped individuals to travel more sustainably by sharing their journeys to and from work. The online network has helped to match people with similar journeys so that they can travel more easily together, saving them money as well as helping the environment by cutting their carbon footprints.

As Alison McInnes said, the social enterprise liftshare has gone from strength to strength, and I pay tribute to all those involved in building it up to include more than 400,000 members in a United Kingdom-wide car-sharing network—a great achievement that I hope will grow and grow.

Getabout, which is a partnership that involves eight bodies—Aberdeen City Council and Aberdeenshire Councils, the two universities, Aberdeen College, NHS Grampian, the Energy Saving Trust and the Dyce Transportation Management Organisation—has also made significant progress in promoting better transport choices, including car sharing, across the north-east. I am grateful to Alison McInnes for explaining so clearly how it operates.

Liftshare and getabout clearly demonstrate that we can take positive steps to reduce car use by developing local car-share networks. In the north-east, the statistics speak for themselves. At present, 80 per cent of commuting cars have only one occupant. Half of all car trips are less than five miles. When my children were small, groups of parents took part in school runs—each family took one day a week. Now, I see a stream of cars, often four-by-fours, go to my local school with one child per vehicle. That is surely a retrograde step that should be reversed if we really want to ease congestion and combat climate change.

The MSPs in the chamber who represent the north-east will be only too aware of how reducing the number of cars, especially at rush hour, would help to address local transport difficulties, such as the huge tailbacks that we experience at the notorious Haudagain roundabout.

With the current high fuel prices and the impact that they are having, especially in rural areas, on top of other challenges to household budgets, we should be hearing about the promotional material published by getabout—Alison McInnes quoted some of it—which states:

“Car sharing can make a real difference to your fuel bills—find 3 other people and you only pay to go to work every 4 days!”

For those trying to cut down on their journeys, it says:

“if you live to the North or West of Aberdeen meet at Bridge of Don, Ellon or Kingswells park and ride and share from there! Parking is free as well.”

I congratulate Alison McInnes on an informative debate. I hope that increased awareness of car-sharing networks will help people to travel more sustainably by sharing their journeys to work and that large employers especially will look at what positive steps can be taken within their businesses to help promote better transport choices, including car sharing, for all their employees.

18:08