Meeting of the Parliament 12 March 2014
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in the debate and for the fact that some of the previous speeches, particularly those of Tavish Scott and Patrick Harvie, lead me in a direction that I am happy to follow.
We can simply accept that the smog and the industrial pollution of the past are, as Tavish Scott has just put it, in the past. However, it is demonstrably the case that most of the pollution that we are talking about now comes from vehicles. I commend to members some of the graphs that are available, which indicate quite clearly the rise in the daytime, which tends to be slightly worse in the morning than the evening, because the rush hour is a little bit more constrained then, but also the substantial fall at the weekend. That indicates quite clearly what we are dealing with.
However, I make the point, which I do not think has yet been made in the debate, that most of the issue is to do with the times when vehicles are stationary, not when they are running. I accept that Patrick Harvie has a point that, when there is a motorway running through a city, there are a lot of vehicles moving, and that does not help. We have to accept that. However, in our major cities, it is not the vehicles that are passing by that are doing most of the damage; it is the vehicles that are stopped and then have to accelerate. There is a solution to that, which I would like to put briefly to the chamber.
Tavish Scott talked about tolling, as if that were the only way of preventing vehicles from being stationary in a city. However, there are two things that can be done. The first is to insist that we have modern control of our engines so that they automatically switch off when we stop and they are not on when we are sitting there. I think that that is going to come to us, so we probably have to do very little to make it happen. The second thing is that we can manage traffic. We can stop vehicles from getting into our city centres by putting traffic lights in the way that stop them until the road ahead of them is clear enough for them to get through to where they are going.
Recently, I had the experience of trying to move through Union Street in Aberdeen at about 4.30 on a Friday afternoon. Anyone who has tried that will know that it is quite impossible. The traffic moves 100 yards and then it stops. There are plenty of traffic lights. If the traffic management system meant that I could not get into a space unless I could get out of it, I would not have to sit there stationary. It would make no difference to the time that I take to get through the city, but it would make a considerable difference to the time that I am in the city on Union Street, or on Hope Street, or on any other street that we care to mention. I suggest very simply to members that that can be done with traffic lights and clever traffic management.