Transport Insights

The Scottish Government has got at least one good headline from a press release today about a £20m spend from its new Bus Infrastructure Fund in the current financial year – a fund that is falling well short of the £500m promised by its ill-fated and probably fictitious predecessor.

The Scotsman reports:

Pioneering Glasgow City Council AI technology to cut bus journey times by up to 50 per cent

Pioneering AI technology that could cut bus journey times by up to half is to be trialled in Glasgow thanks to £490,000 in Scottish Government Funding.

I can’t read the story as it is behind a paywall but I note that a 2022 report from Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT) states that:

Since 2019, SPT has provided £490,000 of funding to the Council to support the roll-out of Traffic Light Priority (TLP) systems. This technology offers greater journey time reliability for buses by allocating additional ‘green phase’ signal time for approaching services.

It could be a coincidence or that someone has got the wrong end of a stick.

But of course what is new and sexy about today’s story is the addition of AI.

It comes as Transport Scotland – an arm of the Scottish Government – announces that:

The Scottish Government has now allocated £20 million through the new Bus Infrastructure Fund in 2025-26.

The cash was announced by Scottish Government minister Jim Fairlie on a visit to Glasgow City Council’s Operations Centre – “a cutting edge hub that unites key city services to deliver real-time, coordinated traffic, safety and emergency management”.

During that visit, the Minister learned more about how Bus Infrastructure Funding is working to ensure the city can capitalise on advances in AI and machine learning – allowing for smarter bus priority measures, meaning faster journeys for passengers.

Everyone in the press release agrees that bus priority measures are important in getting people to use the bus and/or that the launch of the Bus Infrastructure Fund is great news.

Everyone, including Director of the Confederation of Passenger Transport Scotland Paul White, was too polite to mention that in 2020 the SNP government announced £500 million for bus priority infrastructure in a Bus Partnership Fund.

This was paused in January last year, having spent less than £30m, and in December it emerged that it had been scrapped and replaced with a Bus Infrastructure Fund, although the spending levels for the new fund were not announced.

So today we have spend under the new fund for the current year, but no promises about future years.