Switching lanes: Scotland's plan to make transport more sustainable

In 2009, the Scottish Government passed the Climate Change (Scotland) Act, formally acknowledging transport as a major contributor to the country’s carbon emissions. However, at that point, it had not identified the sector as the most crucial area to target emission reductions.  

Retrospectively, that is a bit of a surprise as transport is responsible for 36 per cent of all greenhouse gas emissions in Scotland. And two-thirds of that is produced by road transport. 

It wasn’t until the publication of the Scottish Government’s first Climate Change Plan in 2017, that actions to reduce emissions were ramped up. It set targets to phase out petrol and diesel cars by 2032 – eight years ahead of the UK at the time – introduce low emission zones (LEZ) for road vehicles in the four biggest cities, and deliver widespread active travel infrastructure, and rail electrification. 

There has been some progress. LEZs came into force in 2023 and 2024, after years of delay thanks to the pandemic, while electrification of rail is ongoing, with the busiest route, Edinburgh to Glasgow, completed in December 2017.  

The Scottish Government then updated its Climate Change Plan in 2020, setting a target to reduce car usage by 20 per cent by 2030 compared to 2019 levels and focusing on four key behavioural changes: decreased travel, staying local, changed modes of transport, and combined journeys. It argued these changes would help Scotland meet its long-term goal of eliminating its net greenhouse gas emissions by 2045. 

It said it would encourage these behavioural changes through a mixture of incentives and disincentives, such as investing in affordable, accessible, integrated public transport systems as viable alternatives to cars.  

The Scottish Government has introduced various schemes for reduced or free public transport travel. Bus travel was made free for under 22s in January 2022 and young people have taken advantage, having made more than 100 million journeys in just under two years. But while it is embedding positive sustainable travel behaviours for future generations, this is not the demographic whose driving behaviour needs to change.  

Many would argue the Scottish Government has been unsuccessful so far in encouraging enough motorists onto public transport. For example, its trial to scrap peak-time rail fares was ended after “limited success”. Transport Scotland said the project, which saw ticket prices subsidised by the Scottish Government and standardised across the day, “did not achieve its aims” of persuading more people to swap car journeys for rail travel. Transport secretary Fiona Hyslop said while there had been an increase in passenger levels of about 6.8 per cent during the pilot, it would need to be 10 per cent for the policy to be self-financing. 

This news came as Transport Scotland reported 451 million trips were made on public transport in 2023/24, which was a 15 per cent increase on the previous year. Despite the positive short-term increase, trips are still down by around 10 per cent on pre-pandemic levels. 

Colin Howden, director of Transform Scotland, says there will not be meaningful change in people’s travel habits until “we change the price of public transport”. While he says the government needs to “double down” on its efforts to make public transport more affordable, “car travel remains too cheap”. 

“It’s an uncomfortable thing to say. But climate change is happening because cars and aviation are used too much. At some point, we need to face up to the fact that car use, not all, but in towns and cities, is too cheap at the point of use.” 

Howden says discussions about things like road pricing and workplace parking levies, which would disincentivise driving, have been ongoing for years. “While the government has agreed with our analysis to make these things a priority, and it has committed to developing a framework for traffic demand management, we’ve seen absolutely nothing on the ground in that area.” 

As discussions over how more journeys are made via public transport are ongoing at an executive level, Scotland has made notable progress in decarbonising the sector, particularly in electrifying bus fleets and railway lines. In Glasgow and Aberdeen, the biggest bus operator First has 40 per cent of its fleet comprising either electric or emission-free buses. However, in Edinburgh only seven per cent of Lothian Buses’s fleet is zero-emission buses. As for the electrification of rail, 34 per cent of the country’s track is complete, however, the Scottish Government described itself last year as being “off track” to meet its goal of 70 per cent by 2034.  

Investing in and encouraging active travel is another key part of the Scottish Government’s plan to decarbonise transport. While last year 203 miles of walking, wheeling, and cycling routes were added, funding has been a massive issue.  

The Scottish Government’s draft budget for 2025/26 allocated £188.7m for active travel, bus infrastructure, sustainable travel integration, and behavioural change initiatives to encourage walking, wheeling, and cycling. This was a steep cut from the 2024/25 budget which was £220m. The government also deviated from its commitment to allocate at least £320m or 10 per cent of the transport budget to active travel by 2024/25. 

Jillian Anable, a commissioner of Scotland’s Just Transition Commission, says while investing in subsidised ticketing and cycle infrastructure might increase uptake somewhat in sustainable transport, it tends to be “people that already use those services using them more often”. 

“While they are worth doing, we are at the stage where the scale of the change required, even if you invest a lot in public transport, cycling and walking, you can’t get away from the really hard issues of reducing car kilometres to reach our decarbonisation target.” 

Despite the acknowledgement that car use must be reduced, a report by Transform Scotland in March last year estimated £900m of the £1.3bn designated for transport infrastructure in the City Region Deals across Scotland has been directed towards high-carbon projects, including new roads. “We are continuing to build new road capacity and that is incentivising people to double down on car usage, rather than using sustainable modes of transport,” Howden says. He adds the government needs to “show leadership” and switch funds away from road building and into specific areas of public transport or active travel. 

He’s not the only one to criticise the leadership over car reduction. In January, an Audit Scotland report described spending by councils and the Scottish Government on reducing car usage as “complex, fragmented and lacking transparency”.  

Auditor General Stephen Boyle said: “The Scottish Government set an ambitious and very challenging target to reduce car use by 20 per cent by 2030. But there has been a lack of leadership around delivering this goal. It’s now unlikely the government will achieve its ambition, so it needs to be clear how this will affect its wider ambitions to achieve net zero emissions by 2045.” 

The Scottish Government is now consulting on a new official plan to guide the decarbonisation of the transport sector. The Just Transition Plan for Transport aims to identify the key challenges and opportunities facing the sector today. The draft highlights a commitment to ensuring that no one is left behind, with a particular focus on rural, island, and disadvantaged communities. It emphasises that the transition should generate new economic opportunities by supporting green jobs in areas such as transport innovation, infrastructure, and services. The plan must also align with broader national goals, including reducing poverty, tackling inequality, and improving health outcomes. 

But despite this, Anable thinks Scotland will not achieve its 2045 target of achieving net zero. “And certainly, we’re not going to reach a 75 per cent reduction by 2030”, she says. 

“It’s not whether I think it [Scotland will achieve the 2045 target], it’s that I know it [won’t]. We have really got to acknowledge it.” Based on this acknowledgement, she offers suggestions of what success is in decarbonising over the next 20 years with that reframing. 

“While electric cars are not the be-all and end-all, we need to accelerate the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs) by lower-income car owners, and that means investing in our charging networks in place we aren’t yet.” 

She describes EVs as the “main decarbonisation lever” we have and says the government needs to find a way to get cars and vans with internal combustion engines off the roads quicker than in 2045.  

Anable also suggests that 15-minute neighbourhoods will “be an absolute minimum” and a hierarchical plan for public transport that delivers a minimum number of services per day for “places of all different sizes”.  

“The big headline is if you don’t restrict car usage how we see it today, you can improve all the alternatives as much as you like, but if we don’t deal with the problem, we will just be left with more of everything. That’s what has happened in the Netherlands and Germany, they’ve got some amazing examples of public transport and active travel, but they still have very high car usage and ownership.    

“It boils down to the fact we really do have to electrify everything. The problem is we can’t do that quickly enough.”