It’s very Breich in Breich
Photograph by Islay McLeod
I Closing time
‘It is closing time in the gardens of the West.’ At 68 that ‘definitive’ moment comes closer so I value the chance to update various books – ‘No Gods and Precious Few Heroes’, the ‘Oxford Short History of Scotland’ and ‘Scotland the Brief’. Transport will figure a lot, yet I record a Scotland which seems remote from the benign revolution in European regional mobility, seen close-up in Baden-Wuerttemberg – away from cars and towards cycles, walking, dense bus networks and hybrid tram-trains.
Our Scottish figures on walking and biking are dire, an ‘automania’ admitted in Alastair Dalton’s Scotsman piece on 29 March. The only opinion in it, though, comes from the predictable ‘advanced motorist’ Neil Greig, plus some wishful thinking from minister Keith Brown about electric cars.
Boys: these things are no closer than they were in Henry Ford’s day.
Only in Scotland does the word ‘tram’ signal an assault on the thing rather than on our lost skill in technology – see the yowls of cybertwittery that follow any online article. A piece on the 50th anniversary, 2 September, of the last Glasgow trams originally gave their maximum number as a hundred, an underestimate by a factor of 10. In the paper Ken Houston, petrolista, managed to conceal the rapid renaissance of the electric tram in Europe. Twenty new systems opened in France after Houston claimed the programme had been ended by the Chirac government. When challenged, he quoted ‘an American politician’ (unidentified) about trams being ‘a nineteenth-century solution to a nineteenth century problem’.
II Breich
Precisely. The 21st-century problem has no solution and American politicians are usually there to make things worse. The USA has had under Obama a good rate of urban tram and metro building, new suburban train services, and at last embryonic high speed rail systems in California and Florida. The tram-train, pioneered in Karlsruhe, has eased co-ordination as bus and train share the same minimum-cost stops (item: one pavement). But it’s in fact a re-run of the American ‘Interurban Electric’ of the 1900s, whose lines stretched from Long Island far into the mid-west, until bought up and closed down by Big Auto and Big Oil.
It would take a prize bunch to wreck this ‘second chance’. Step forward the Transport Initiatives Edinburgh elite, paid average £73K salaries to do the tram fiasco. But was it worse than the much lauded Glasgow-Airdrie-Bathgate line? This could have been a cheap, efficient tram-train but instead has Europe’s most over-engineered, badly-sited ‘heavy rail’ stations (costing £2m each). Hopeful Armadale, very wee Blackridge and Caldercruix provide in these depressed days a glitzy re-run of desolate ‘one-passenger’ Breich in the wilds of West Lothian. Work is only starting on the Borders line, but we now have Breich East, Breich Central, and Breich West.
Public transport sentiment works in Europe. Curbing the car provides ‘social saving’ to feed industry; this has enabled Baden-Wuerttemberg to score in eco-high-tech manufacture – Bosch, Daimler, Voith, Siemens – now 35% of its GDP. In Scotland our industrial remnant struggles to match a third of this.
Tuebingen, the size of Perth, has six trains to Stuttgart an hour, by two routes: a capacity of about 4,000. Folk travel comfortably and read, write or phone, a ‘hands-free’ intellect reflected in the above industry and the quality of its personnel (building, inter alia, the machines that make the pretty boxes and tubes for duty-free Scotch). From the near-empty cavern of Perth Station to Edinburgh there depart two three-car diesels via Fife or Stirling: capacity perhaps 400.
III Off-roaders
Consider our civics, and a Telegraph story (2 July) about ‘NHS Procurement Scotland’. Our procurers get a fleet of big cars, value £1m, to drive from Larkhall to Gyle in Edinburgh. Video conferencing exists, a railway (see above) runs all the way, but they get ‘a BMW convertible, an Audi TT and three Range Rover Evoques’. Keep up with big-buck numptocrats, if not with productivity.
Expect journalistic consistency? Take two extracts from the Scotsman: Alastair Dalton filed on 26 July, 2012: ‘Luxury car buyers are paying over the odds because of the poor reliability of "premium" brands such as Land Rover and Alfa Romeo…The British-built off-roaders were found to be by far the least reliable make, according to What Car? magazine. The annual survey, of 50,000 cars between three and 10 years old, showed Land Rovers had a 71% chance of breaking down compared to just 10% for Hondas’.
This wasn’t read by Tom Hunter, filing on the 27th: Splash the Cash! ‘Entry level Range Rover worth every penny’: (Price £70,000; performance 130 mph; 23.5 mpg: emissions: a kilo of CO2 every 2.5 miles. CTH.) ‘Come nightfall, the dashboard of the Range Rover Westminster starts to resemble the controls of a private jet…Comparisons don’t end there, for in the raised-up world of the Range Rover, you travel with your head closer to the clouds than almost anyone else on the road…Then there’s the power. Like a Learjet barrelling towards take-off, the Range Rover is blessed with a surge in acceleration that feels that it might last forever…’
In the Borders we live in four-by-four country: ‘bankers’ tanks’ squat on our narrow roads like cane toads, alarming European visitors. In six years I have never had a word with their drivers, though folk ‘with their head closer to the clouds’ can’t be expected to notice elderly cyclists, bairns in buggies, etc.
Can you handle such cars and notice people? You can’t work in the things and Dalton thinks you’d always be worrying about them seizing up or falling to bits. Can you expect anything from Booster Hunter but Clarksonism? In the PR-driven niche market that newspapers now occupy, this sells ads.
I was prepared to add a motor-megadrool by Michael Kelly in the Scotsman on 11 October, but a line on the M76 extension, ‘It reduces the run to Manchester by 20 minutes. Well worth the £692 million invested’, coming from the author of ‘London Lines: the Capital by Underground’ (1996) hints at black propaganda. Weel done the Provost!
IV Gatsbyland
Fifty years ago, writing my first columns for Tribune and the New Statesman, I tried in vain to save the Borders railway. (It’s comin’ yet in 2014, but pride of place will go to the new Forth Road Bridge, even if it brings only £36 million to Scots workers from a £1.5 billion outlay.)
It was then that I first read Chandler, Hammett and Scott Fitzgerald and the auto-age drama of ‘luxury and corruption’ that had replaced cowboys, prospectors, and railroad-men. Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ (1923) is winners’ territory: the bootleggers whose dough would always make mugwumps like me look silly; plus pretty, pliable, buyable girls, and everywhere the grand cars. Tom Buchanan, old New York money, has his, along with his society wife, and for fun on the back seat, his garage-owner’s wife, Myra Wilson. Doll-wife runs over mistress in Jay Gatsby’s yellow Rolls-Royce, wronged husband slays Gatsby. All this under the all-seeing eye of the sign above the Wilson garage, Scottie’s take on the masonic eye on the dollar bill.
American cities downtown are no longer like this. San Francisco or Manhattan would seize up if BART or the Transit failed. New York’s vast metropolitan post office is being rebuilt as an Amtrak hub. The London Olympics were a triumph for public-transport-based mobility. Holyrood ought to look long and hard at their lessons.
Out in Arabia Deserta where the black stuff comes from, the sheikhs’ cash is going into rail, long-distance as well as urban. New ‘Supercapacitators’ mean that an electric train isn’t just emission-free, it can generate 30% of its power demand when braking. But switching from hydrocarbon to renewables – from photovoltaic to the 22 billion tonnes of coal-equivalent that sloshes round our coasts each year – requires planning, trained engineers, real money, and social commitment. Are we there yet?
V Unpurged images
Visiting extraordinary Istanbul, to give a paper on Edward Said, Islam and the Scots at the conference of the European Society for English Studies on the pastoral campus of the Bogazici University, added to the nightmare horizon.
The Eurasian megalopolis has 13.5 million people, three million cars, a rudimentary metro and a pair of new Edinburgh-type tramlines. Through the Bosphorus on whose elegant banks Candide cultivated his garden crawl half-million-ton tankers bringing crude from the Transcaspian pipe, and keeping most urban Turks mobile through packed diesel buses and ferries. Elite SUVs plough through the morning and evening jams from/to fortified suburban villas, like great black beetles parting waves of ants. In months the continents will be joined by a rail tunnel.
But at the conference, little seemed to have changed from Scottie’s day in middle America – and didn’t we literati know it, the pen being mightier than the spanner? Literary journalism’s fairy dust can transform dire fact into glitzy commodity. An American academic analysed coverage of Ciudad Juarez on the Tex-Mex border where there’s been a death toll of 28,000 since the Calderon regime started its war on drugs in 2006 – 10 times those killed on 9/11. The bulk of coverage (we’re talking pointy-head reviews, not supermarket tosh) doesn’t do the victims – they’re boring. On Tex-Mex, the young bravo from a cartel, bracing himself in his Porsche for that first squeeze of the trigger, will be the one whose story makes it to the New York Times. Just as – some spoilsport tells us – his cash and his bosses underwrite Wall Street.
In what the Guardian’s Nick Davies calls ‘churnalism’, aspirant gonzos live on the PR handout. Something that makes falsity pay. So New Yorker staff writer Jonah Lehrer can admit forgery and pretension, get sacked, and then land massive sales? Now there’s a proposition. Write a stinker that lies its head off. Get disgraced. But in the emocracy, pimp that story, however dire, and you’ll pull in gold. Since 2006 81 million people know about Roslin Chapel through Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.
VI But wait a minute…
Who actually turns up at Roslin? Forty thousand in the old days, quadrupling to 170,000 in 2007, Vinci Code-filmyear? Then back to about 70,000? Growth at whose expense? Visits to the Borders have dwindled at the same time. Pubs are vanishing along the A7, the SYHA has closed down all the region’s hostels, founded in the 1930s to get the kids into the country. In the 1950s the buses in Gala Square used to pass by ads for ‘The Mick Mulligan Band: Vocalist George Melly’. Makin’ mischief! Wayhay! Now the square’s shops are mostly empty and Gala’s down to its last disco.
Oil was under $10 a barrel in 1999; over $110 now. It’s essential for chemicals, sea and air transport, but should in theory be optional for transport in high-density urban areas in which 70% of our people live. Yet cars mean class: the four-by-four is a political statement by the top quartile of the population. Nor is it spatially neutral; not after the supermarkets, which in contrast to Europe – with its local artisan-trader class – displaced retail to the out-of-town mall and left the centre to pound and charity shops, mobile phones, estate agents, food and drink outlets, mopping up the surplus cash of those whose chances of owning property are zilch.
Employees of call centres are now 5% of the Scots labour force; half of those in manufacturing. Renewables might reset the balance, but retraining gets more difficult as manufacturing declines, carrying with it work-based education. Urban improvement is ‘shovel-ready’ literally – fancy paving rather than new skills and new firms.
This brings distinction of a sort. On 4 May the Financial Times found Coatbridge was the UK’s obesity capital, at one person in five. ‘I gave up walking the minute I passed my driving test,’ a teacher said. ‘So I drive to work and sit at a desk all day.’
Professor Christopher Harvie was SNP MSP for Mid Scotland
and Fife and has held senior academic posts in both Germany
and Scotland
