The working group meets every six months or thereabouts, and the next meeting will be on 30 March. The group is a mixture of people from Transport Scotland such as me, Fife Council, West Lothian Council, the City of Edinburgh Council, SEStran, FirstBus, Stagecoach, the Confederation of Passenger Transport UK and our team of consultants.
A second revision to the project is in the public domain—it is lodged on our website—and it has a series of schemes that could be raised beyond the scope of the project that we are building at the moment. It also contains some schemes that are within the scope of the project, such as the bus hard-shoulder running schemes that we have already implemented. They are running well and they help buses to skip some of the queuing traffic, particularly on the approach to Newbridge, for example.
We also monitor the performance of other schemes, particularly the bus lane in the Fife ITS contract, which is quite a talking point at the workshops. It was originally envisaged as a temporary arrangement as part of the construction phase of the project, but most members of the working group are keen to make it a permanent facility, particularly in view of the fact that it runs from the Halbeath park and ride, which opened at the end of 2013 and is on the main conduit to the Forth crossing. It seems sensible that, as demand increases, there should be a chance for buses to use the hard shoulder facility and bypass any queues. We monitor that and inform the group about what is going on with it. As I said, it is working successfully. Typically, we find that 12 buses use the lane in the morning period.
We also talk about some of the other aspects of the project, such as the managed crossing strategy and how buses will eventually be able to use not only the Forth road bridge but also the Queensferry crossing if high winds are affecting the Forth road bridge. That will ensure that we have reliable bus journey times. The Ferrytoll park and ride access and egress arrangements will be improved, so we also give an update on that. That is part of the main contract around the Ferrytoll junction and some of the work there is progressing as we speak.
One of the big issues over the past year has been the Newbridge interchange, which is right at the southern end of the project corridor, if you like. A public transport corridor study is under way there, which is a jointly funded study between Transport Scotland, the City of Edinburgh Council and West Lothian Council to try to see how bus movements in particular across and around that junction can be improved in the longer term. It is quite a challenge to ensure that everything will work to a much more reliable degree in the future. That is one of the main focuses, as the interchange seems to be a main bottleneck for public transport, particularly from the local authorities’ point of view, and the study is on-going.
There is another series of issues. As I mentioned, we monitor the park and ride at Halbeath, which is now a 1,000-car facility. It is used by around 480 to 500 cars every day, so it is about half full, which, as I understand it from the bus companies, is a normal thing. It takes quite a while—a number of months or years—to get patronage up to the maximum capacity. The Ferrytoll park and ride is already at the maximum capacity. It is positive that people are getting out of their cars and using public transport to move to destinations south of the Forth.
Of the other interventions—I think that there are around 20 or 25—we look at the development of one-ticketing, with the potential migration to smart ticketing, which is a SEStran initiative. I cannot say that I am particularly close to that, but it is investigating public transport ticketing in and around Edinburgh and the Lothians. We also look at marketing facilities to encourage more use of the park and ride facilities, and colleagues from Traffic Scotland contribute to the group. We are hoping to use the variable message signs to encourage people out of their cars and on to the buses by displaying signs that show people that they would get there quicker if they got out of their cars, such as “20 minutes to Barnton by car, 10 minutes by bus”—I am just talking theoretically.
More physical initiatives are also being looked into. For example, there is potential for some slip roads linking the B800 to what used to be called the M9 spur and is now called the M90, to try to bypass some of the major congested roads so that buses get better priority to the airport and the Newbridge junction.
I think that I have said enough.