I have to admit that I am one of those annoyingly cocky cyclists. I gamble on gaps between taxis, pay scant attention to red lights and often ‘forget’ to wear safety equipment in order to avoid ‘helmet hair’ at work. I’ve cycled since I was young, I tell myself, getting into accidents is for other people. The process is as much entertainment and fashion as it is a means to getting from A to B. For example, I wouldn’t be seen dead in one of those humptious yellow vests.

The ugly truth of course is that I’m more likely to soon be dead when cycling without one of those vests.

I wonder if the Edinburgh cyclist who died in Edinburgh this week thought similarly to how I do, or the other 15 cyclists who have died on the Capital’s streets since 2000. Not that complacency is the main reason for cyclists getting into accidents, it is cars, but there is precious little being done to make the roads safer for those on two wheels when up against numerous, too many, people on four wheels. The Greens, of course, are leading the arguments and are quite rightly calling for a cycle safety summit.

Perhaps Scotland should take a lead on this issue within the UK by taking a leaf out of The Netherlands’ book by implementing the following:

“Cyclists in the Netherlands are well protected as the law assumes the stronger participant (i.e. the car driver) is guilty until proved innocent (i.e. is the guilty party in all accidents involving weaker traffic unless evidence of the opposite is provided). Furthermore, drivers know to expect a high volume of cyclist traffic. Due to these issues the number of car-bike collisions with serious consequences is not alarmingly high in the Netherlands”

For a Government that is often so keen to get a jump on Westminster in bringing in legislation and making Scotland a noticeably better place to live than down south, I would have thought that this was right up their cycle path.

I don’t know why lycra-clad cyclists are a target for so many drivers, metaphorically and physically. This was recently taken to extremes in Bristol when a bus driver used his vehicle as a weapon to purposefully take a cyclist out on the road (the incredible BBC video is here). That is an extreme example but if cyclists were less of a target and more of a risk to ending up in prison or having to pay a large fine if you hit one of them with your, regardless whose fault you believed it was, we would most likely see less people dying on our streets and more people dusting off their mountain bikes and enjoying the satisfaction and occasional thrill that is cycling through your home town or city.

Cyclists need to do their bit too of course, paying attention to red lights, knowing their Highway Code and having a second look at that garishly yellow high visibility jacket, but the Scottish Government can, and should, take a lead. It once considered taxing cyclists but they should go the other way and protect them by placing an assumption of guilt on the driver in any car-on-bike accident on Scotland’s roads.

After all, if it saves one life…

The Glasgow Underground, aka the Clockwork Orange, is the third oldest subway line in the world behind London’s Underground and Budapest’s Metro. It is also fiercely popular in Glasgow, in part due to its sheer simplicity – one train goes clockwise around the numerous stops and the other goes anti-clockwise. Dead easy.

I wonder, and have wondered for a while, if there isn’t a way to take this concept wider, and to a higher altitude.

Let’s start with a little bit of local topgraphy.

Scotland consists of 790+ islands, the vast majority of which are not reachable by foot, car or underground. That leaves flying or ferry, unless one wishes to swim to Stromness.

So what are the options?

Well, one can currently fly from Islay to Glasgow, Colonsay or Oban; from Barra to Benbecula, Kirkwall or Glasgow; from Stornoway to Aberdeen, Inverness, Edinburgh, Glasgow or Benbecula; Sumburgh (Shetland) to Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Fair Isle, Foula, Glasgow, Inverness, Kirkwall, Lerwick, OutSkerries or Papa Stour and Dundee to, well, London, Jersey, Belfast or Birmingham apparently.

The list goes on and on, there are after all 38 airports in Scotland, all sending planes hither and thither across the nation throughout each week in a myriad of directions.

My question is – why do we send planes criss-crossing each other across Scotland when, taking Glasgow’s underground as an example, the most efficient way to service all stops is to go round in a circle? Is there not a way to have two domestic routes for Scotland, one clockwise and one anti-clockwise?

For example, a route could be: Edinburgh – Glasgow – Islay – Tiree – Stornoway – Kirkwall – Sumburgh – Aberdeen – Edinburgh. You could mix up some stops every other round trip, Benbecula instead of Stornoway for example, or Dundee instead of Aberdeen. You could even bring into play Fife airport or build one on Mull to really spread the Scottish pound. Moving the ideas into overdrive, there could be a Government-sponsored cycle scheme at the more rural airports so that tourists can hit the ground pedalling when they touch down, spending their Euros and Dollars more easily in our farthest flung parts. I also can’t imagine anyone minding having to go via Scotland’s beautiful West (or East) Coast to get to where they’re going, particularly if it includes the world’s most popular airport for landing – Barra.

The opportunities are endless but there must be a quicker, more convenient way of mixing rural Scotland with the nation’s cities to aid business and tourism. An improved boarding system that would make flying on these flights more like catching the train would make it more workable too; pre-cleared passengers standing by the runway in a bus shelter at Tingwall waiting to hop on before the Scottish Flyer takes off again. Why not?

The other option is ferry of course. Many of them may now sail on Sundays but it’s not the most modern and convenient way to travel for would-be tourists or business people, as romantic and other worldly as they are for the rest of us. Even the excellent suggestion in The Herald yesterday, to give every Scot a free ferry ride a year, would struggle to get travel off the ground. How many of us have looked at Harris or Jura or Orkney and longed to travel there but balked at the driving distance and logistical nightmare of boarding ferries? It can’t just be me, and this free ticket won’t boost passenger numbers for those flying into Scotland from afar.

Nonetheless, we have two fine options on the table – to use our ferries more, including giving each Scot a free ferry ride each year or to rejig how we fly domestically and bringing our highlands and islands closer to the relatively richer central belt.

Which would you choose?

What do we want Scotland to be famous for – building roads or building high speed rail links?

One may say that the cost of high speed rail is prohibitively expensive and as a result comparing road-building with 250mph rail travel is a false dichotomy. I would argue the other way.

The cost of HS2 is set at £32bn over decades of investment. Let’s say that the Scottish share of that is £4bn.

Monies (to be and already) spent on roadbuilding over the past and next few years includes:

M74 – £700m
Forth Road Bridge – £2bn+
M80 Stepps to Haggs bypass – £320m
M8/Aberdeen Western Peripheral – Goodness knows

So, the money is there if the will is there. Of course, the SNP’s short term view is to keep Scots happy enough for the next few years to make sure they vote Yes in the referendum and a 30 year plan for HS2 doesn’t fit into that timescale unfortunately. A counter-argument could well be that a Yes to independence will release the oil revenues that can be used to be spent on upgrading our infrastructure. Sounds good to me, particularly in light of the coming paragraph, but it’s prudent to operate in the expectation that Scotland will remain a part of the UK.

When I was in Norway, a country with oil-soaked ground beneath its seas, I was amazed at the number of tunnels that linked the archipelago of islands around Trondheim. Distances of 2km, 3km, 5km had been bored down through the ground and up the other end, seemingly with little fuss. Similarly, bridge after bridge was crossed on the little road trip that I was on. S, I couldn’t help but ask myself, why is there so much fuss involved and money being spent on a single Scottish bridge?

I decided to do a little reasarch.

There are over 900 road tunnels in Norway with a total combined length of 750km.

The longest road tunnels (>7km, with opening year and length) are:
• Lærdalstunnelen, 2000, 24505 m, world’s longest road tunnel
• Gudvangatunnel, 1991, 11428 m
• Folgefonntunnel, 2001, 11150 m
• Korgfjelltunnelen, 2005, 8530 m
• Steigentunnelen, 1991, 8079 m
• Bømlafjordtunnel, 2000, 7888 m, see also below
• Eiksundtunnelen, 2008, 7765 m, see also below
• Svartisentunnelen, 1986, 7615 m
• Høyangertunnelen, 1982, 7543 m
• Vallaviktunnelen, 1985, 7510 m
• Åkrafjordtunnelen, 2000, 7400 m

The new Forth crossing will be only 2.7km in length and the Norwegians have finished 6 tunnels that are much, much longer since 2000.

So, the crucial question, how much did they cost?

I was only able to find figures for three of these tunnels but the results may make you weep for your Scottish pounds:

Laerdal – 1,082 million kronor (£120m)
Bomlafjord – $61 million dollars (£38m)
Eiksund – 846 million kronor (£94m)

This is a country that is prohibitively expensive. I know of people who take their own potatoes with them over the border because they can’t face buying them in the supermarkets there. And they can still build long tunnels for a fraction of the price of our smaller Scottish white elephants bridges.

There are other comparisons that can be made. China, for example, built a 26mile bridge (longer than the English channel) for £1.4bn, albeit with wages at a much lower rate than you’d have to pay in Fife/Edinburgh.

So if the cheapest countries in the world and the most expensive countries in the world can build bridges and tunnels for cheaper than Scotland can, there is only one question that need be asked….

WHAT THE HECK ARE WE DOING WRONG!?

Why do Parliament buildings, trams, bridges, solar panels, insulation, heck, railway fares even, cost more in Scotland than in other places? Why can Norwegians happily hop from island to island by car and bike but we still have an old-fashioned network around our Highlands and islands?

So much in our would-be country needs to be ripped up and started again, both metaphorically and physically. Where better to start than with rail tracks, tunnels and bridge plans. High Speed Rail from Birmingham to London makes little sense but from Edinburgh to London (and beyond) it most certainly does. Independence or no independence, let’s shoot for the moon, and ask the Norwegians how the heck they do it.