ON THE ROAD TO NOWHERE WHY SCOTLAND'S MISSING THE BUS ON ECO-

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jun 15, 2008 | by PETER JOHN MEIKLEM

TOP restaurateur Shirley Spear can't talk for long about the impact "inadequate" public transport links are having on her business - she has to head off on a 50-mile car journey to pick up a trainee chef.

The co-owner of Skye's The Three Chimneys - widely regarded as one of Scotland's finest restaurants - Spear knows transport links on the island are so poor that if she wants the new chef to try his hand in her famous kitchen, then there is no alternative but to give him a birl in her Audi estate.

If she asked him to get the bus, the trainee may have had to wait a very long time. In fact, he would have had to wait for the morning school bus, but bunking down in the heather around Portree is hardly the ideal preparation for a job trial.

This situation in one of Scotland's top tourist draws outside of the central belt is just one example of the problems that industry body the Scottish Tourism Forum has warned will "wither" the industry unless more is done, and quickly.

According to recent research by VisitScotland, 40per cent of visitors now consider environmental impact when organising their holiday. The number of visitors actually using buses in Scotland has grown too - from 31per cent in 2005 to 38per cent last year.

With petrol prices continuing to soar, and the credit crunch giving would-be tourists all the excuses they need to stay at home, a meeting of many of the industry's key players last week warned that much of rural Scotland is "cut off" from the rest of the UK by the poor quality of the transport links.

Although the state and size of some of Scotland's main roads - such as the A75, the A9 and the A82 among others - is also considered a major impediment to growth, the public transport question is fast rising up the tourism industry's agenda.

Chris Harvie, the SNP MSP, says the Scottish parliament's economy, energy and tourism committee - of which he is a member - is looking at the issue with increasing urgency.

The committee is due to report on the prospects for growth in the tourism industry in July and Harvie says concrete recommendations on improving public transport links for businesses will be made.

The government-funded tourism marketing body VisitScotland may still have "aspirations" that tourism spend will grow by 50per cent by 2015, but small operators across Scotland believe the chances of hitting that ambitious target are being undercut by the difficulty of getting around Scotland without a car.

Says Spear: "We are seeing an increased number of enquiries from people who want to get here without a car. They want to travel but they still want to be eco-friendly. We are sorely lacking in any kind of public transport to meet their needs."

Next year, the SNP government launches the Homecoming Scotland 2009. Ostensibly a celebration of the 250th birthday of Scotland's national poet Robert Burns, the homecoming is being used to market Scotland across the world, in the hope of harvesting a bumper year for the tourism trade. Spear, among others, feels the transport problem could mean the year of the homecoming stays stuck in the starting blocks.

"The new government has taken tourism on board in a big way. However, there is still a lot of work to be done. If we don't start planning and thinking ahead now we are going to be left behind like we have been so many times in the past."

Skye is by no means the only part of Scotland to suffer from the problem; all of the nation's outlying visitor-draws are suffering to a greater or lesser degree: the rest of the Highlands and Islands, Dumfries and the southwest, the Borders, the East Neuk of Fife, among others, can all slip off the traveller's itinerary once they have considered the labyrinthine network of bus times and connections required to get anywhere.

For Harvie, the crucial question is not the quantity or quality of the services - although he admits those are also serious areas of concern - but the co-ordination between various services.

HE believes that a national coordinator should be appointed to promote a more joined-up approach from Scotland's public transport operators. A rural transport tsar - although Harvie disdains that shopworn word - who can "speak tactfully but with a big stick to encourage operators to work more closely together to make services join up", is number one on his wish list.

Tourism attractions in the central belt do not have to face the same public transport challenges. Spear says she is sometimes "aghast" at the "vast sums of money" spent on improving the travel infrastructure between Scotland's two biggest cities. To rub a little more salt in the wounds, City of Edinburgh Council, Glasgow City Council and Scottish Enterprise last week announced an extra GBP300,000 of funding to attract more tourism and to improve transport links between the two cities.

Called the Edinburgh-Glasgow collaboration initiative, the money will be spent on improving all sorts of connections between the two cities, allowing them to be increasingly viewed - a spokeswoman for the project says - as "one shared economic space".