Public transport 'system' is a national disgrace

IT SEEMS Mother Nature has been helping Al Gore ram home his message about climate change. The Inconvenient Truth for the summer of 2007 has unquestionably been rain. Soaking June - the UK's wettest on record - has given way to sodden July with Wimbledon so badly disrupted, officials must be regretting the decision to give refunds for interrupted play.

At Glastonbury, Dame Shirley Bassey wowed the sodden, mud-caked crowds with diamond studded wellies, but her helicopter had to make a forced landing during a thunderstorm on the way home. And - of course - music fans heading for T in the Park had to abandon cars for shuttle buses after car parks turned into mud baths on Friday night, temporarily closing the venue. The downpour across Britain was suspended on Saturday - perhaps a celestial thank-you to Keane, the only rock god green enough to take the train to Al Gore's Live Earth gig in London.

The planet isn't happy. But neither are the good people of Perth.

It wasn't just festival-goers who were stuck in Friday's 12-mile tailback on the south-bound M90 approaching T in the Park near Kinross. Music fans may have had the nine-hour journey from hell before finally arriving on site, but so did thousands of non gig-going Scots. Like a bus of old folks on a day trip from a Perthshire care home, a non-emergency case heading for hospital at Glenrothes, lorry drivers nearing the end of already frustrating journeys down the agonisingly slow single lane A9, and Highland Scots missing flights and ferries as they sat in the gridlock. All "innocents" swept up in the closure of Scotland's east coast arterial route by music fans who couldn't get their lardy backsides out of Mummy or Daddy's cars and take a bus to Balado as they'd been told.

Driving north, past the biggest gridlock I've ever seen, cars were driving back up the hard shoulder against the direction of travel, avoiding groups of festival goers who had ditched lifts to walk the remaining few miles to the venue. In between them, old ladies were trying to shimmy down the steep motorway embankment to find "privacy", articulated trucks were apparently empty as their drivers caught shut-eye, and then, horrifyingly, a group, including one old man in a wheelchair, were crossing the motorway through near constant high-speed traffic to be picked up by another vehicle on the strangely clear north-bound carriageway.

Calling Radio Scotland to encourage their travel service to advise folk not to join the mayhem that had developed between Kinross and Perth, I was met with that uniquely Central Belt combination of "it's a festival, it's always like that", and "aye - the Forth Road Bridge approach is busy as well tonight". It took several hours before I heard the first report telling motorists to stay well clear. And, by then, all the minor roads around Kinross were car parks too.

But what of it. T in the Park is a one-off event. The rain was exceptional. The previous week's attempted car bombing and subsequent security alert was the first in Scottish history (if you can erase Lockerbie from your mind) and no-one died. Well, no-one we've heard of. Lessons will be learned and, according to the police, the atmosphere at the event was very good natured.

Fine. So why grumble? Because Friday's gridlock is not a one-off. It's a measure of the transport and congestion problem we've been storing up since the Beeching cuts of the 1960s. Balado was partly chosen as venue for T in the Park because of its excellent motorway connections - chief amongst them the M90, the straight, fast route from Perth to the Forth Road Bridge. Straight and fast because it used to be the direct rail-link between Perth and Edinburgh - ripped up when King Car took over 50 years ago. Now car journeys from Perth to the bridge take roughly half an hour, while rail journeys, forced round the Fife coastal route, take one-and-a-half hours. And the frequency is dreadful - direct trains run only every few hours.

The central bus station in Perth offers no car parking, so anyone living outside the city must be dropped off, spend an extra hour to get into Perth by bus or hope the nearby train station car park isn't full. It always is. And parking meters don't cover the hours needed for a day trip to Edinburgh. Especially not the kind of day trip spent sitting instead on a gridlocked motorway, wishing Beeching had never been born.

That's why on Friday I was heading south, by car, to the BBC's Edinburgh studios - reluctantly involved in one "hard to avoid" bad transport decision and examining hundreds of folk making another. The early queue of cars slowly ascending the turn-off to T in the Park were all big, sensible, parents cars - not decorated Mini Coopers, beaten up Transits or cheap and cheerful Cinquecentos. A sobering discovery. The generation dropped off at school have grown up to become the generation dropped off at rock concerts. Too posh to walk, they're now too posh to take the bus. Let's hope, for Edinburgh's sake, they aren't too posh to take the tram, otherwise 600 million will be spent in vain.

T in the Park has been a massive wake-up call. Outside the Central Belt our public transport is so poor it can be overwhelmed at any time. The only bit of good news - music fans finally got the message and started using buses. So, perhaps in future years, organisers will have the courage to go one better than Al Gore's pop-posturing at Wembley and follow the example of Radio One's Big Weekend in Dundee last year and ban admission to T in the Park by car.

Oh yes, and it stopped raining.