Bus services are to be improved with £4.2m in funding, Transport Minister Keith Brown has announced. Transport Scotland's bus investment fund is to be split among 13 projects over three years. Successful bids include a better park and ride at Kingswells in Aberdeen, bus stop timetables in Fife, and extensions to a southern Highland rural service. Improvements are planned for the A81 in East Dunbartonshire, as well as rural services in Dumfries and Galloway. Mr Brown said: "This fund provides local authorities, regional transport partnerships and bus operators with the...

I’ve also always spent some of my working week on development planning as well as cycling work. With a few honourable exceptions, the approach to cycling in new development is often pretty dismal. The private sector doesn’t really want to create ‘highway’ space that can’t be sold on, while local authorities don’t want to adopt high quality finishes with a future maintenance liability. Consequently public space, cycle routes and cycle parking in new development, where we have a chance to really do something good, is often shoe-horned into spaces that can’t be used for anything more...

As a professional who has been involved in a number of public inquiries, I’ve come to realise how crucial it is to road test ideas, skills and strategies. To be successful at inquiry, important skill sets are required to enable you to ‘know your story’, expand your story (in plain English) and be able to ‘recall the story’ when there are lots of different issues going on. On reflection, the journey from my first public inquiry back in 1998 and what I learnt from my peers and managers – and the experience since then – I realise the value of training and development in this area is...

It is fitting that PTRC News should be highlighting cycling, just nine days after the historic House of Commons debate on 2nd September 2013. It was a remarkable sight: an estimated 100 MPs, 30 of whom spoke, giving wholehearted cross-party backing to Get Britain Cycling - the published findings of the All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group's recent Inquiry. Admittedly, at times, the debate was stodgy. But anyone watching the 4-hour epic on Hansard TV definitely got their money's worth. The report recommended a...