Public Transport Should Rule! Private Cars need to be garaged

 

Central flower area at Glenrothes Bus Station

Glenrothes is Fife’s regional centre and I live close by. It is a new town, meaning that it came into being after WWII. It was originally designed to take about 32,000 people and house the miners expected to take jobs at the Rothes new coal mine that was closed four years after being opened due to flooding and geological problems. There are now nearly 40,000 people in the area.

It is Fife’s civic and administrative centre and the seat of Fife local government operations including the Fife Constabulary and Fife’s Fire and Health Services.

Anyway, I want to look at public transport because I would like to think that eventually we will wake up and be less dependent on our own private four wheels and learn to love the bus and train.

The train system (sob, like Australia) is in the process of being ‘rationalised’. That means the smaller villages are being marginalised and train services curtailed. Now Thornton – originally a possible for the seat of Glenrothes – is a railway stop called Thornton with Glenrothes.

Back to the buses.  I love buses and trains. Always have. Buses are easily manageable as distinct from trains. It is a big subject, this bulk transportation, but it needs to be addressed. Our roads are very expensive to maintain, especially when water freezes to ice (10% more volume) and makes cracks and holes in existing roads when the thaw happens. Big and expensive problems. It is suggested that the next ten years may repair the UK road system – what cost?? Don’t know. And that is only what needs to be done now let alone what else can happen in those ten years.

It takes me about 7 minutes to drive my little car from my home to the bus station and park for a full day at minimal cost. I usually go to Edinburgh on Saturdays (for the WIBS vigil). The bus leaves for Edinburgh on its way to St Andrews on the half hour every hour and takes an hour to get to Edinburgh.

Coming, as I do, from Australia, I am delighted with the frequency and timeliness of the buses here. I know when to expect my bus, can organise myself to get to the station on time, stand in a queue (sigh, horrific during August because of the Edinburgh International Festivals) and sit in the most comfortable seat, open my book or kindle and settle down to read while being transported to Edinburgh.

Halfway along the journey, the bus calls into Ferry Toll. This is a park-and-ride stop where some 300 buses daily deliver passengers to and from their parked cars. There is a facility for parking–free of charge-for 1050 cars, in the open and within a 4 storey car park. It is often full (again especially during August). It has run out of room – and is only 10 years old. Crikey there ARE a lot of us!!

Ferry Toll needs more (hey, there will always be more of us!) space and other locations are in the pipeline for consideration, but, in any case, the idea is great and worthwhile being adopted as park-and-rides all around every currently congested city in the world. Keep private transport out of the cities is my motto.

Back to the Glenrothes Bus Station. At the moment, all the surrounding public gardens and planting are just plain eye candy. It is summer and the colours are magnificent with brilliant begonias everywhere. It is something Australia hasn’t the resources to emulate. Mind you, as the water wars get closer, maybe the maintenance of these public gardens will become more difficult. Hard to believe in Scotland though; there is a lot of water. Glenrothes has an impressive national record in public space and garden development and maintenance. It shows.

 

Good public image!!

Each year the vibrant colour of the annual flowers and perennial bushes on the traffic roundabouts and surrounding approaches during the seasons is a delight. I hope I never take any of this for granted. So here are my photographs of the colourful, visual beauty of Glenrothes and its bus station.

I took some photographs that I feel aren’t as terrific as the professionals, but hey! They are mine!!

 

 

 

 

 

How to make a population feel good about going from somewhere to somewhere else – give them a visual treat.

Very bright & beautiful

WIBs #4 – RBS education schemes!

Leading on from my first WIBs article that mentioned Henry Dundas, 1^st Viscount Melville, I decided to take a look at Dundas House on the eastern side of At Andrew Square. I took a couple of photographs of this imposing building that was built in 1774 as a house for Sir Lawrence Dundas.

HQ of the RBS St Andrew Square

This mansion of a building became the headquarters for the Royal Bank of Scotland in the 1820s. I have yet to go inside.

Dundas House dome

I do know the ceiling is magnificent. Lawrence was a businessman, landowner and politician.

But long before the RBS shifted from the ‘auld toon’ it had developed a name for itself. Indeed, Scotland and banking especially during Adam Smith’s time in the late 1700s brought capitalism to the fore with banks moving from gold and silver based currencies to paper money redeemable against the banks’ assets.

Edinburgh and Scotland itself, can notch up so many ‘firsts’ it boggles the mind. These ‘firsts’ are from all across the board as well, though banking and finance was a Scottish speciality for some time!

The RBS, in 1728 was the first bank in the world to offer an overdraft facility. Whether or not some of these ‘firsts’ are for good or ill is debatable!

The 1700s were rife with the Acts of Union and the Jacobites and Whigs,  banks, the Scottish Enlightenment and, I discovered yesterday listening to a talk by Rachel Hewitt, the first Ordnance Survey map of Britain. 1791 was its start date with complaints about the lack of accurate topographical knowledge of Scotland after the 1784 rebellion.  Ms Hewitt’s doctoral thesis has been published as a book – Mapping the Nation.

Rachel Hewitt

Anyway, the “Old Bank” the Bank of Scotland was suspected of Jacobite leanings and the Royal Bank of Scotland, the “New Bank” chartered in 1727 was established with decidedly Hanoverian and Whig ties. The RBS was out to either kill the Bank of Scotland or take it over.

The rivalry between these banks led to internecine policies that saw the RBS buying up Bank of Scotland notes and then presenting them in bulk for payment, thus forcing the Bank of Scotland to call in all loans. This toing and froing made both banks vulnerable to attack from each other and eventually a truce was called but it was 1751 before the banks agreed to accept each other’s notes.

In any case, the RBS grew, opened branches and bought out failing banks in England and has become the biggest clearing bank in Scotland today.

Of course the threat of the global collapse of the financial sector in 2008-2009 affected the RBS as much as any other bank except there was the added disadvantage that the RBS had Sir Fred Goodwin as its mismanager. He offered his resignation that was accepted, presumably with alacrity by RBS’s chairman. But it cost a pretty penny in pension moneys that he had written into his contract.

Fred Goodwin

He had led the massive aggressive expansion taking RBS to the world’s largest company by assets and, of course, also oversaw RBS’s spectacular fall during the financial crisis. His name became Scottish mud after his £3 million lump sum payout and the disclosure that his pension would be about £700,000 annually for life. He agreed to slice £200,000 per year from his pension after a huge outcry from the community.

Now he has a lucrative job with the architectural firm that worked on the Scottish parliament. Here’s a great quote from the Linlithgow MP at the time, Michael Connarty:

“This is a very odd appointment and will confuse people.  People wonder what he knew about banking and will now wonder what he knows about building. There is a deep irony that one the architects of RBS’ downfall is now working for the architects involved in the Holyrood building fiasco.”

The Scottish parliament building opened three years late and £431million was 10 times over budget.

The oddness of Goodwin’s appointment to RMJM Architects becomes somewhat clearer when you realise that his mate helped him out. All together now ….

Sometimes I look at the buildings that house the headquarters of banks and reflect on their being training grounds for people like Fred the Shred. Like politicians and used car salesmen, banks and bankers enjoy little or no respect from the ordinary bloke.

The obscenity that forms the bonus structures in firms like banks, investment and insurance monoliths, resource giants, retail and armament firms is what will bring capitalism to its knees. Eventually. It is an unsustainable system of wealth creation and brings out the worst possible aspects of human nature.

I must say that I find enjoyment in ferreting out information on people who form the ‘best’ and the ‘worst’ in our societies. It is always enlightening, and never black and white!

Women in Black – against war

WIB in Melbourne, Victoria

Women in Black is a women’s anti-war movement formed in Jerusalem in 1988 after the First Intifada. Israeli women stood vigil every Friday wearing black clothing in mourning for all victims of the conflict.

This is taken from the Wikipedia article to which I have linked anyway.

At the peak of the Intifada there were thirty vigils in different locations throughout the country. The number dwindled sharply after the Oslo Agreement in 1993, when it seemed that peace with the Palestinians was at hand, and picked up again when violent events proved that hope to have been premature.

The first vigils in other countries were started in solidarity with the Israeli group, but then embraced other social and political issues. Especially notable were the Women in Black group in former Yugoslavia, which in the 1990s confronted rampant nationalism, hatred and bloodshed, often meeting with violence from nationalists and persecution by police.

There are now WIB groups throughout the world and while no one is really sure how many people participate, it is estimated that some 10,000 women are involved, many of whom regularly stand vigil in about 150 different WIB groups.

WIB in New York vigil

This is from a web site that is not updated regularly. It does however have a lot of information about the UK groups. There are clickable links to history and resources pages.

International Women in Black conferences and encounters have been held in Jerusalem, Beijing, former Yugoslavia, and Brussels. Another is planned for Italy in 2003. In 2001 Women in Black was awarded the Millennium Peace Prize for Women by the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and International Alert. Women in Black in Israel/Palestine and former Yugoslavia were also nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and the Right Livelihood Award.

I hail from Australia originally and there is a WIB group in Melbourne that is very active. I have located a WIB group in Sydney and another in Armidale in NSW. As this movement spreads around the globe, I can only hope that our desire for peace and equity prevails over territorial and resource greed and theft and the desire to rule and dominate is seen as the misuse of power and no longer appropriate (it never was).

Standing as we do in Princes Street in Edinburgh (and have done weekly since 2002), a lot of people walk over the pedestrian crossing from Waverley Station and The Bridges apart from those coming up from Leith Walk and along Princes Street. It is a busy little hub and our exposure is great.

Rugged up in the snow January 2010

While silent vigil is the norm, it is impossible not to talk to people who come up and want to applaud the vigil and/or vent their sense of loss, bereavement and anger at war in general. I was chastised once by a bloke because WIB is female. I tried to say that women are the ones who lose fathers, husbands and sons as war fodder and women have the fortitude to stand up in the first place. He just walked off.

A couple of weeks ago I was standing holding a placard, and a woman passer-by in obvious distress covered her face with her hands and just stood there. I went up to her – what do you say? I put my arms around her and she sobbed. When she calmed down enough to speak she said that she had suddenly been overcome with the injustice of war in all its manifestations. She just didn’t know what to do.

Handing out leaflets to passers-by

I suspect that most of us feel that way and sometimes we despair. I told her to get cross, write to papers, contact her representative; do things and focus that feeling of helplessness onto something that can be done. But, never, ever give up trying.

I have not seen her since, but I did meet a big, smiling German who gave me a high five and said that last May he had stood in the middle of Munich by himself holding two placards. He grinned his appreciation of our vigil.

All is not lost.

WIBs on Saturdays

James Clerk Maxwell

This statue of Maxwell (1831 to 1879) is dominated by the Melville Monument at the centre of St Andrew Square east George Street in Edinburgh.

It depresses me that Henry Dundas Melville, 1st Viscount  (1742 to 1811) even if he was known as the Uncrowned King of Scotland, should warrant 140 feet and 1500 tons of monument when Maxwell, who is arguably the most influential physicist and mathematician, has a smallish statue dwarfed by the privileged class! Dundas was a lawyer and politician, first Secretary of State for War and both the first and last person to be impeached in the UK.

Maxwell, on the other hand, was a theoretical physicist and mathematician. An immensely important figure – his synthesis of electromagnetic theory into his four famous equations makes him arguably the greatest influential 19th century scientist for 20^th century physics. We benefit more than can be told from computer to telecommunications from his understanding of the electromagnetic field. Einstein thought he was pretty good too, considering his work continued on from Maxwell’s. Apparently Einstein had a photo of Maxwell on his desk!!

Ah! a monumental juxtaposition that highlights what impresses humanity. Power and privilege over intelligence and creativity.

I get to see Maxwell each Saturday when I take the bus to Edinburgh. I do this because I am a supporter of the Edinburgh Women in Black and we stand in Princes Street opposite the magnificent Balmoral Hotel for an hour holding anti war placards.

A cold January Afternoon

Back to Maxwell (I will talk about WIB in a later post). I contemplate the circular object in his left hand. Well, of course!! Maxwell is holding his colour top that he used for investigation of colour vision and additive colour.

From his wikipedia article:

Maxwell is credited as being the father of additive colour. He had the photographer Thomas Sutton photograph a tartan ribbon on black-and-white film three times, first with a red, then green, then blue colour filter over the lens. The three black-and-white images were developed and then projected onto a screen with three different projectors, each equipped with the corresponding red, green, or blue colour filter used to take its image. When brought into alignment, the three images (a black-and-red image, a black-and-green image and a black-and-blue image) formed a full colour image, thus demonstrating the principles of additive colour.

First permanent colour photo - a Tartan ribbon

This photograph of that tartan ribbon was taken by Maxwell in 1861 when he was thirty years old.

I visited Maxwell’s house at 14 India Street in Edinburgh and signed the visitor’s book when I first arrived in Scotland in 2008. It gave me a delicious shiver of moment and history.

I wonder how many people scurrying past his statue even know who he was. And do we remember to marvel at his ability, the amazing wellspring of his mind? I doubt it. What an immense sadness that brings to me.