A new year provides a great opportunity to try something new, and so we’re excited to be sharing our new blog.
For our first post, our Partnership Director, Brian Butler, shares his thoughts on the year ahead.
Just like that, it’s 2025. We’ve been back at work for a few weeks now after the festive break, settling into our normal routines, and feeling refreshed and ready for the year ahead.
As January progresses, as well as wondering how it can really be 2025, I find myself thinking about our ambitions and intentions for the year ahead. At SEStran, we are moving into the last quarter of our . This gives us the opportunity to consider what we’ve achieved so far and finalise our plans for the upcoming year.
The 2024/25 year is proving to be a busy one as we work to deliver against our four Regional Transport Strategy objectives:
Climate change is undoubtedly the biggest challenge of our time and with transport being responsible for 28% of Scotland’s greenhouse gas emissions1 transitioning to a sustainable and post carbon transport system is rightly at the heart of everything we do.
Encouraging people out of their petrol/diesel cars and into more sustainable public transport is only possible if we have an effective public transport network, coupled with reliable, real-time information. We are progressing work on our bus and rail strategies – plans which will coordinate the actions required to ensure our public transport system meets the needs of everyone, as well as working with partners to improve and expand real time public transport information provision.
We realise, however, that private cars will always be a preferred way to travel for some, and so we are working with partners across our region to improve EV charging infrastructure to help make electric vehicles a more viable alternative to petrol and diesel powered cars.
Getting to and from an appointment at a hospital, doctor’s office or other healthcare setting can be difficult for many people, particularly those living in more rural areas and transport is one of the factors that contributes to repeated non-attendance. We’re working with health boards across our region to better understand these issues and find ways to tackle them.
Moving more and being a little healthier is something that many of us are thinking about after the excesses of the holiday period. Much of our work at SEStran focusses on active travel behaviour change – how we can encourage people to make changes to their travel behaviour which not only benefit our environment but also health and wellbeing.
Through our People and Places Plan, with funding from Transport Scotland, our People and Places grant is allowing over 100 projects across our region to deliver behaviour change interventions that support people to choose active travel over cars. It is exciting to see these projects progress and we are looking forward to learning about the changes and improvements on the ground when we receive their end of year reports.
With so many of us now choosing to shop online, the recent Christmas period reminds us of how important it is that the movement of freight in our region works well. As a society we’re becoming more and more used to speedy delivery once we’ve hit that ‘buy now’ button, but not many of us consider the journey each parcel goes on before it arrives at our door. We’ve been continuing work that looks at sustainable first and last mile freight delivery and are excited to be part of work to not only make this more sustainable, but also quicker and more efficient.
There’s no doubt that 2024/25 is a busy year for us at SEStran. As we look ahead to 2025/26, I feel excited and optimistic about the opportunities ahead to allow us to continue to achieve the objectives set out in our Regional Transport Strategy.
1 Scottish Transport Statistics 2023 – Transport Scotland
