Tuesday was banal for most commuters across Glasgow and beyond. The weather was typical (mild, grey and damp), the trains were mostly on time, the Subway operated normally, and the buses trundled along on their own schedules through the usual diversions.

But in the background, transport across the west of Scotland was driving toward its biggest structural shake-up since the mid-2000s, when Transport Scotland and SPT were created in their current forms.

On June 16, it was announced that a new CEO would be entering the ring at Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT) later this year. Jamie Ross will be taking the gloves from Valerie Davidson, who is retiring after 26 years with SPT, the last five as chief executive. (She chose to retire under the normal terms of her contract with no extra payments or special deals involved, a spokesperson for SPT confirmed to me over email).

For the past two years, Ross has been Director of Transport at Liverpool City Region Combined Authority (LCRCA). It was a post created specifically to deliver bus franchising, and in Liverpool, he has done in two years what Scotland has been trying to do for at least seven.

Ross is certainly qualified for the job. He has more than two decades of experience in senior transport leadership and did a four-year stint as a Scottish Government civil servant. But that SPT had to recruit someone from England is an admission that up here, things are not going well. Poor Ross has his work cut out for him.

It all started with a Thatcher-era deregulation experiment in the 1980s that forced councils to turn their bus departments into companies or flog them off to private firms like Stagecoach or First. Private companies decide the routes, timetables, and fares as a result, so if a route doesn’t make money, it gets axed. Or councils have to cough up subsidies to keep the service going.

Glasgow is a mess and it isn’t about money – it’s the absence of joined‑up thinking

Glasgow is a mess and it isn’t about money – it’s the absence of joined‑up thinking

65,000 Central Station passengers have lost their trains. How are the roads coping?

65,000 Central Station passengers have lost their trains. How are the roads coping?

Rats, rubbish and........

© Herald Scotland