Why wasn’t the cycle tax idea killed off on day one?

Scottish Government spokespeople have been busy denying that the proposal for a road tax for cyclists is going anywhere. Indeed John Swinney appears to be issuing a personal and very clear denial.

It’s a welcome turnaround, and has even prompted a few voices from the SNP’s loyal fanbase to complain that our decision to object in the first place was an over-reaction.

It’s easy to get annoyed when politicians just milk a story for the sake of some coverage, but that’s not the case here. The issue isn’t really about a realistic prospect for a bike tax – because there is no chance that they’d ever have got away with it. You don’t need much imagination to come up the bones of a kick-ass non-payment campaign, and I doubt that the Government would have been able to collect a single payment. Success for that campaign would have been pretty much in the bag.

No, what’s genuinely worrying is that this notion even made it into the consultation on the otherwise pretty decent Cycling Action Plan for Scotland. I don’t doubt for a moment that the cycling organisations who helped to draw it up were never shown this question, which was probably a late addition at the suggestion of a civil servant. But at some point this addition must have been signed off by Ministers. What was going through their minds at that moment?

One suggestion has been that the question was included in order to ‘rule out’ the idea. Which is even odder. If it needed ruling out, it must have come from somewhere. Somebody somewhere must have been serious about this, or there would have been no need even to mention it. And if this was an attempt to rule it out, surely a simple “The Scottish Government does not support this proposal” would have done the job.

So in short, the SNP deserved to look silly for this even if they knew that the idea was doomed from the start.

At some point in the next few months the Government will have to respond to the cycling consultation, and if that response is going to be meaningful there will need to be a real shift in the spending priorities. I’ve no doubt that Swinney will spend the next few months pleading with opposition parties not to demand new spending in a difficult year, but he’s never short of a billion or two for building new climate-busting roads and bridges. If just a fraction of that was spent on cycling infrastructure, or on other measures to make our streets feel safe for walking and cycling, it would be utterly transformational.

Holyrood’s Transport & Climate Change Committee will also be holding an inquiry this year into active travel, and I’m hoping that it will lead to much clearer recommendations than we’ve made before. I’m sick of looking at each year’s budget and criticising the outdated transport priorities, only to see the very same thing repeated in the next one.

Party politics aside, I hope most of us want the same thing – a big increase in cycling and walking to help hit environmental targets, improve heath, and make just Scotland a nicer place to be in. But it won’t happen by wishing, and it won’t happen by publishing a consultation document. If it’s going to happen it means agreeing a significant change in government policy, and the sooner the SNP recognise that the better.