Fix the M8, mate?

Scotland's transport system is broken. Everyone seems to agree, but the solutions that are being proposed seem to me the opposite of common sense. Yesterday's news carried stories about the road transport lobby's worries over fuel price rises (they want them reversed, poor darlings), while a meeting of the First Minister with industry leaders was headlined with a demand to have the Edinburgh - Glasgow motorway finished - and widened.

OK, hang on, wait a minute.

The main east-west links across central Scotland are, indeed, broken. In the past month I personally have travelled from my working base in East Kilbride to visit customers in Dundee twice and Falkirk once. Each time, both ways, my colleague and I travelled together by car (no, I didn't take a car myself). Each time, a substantial part of the journey was spent in queuing traffic. So yes, the network is, for most of the working day - not merely in the humorously misnamed 'rush hour'- beyond capacity.

But it's beyond capacity because of journeys that don't have to be made, most of them being made by solitary people in cars; and most of those cars are larger than they need to be.

Scotand has now ubiquitous high-speed digital network infrastructure. We really don't need most of the face-to-face meetings that most of these solitary motorists are travelling to. We really don't need nearly so many people to travel to workplaces distant from their homes as we currently have, and not nearly so distant.

But what we do have - what human communities the world over are dogged with - is a culture which lags our technical and economic realities. We're using the workplace as a proxy for community. We are, after all, communal animals. Since we now spend most of our lives engaged in work, we choose to do it collectively. But what we have is a situation in which everyone who works in a single enterprise travels to that enterprise's premises to engage in communal activity. We don't need that. If people want to work in shared workplaces - which clearly they do - the answer is to set up shared workplaces close to their homes, where workers from many different enterprises can share gossip, brag about their virtual football scores, and bicker about whose turn it is to make coffee.

I'm sorry, transport lobby. The cost of fuel is real. This is the real world imposing on your cosy comfort zone. And if you think a pound a litre is steep, you ain't seen nothing yet - expect the two pound litre within five years. Oil production is not increasing and willprobably never increase again; oil demand across the world is rising. Furthermore, it doesn't put you at a competitive disadvantage - every business which moves physical goods from place to place is suffering equally. You just have to pass your costs onto your customers, and we - your customers' customers - will have to make an economic decision about whether we're prepared to pay that increased cost. The gradual decline of road transport isn't preventable. The goods which it is now marginally economic to produce centrally and distribute widely will simply cease to be produced and distributed in that way.

Similarly, road warrior, the digital revolution is real. Every hour you spend slumped behind a steering wheel is an hour your digitally equipped competitors are doing productive work.

Smarter Scotland does not need a bigger, wider - finished - M8. Smarter Scotland needs to teach its business community to use the tools we've got. This isn't rocket science; this has been obvious most of my working life.

Now it's time to do it.