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Page 66
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am intrioued by The Hawk's -Bird's-eye view" of Scottish postbuses (-Preaching the philosophy . . CM May 27). Obviously from his eyrie in Stamford Street, SE1, he cannot get a clear view of rural Scotland, of the isolation of the people who live there, or of the unanimous welcome they have given to the postbus idea.
A simple telephone call to Edinburgh could have told him what the postbus means in Scotland. He could have learned that, because of postbuses, rural Scotland is better off — it now has public transport over two and a half thousand miles of Scottish road where five years ago there was none; local authorities are better off — only a very few of our postbuses receive a local authority contribution and, in all cases, this is very much less than an orthodox bus service would require; the Scottish Transport Group is better off -they have more than once expressed their support for postbuses on those routes which would be hopelessly uneconomic for them, and have already transferred to the Post Office a number of routes including those on the island of Islay which, in spite of local authority contributions, were deeply in the red; and the Post Office (and therefore its customers) is better off — strange though it may seem our postbus operations are financially advantageous to us.
And we have done all this with minimal diversion of administrative resources, and certainly with no detriment to our primary task of collecting and delivering the mail. We now have 101 services.
Perhaps The Hawk — who clearly has Highland ancestry -should return to Scotland to find out for himself.
TREVOR C. CARPENTER, Chairman, Scottish Postal Board, Edinburgh.
• Did Mr Carpenter really read The Hawk's piece? It's not a case of making a simple phone call to Edinburgh; we know all about the value to the community of postbus services and not so long ago had a feature about this. In Bird's-eye View we merely had the temerity to ask whether it might not be better for the Scottish Transport Group to carry the many thousands of passengers a year now going by van; and to suggest that the STG should at the same time deliver the mail. -Editor.