Why Did Scotland Spend 67 Million Pounds To Change The Roads?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.ย. 2024
- #cars #driving #road #infrastructure #scotland
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Scotland spent £67 Million to make a few tweaks and changes to some of it's roads. It seems like a pointless project but it turns out there might be a good reason for it. Sort of... It depends on your point of view, it's mainly about Green Energy and saving the environment but then it might also not be.
Additional Footage from;
Stevie B / @steviebutube
Collet & Sons Ltd - www.collett.co...
Vattenfall - group.vattenfa...
Sika - gbr.sika.com/
In the grand scheme of things, the 16 million trees in question seem like a bit of a loss, but since the majority of them were conifer plantations, many of which were, and are planted in questionable locations and cause degradation of the already fragile soils on many of Scotlands hillsides, I'm in two minds about this. If they are replaced with mixed deciduous woodland, of the sort that *should* be covering these hillsides, and still *would* be covering these hillsides, had generations of land owners not decided to chop them down in order to make "grouse moors" and "deer stalking estates" and indulged in other similar Victorian era style eco vandalism, then this might actually turn out to be a win in the long term.
Well who needs timber anyway ? Actually we need huge quantities and it's got very expensive.
@@auldfouter8661where did you learn to double space? Ive seen people do it everywhere and cant wrap my head around why anyone would bother with the extra space lol
I love the internet
@@Peter-xx6tz Probably on a phone using predictive text which adds the space after each word, but they don't realise and are adding their own spaces as well.
Why are people so anti conifers. The widespread coniferous plantations are for industrial timber production and are responsible for the explosion of the red squirrel population in Scotland once again. They were planted after the war after hundreds of merchant navy men died in the attempt to bring timber across the Atlantic for us in the uk. They do not destroy soils and indeed can significantly improve them considerably and prevent their erosion
Can we take a moment to mention the epidemic problem effecting Scotland of blue Saab's parked in every lay-by and on the side of every road. I didn't realise how serious the problem was until I saw your aerial footage 😔
Bloody nightmare! I had nowhere to park...
Blue car. Classic.
@@AutoShenanigans❤
Down in England, I honestly can't remember the last time I saw a Saab on the roads. Probably pre-pandemic. The English simply don't drive them anymore. There was a time when Saabs were 'in vogue' in England.....though that was about 30 years ago! Now you can't move for Hyundai's, Kia's, Skoda's, and increasingly, Tesla's.
Its a real challenge - something we Scots struggle with daily.
I love the roads in Scotland! Much better than the straight boring roads in England! Dual carriage way A roads? Snoresville.... twisty up and down A roads .... love it! ❤
Silly question: why not just go the wrong way around the roundabout?
They probably have the road closed anyway (as is normal when moving unusual loads, late at night, like this) and it looks like there would be space, given the tightness of the roundabout itself. (but I admit that is just an eyeball guess)
it is the dynamics of getting something long and rigid around the corner. they'd most likely still have to remove obstructions no matter which way they crossed, even though those extreme overlength rigs do steer at both ends. interestingly, for US wind farms, they haul the same components at motorway speeds with just a pilot car front and back.
@@kelticd5397 so they do go the wrong way and they still had to make alterations anyway? OK, fair enough then.
Too tight a corner
@@kenbrown2808 Yeah, but - at least after they landed in Scotland - these never got close to a motorway. Somewhere with less shit roads, maybe they do manage higher speeds.
I'd add that roundabout entries tend to have a much bigger splay than exits to allow for more vehicles to stack at the stopline. Hence, the angles are not so severe.
The railway may be deduced , but it has not been dismantled and indeed is still ( just ) home to the heritage railway at Dunaskin Ironworks , which sadly is due to close soon .
However , the track is still present all the way from Ayr to Dalmellington , and a look at Google Earth shows that track still runs right down to the harbour . so the railway could have been a viable option .
Spot on with the Hermes/Evri reference, entertaining as always
To be clear, many of the trees being felled were planted as crops shortly after the second world war - they were reaching the age where they would have been felled anyway. The wind turbines just happened to come along at the right time.
I assume the felled trees still got transported down some insanely small road at INSANELY high speed.... Those things are terrifying :D
Yep Forestry Commision land started after WWI due to the loss of woodland to make pit props and trenches. A valuable cash crop.
@@malcolmyoung7866 Its kinda interesting how much more 'forestry' the uk as a whole has compared to the low point of around ww1. I mean, a lot of it is 'cash crop' stuff or another massive monoculture, but without that, I guess it would have been open grouse land?
They are supposedly rectifying this when they replant, but its a long term thing, you can't just stick some trees in.
Not really clear at all since there will be few, if any, plantations left from the post war years.
Sitka Spruce, and (to a lesser extent) Larch, are felled in a rotational cycle of approximately 40 years.
Many of the trees removed for the wind farms around the country were not even 20 years into their cycle.
That aside, the devastating effect on the landscape of our countryside here in Scotland is beyond reproach and the main beneficiaries of these developments are the Lords & Ladies on the huge estates..... (and possibly those who receive a brown envelope or four😉😉)
@@WeeShoeyDugless you should see what they've done to the Shetland Islands....
There's a crossroad in my town in Scotland that was changed into a mini-roundabout because it was a bit too big, everyone hated it, then a few years later they mostly changed it back (but kept the road narrowed somewhat). It was a whole weird sequence of events.
what town is it?
I think my water just broke...I'm a man
I think that a lot of this is to do with the fact that, weirdly, the road planners have no interest in vehicles or roads. Sure they are probably highly qualified, but they have no interest in making roads actually usable.
@@robertdewar1752 these days if the traffic flows freely then you have to lower the speed limit, add speed humps, narrow the road and do everything in your power to clog it up, then justify it by calling it environmental safety measures!.
@@CrusaderSports250 Agreed. I've never understood the logic behind making traffic slower by making the road more hazardous. All that happens is that people go out and buy bigger, heavier vehicles (SUVs) to cope with the speed bumps etc. So we're all back at square one but with more road damage, potholes etc.
Vattenfall is the Swedish state-owned energy company. Its name, which means waterfall, comes from the fact that it started out by operating hydroelectric power stations.
And Vattenfall did deals with Scottish Power… Scottish Power are the least green energy company I know….purchasing some of the old coal fired power stations in the uk before they hit issues….fiddlers ferry and ferrybridge
Vattenfall was/is also involved in German energy with questionable pedigree.
Strange world we live in! Swedish Vattenfall build wind farms in Scotland and the biggest wind farm being built in Sweden is largely owned by the Chinese.
@@ovekarlsson777 Along with everything else 😔
@@SiHadlingtonScottish Power is owned by the Spanish company Iberdrola. Are you thinking of SSE maybe ?
I learned about Scottish roundabouts being partially flattened to allow for turbine blades from Tom Scott's 'Lateral' podcast. Nice to see an example at last.
I used to work in Ayr and saw a lot of the convoys moving through the town at night. The clips in this video don’t really show the sheer size of the turbines, they were massive!
And once again Jon manages to feature a few of my old haunts, just off the A77 roundabout are 3 car dealerships I used to deliver cars too regularly. A dead end road that where just a single car in the wrong spot could make it impossible to turn a 60 foot transporter around, reversing blindside the wrong way onto a bit of dual carriageway exiting the roundabout was a regular shenanigan, not one that was fun either given the racing speed/racing line many like to use leaving the A77. Ah the memories.
On the subject of road alterations in Scotland, in Livingston part of the Houstoun Interchange was dismantled by the summer of 2005, with rumours of similar plans for Cousland Interchange. These two were two of the three full cloverleaf interchanges in the UK - the other being at Headless Cross, near Redditch. Nothing has happened at Cousland and I'm not sure why they bothered messing about with Houstoun.
It must have been a real pain whilst trying to film that some tosser kept turning up and parking his blue car in your shots.
AND waving like a maniac.
I was that tosser as I had my Drone to take photos before & after & survey the route.
The trees were mature plantation trees that would be cropped for timber in any case, with the preserved wood products, say for use in construction, holding carbon out of the atmosphere for many decades after felling. So really quite a good conversion of land in terms of reducing green house gasses long term.
My mates mum was on the road crews working the tamper machine. I'm surprised you never mentioned her. That's 3 videos she's been part of and you've never given my mates mum a shout out. She's had a long a varied career so I wouldn't be surprised if she stars in future videos.
I'm pretty sure your mates mum helps keep the Cock bridge to Tomintoul road open in the winter too. She is a veritable whirling dervish with a shovel in the snow.
Honestly can’t tell if troll
We've all heard about your mate's mum tampering, Graeme.
@@Calvi36 No she was at Lancaster services last week. Polkemmet the week before.
@@AndyHullMcPenguin She only does that for pocket money when her husband doesn't give her her full "house keeping" money.
Somerset council, have just spent £10mil building a by-pass in the wrong place, so are now having to spending £76 mil on a new motorway junction.
They piss peoples tax away when we work our arse off it .
By comparison, this seems like decent value then, really.
The best thing in that video.... "You could see that this wasn't a job for Evri." My question is, given their propensity for losing (ahem... Stealing) parcels... Where the hell would they hide the turbine blades. If anyone could lose them Evri could.
"Oh these? These are our really long horse trailers for our really long horses."
Evri said in their defence that they left the turbine blade behind the blue wheely bin as requested.
Can you go and check as my missing parcel may be there as well...🤔
Why didn’t they just close the roundabout for 10 minutes while the lorry’s went the wrong way round for the one exit required, instead of facilitating the madness of going all the way round to take the third exit?!
I was thinking exactly the same thing - the road was going to be closed anyway - so why go around the roundabout??
Because the inmates are running the asylum 👍
Going the wrong way round on a right turn makes it a tighter corner which makes the problem worse if you have a longer vehicle.
That roundabout is 4 lanes wide so gives plenty of space to go round the correct way, to go round the wrong way is a tighter turn due to the angle the A77 from the south is to the roundabout.
Loved the hermes joke, it's the first time a video on youtube has made me actually laugh out loud for a long time. Cheers.
Cheers mate, thanks for watching!
The hard surface I believe is called Grasscrete. Great vid as usual 👌🏻
Grass cell blocks is another term, used to make a hardened verge.
There were a few roundabouts from canderside toll to strathaven that were halved to allow the truck to get around with wind turbines
The Stonehouse one at the petrol station in particular. How I'd love to drive right across that some night.
It's kind of strange to see Auto Shenanigans not on a weekend, Through I can get used to it soon enough.
Wait, does that mean I should have been working today?
I'm very happy to see a new AS episode on any day of the week! 😀
“Sub optimal” is a very polite way of describing the roads in Ayrshire. It’s been well known by the authorities that the Ayr A77 bypass has needed to be a dual carriageway since the 1990s but it still hasn’t happened. Meanwhile, new build housing estates keep springing up all around the area, adding more traffic to an already overloaded road system. It jams up every day and disrupts the flow of traffic to and from the Irish ferries at Cairnryan.
When you see them up close, the blades for those turbines are so much bigger than you'd think. They are also surprisingly intricate
I do lots of road trips in the U.S. and I love seeing them on the roads or walking up to them while they're parked at rest stops.
And completly non recyclable.
It's nice to see the company I work for feature in one of your videos, Collett Transport. The wind farm drivers certainly earn their wages and have to spend many months away from home while the weather is good. Keep up the great work with the videos dude.
The trucks that lift the blades to get around some corners are very impressive. The movements around Selkirk in the past year were the ultimate KLF JAMM tribute.
I was in Luxembourg last week and was ushered off the road by police to allow for a wind turbine blade to come down the very narrow valley. The whole thing was controlled by a guy walking alongside with a radio control!
Yeah, they're called SPMTs and are sometimes needed those for particularly difficult sections as they do away with the cab at the front (and sometimes back) and can therefore navigate much tighter bends.
@@KindredBrujah - thanks - it was a clever bit of kit!
Short answer:
They didn't spend that amount on altering the road, most of it went to backhanders, bribes and motorhomes.
Operation Branchform?
So let me get this straight - tax payers paid for road widening, so that private company can transport wind turbines and sell the energy for profit?! Are they paying back £67 million? Or am I missing anything?
Yes, through taxes. Windfarms already pay more tax than oil and gas exploration, yet get a fraction of their subsidies.
It's the Scottish government- they're officially off the rails.
If that's the case it's about the best deal the SNP have ever struck.
@@flyingpanhandle taxes from oil, even if not exploration itself, raises 28 billion a year.
So at least from tax perspective oil pays a lot.
No, the company building and operating the wind farm will have paid for the public road improvements required to get their turbines to site.
There’s one corner near me, which is on the side of a hill, and at the point two lochs/glens meet called Strone Point. This used to be a bit of an accident hotspot (several deadly accidents, over many decades), but no real improvement work was carried out.
When the wind farms started to appear though this bend needed some attention, and it got some much needed attention (reducing the sharpness of the corner). It’s still a bit of a slow corner, but given the wider carriageway and extra camber, if you go in too quick you should be able to come out of it. I can’t recall an accident there since it was reworked for the wind farm traffic
I did a similar abnormal loads route plan for a site in North Northumberland off the A1. Let's just say the AutoTrack required some specialist vehicle models to get it to work. Also, never forget abandoned scheduled monuments (1800s mile posts) lost to time in foliage.
Very few people here are going to know what autoTrack is lol
I agree with @AndyHullMcPenguin those 16 million trees have very little value both environmentally and economically. There was a big push post WWII to plant conifer plantations. The problem is in the highlands they replaced Caledonian forests which have a high environmental value with timber that is likely only good for pulping (paper & mdf). We planted trees that will not compete on the market with Scandinavia or NW USA trees. Remember these were planted with grants so the incentive was higher than their value. In effect the wind turbines are a win win scenario since the conifer plantations are dead places on the ground unlike native Scottish forests or broadleaved hard woods lower down and of course the reduction in CO2 benefits everyone not just the Scots. There is a lot of restoration work to be done in the UK as a whole. I've been an ecologist for 30yrs and only now is restoration happening where before it was a Canute like holding back of destruction as much as possible. The Wildlife Trusts are aiming for 30x30. That is 30% of the land in a good state for wildlife by 2030. Support your local wildlife groups to help. In my county we have somewhere in the region of 15-20% to go to get that result but it is achievable and whatever we do is better that losing it.
There is value - we have a problem now with the forestry cycles having a dip with fewer plantations at harvest time - and house building is at a high level. Sitka is a valuable timber, houses are built using it. Very few old growth Caledonian forest was replaced. Most of it had already gone centuries ago. Having said that, a fair bit of Dumfriesshire heads to Chirk to make chipboard and windthrow ruins many coupes.
A couple of months ago Tom Scott did a Lateral Highlight on why some roundabouts in Scotland got chopped in half. (Spoiler: same reason.)
Originally, That's what the video was going to be about.. however, I'm not sure Mr. Scott was entirely correct ;-)
Wouldn't be the first time...@@AutoShenanigans
"it's now a racing bridge" gave me all the lols.
Cheers mate, thanks for watching!
And in Dundee we just built roadways through the middle of roundabouts to get wind turbine parts transported from our docks.
That’s actually quite practical. Saves dicking around with entrances and exits like they did here. This chaos will continue for many years unfortunately.
Aerial drone super footage of widened roads with a parked Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaab!
This is a fantastic short video Jon, find this really interesting around enabling works for other infrastructure projects. Another project that you could look into is the support road network for HS2. They are building a road the length of HS2 Phase 1 so not just a new rail link but also a new road to support this. May not be completed for some time though!
Cheers mate, thanks for watching!
Great video. That sounds like an awful lot of money for a couple of small road widening projects!
Spare a thought for us in Wales where we would die for roads as good as Scotland's.
Our 'government' are about to spend £32 Million changing EVERY 30mph road into a 20mph limit in September. They're spending that money despite local authorities having to make huge spending cuts because of a £340 Million deficit. If you're visiting Wales you better allow more time for your journeys!
Something's gotta pay for all those dual-language road signs.
(I'm in Scotland, and jesting of course)
Yep, as a Welshman, it's stupid and unnecessary, and is just part of the Labour power trip.
Reducing the speed limit through built-up / residential areas to 20mph sounds like a great idea to me.
@@IstasPumaNevadaBut not on main roads.
That's crazy and irrational. Cars are heading toward self driving, and even if that takes ten years, we simply won't need low speed limits anymore. Thankfully they aren't about to spend £1.5 billion on trams of all things.
I worked for Babcock’s in Renfrew in the 80s. Back then they had to modify roads to get huge sections of boiler components on to the motorways to build Drax Power Station. 40 years later and we’re doing the same thing although the trees we’re destroying are for green energy in the guise of wind turbines. Not just that, thought. Drax is now being subsidised to destroy North American trees to supply power to the grid. But not to worry, they plant new ones which one day (not in most peoples’ lifetime) will balance out the CO2 emitted. The fact that burning coal would produce less CO2 and the trees could still remove it are mere details in this odd eco world we live in.
Possibly the best visual representation of Evri ever.
Cheers mate, thanks for watching!
My road to work takes in the A704 and A71, which recently had to have some minor modification works to allow a small wind farm extension to be constructed. But rather than widen the worst corner on the road, they simply built an almost straight line cutoff across a field. They removed several traffic islands, cut weird notches in roundabouts (including one which decimated a habitat for what seemed like hundreds of bunnies) and removed so much signage I thought the Nazis were coming back.
However, I often encountered the oncoming turbine parts at just after 5am. I’d be driving along and see that someone had flattened the little traffic island bollards with a sandbag. That was my clue that somewhere ahead was a massive load taking up 80% of the road width and coming towards me. I took some interesting detours those mornings.
I don't know about this specific project but a lot of these windfarms are being built on monoculture forestry land so the ecological impact is relatively small, and the trees were going to be cut down at some point regardless. Also wind turbines reduce carbon output from fossil fuel power generation significantly more than the trees absorbed so it's still a net benefit in carbon emissions
Show us your working for the CO2 figures created during manufacture, transport, road works, construction and then maintenance of these windmills x50 and get back to us.
16 million trees lost....but the "green energy" dreamers don't care about the environment do they ?
@@DaveFiggley Does fossil fuel power generation not require those things?
@@DaveFiggley "Tree offset calculation is based on a tree planted in the humid tropics absorbing on average 50 pounds (22 kg) of carbon dioxide annually over 40 years . Each tree will absorb 1 ton of CO2 over its lifetime; but as trees grow, they compete for resources and some may die or be destroyed - not all will achieve their full carbon sequestration potential. This calculation assumes that 5 trees should be planted to ensure that at least one lives to 40 years or that their combined sequestration equals 1 ton." - This is one of many ways to calculate CO2 in trees, but it is close enough for the purposes of this debate.
Generally speaking a tree growing to maturity equals about a metric ton of CO2 give or take. In the case of the millions of Scottish trees chopped down, this CO2 is going to be turned into "pencils, toilet rolls, Ikea furniture and magazine blow in adverts".
This was always going to be its fate, but perhaps the trees reached the Timber Particle Board factory a little quicker than they might have done otherwise.
So in summary, the conifer plantations of Scotland are a short term carbon sink anyway, since they are destined to be "consumed" and a fair amount of their CO2 is going to go back in the atmosphere. Hence my comment above about planting mixed deciduous trees rather than pencils and toilet rolls. Deciduous trees grow over much longer periods and tend to keep their carbon locked up. As to the amount of CO2 used to build the turbines, it is not even within an three orders of magnitude of the amount released by gas fired or coal fired plant of similar capacity over their life time. Arguably nuclear energy is as green as wind power, but it has proven rather difficult to sell this idea to the public.
@@DaveFiggleyburning fossil fuels produces far worse pollutants than co2. The main reason co2 gets mentioned is because it's the one most people recognise so industry shills pretend it's the only one that matters.
The Evri sequence made me laugh far harder than it should have 😅
Why not just have a gated road straight across the roundabout like they do around Stoke on Trent area for transportation of massive turbines built by GEC Alsthom.
How splendid to have this mid week video many thanks AND the heavy haulage specialist in your vid has a depot here in Happyfax.
Cheers mate, thanks for watching!
They did a similar thing with the A822 when the Griffin Wind Farm was built near Aberfeldy.
I instantly "liked" this video for your Evri short! Classic!
I'm impressed , your Gaelic has come on. You got Ayr ..bang on . ✅😂
I was disappointed with his rendition of Dalmellington though. What's wrong with Da'mel't'n ?
I had the misfortune getting stuck behind one of those blades destined to be part of the Walney wind farm and can confirm they are bloody massive. I think the technical term you are looking for at 4:10 is Rumble Strip.
not rumble strip, grass blocking
It's grasscrete, or a similar product with a different name.
You do realize I was been a bit 'tongue-in-cheek' with that last statement.
Good information,good speedy presentation.
There's no fucking way that lot cost £67m but I'm not surprised. Money goes missing in Scotland, willy-nilly since devolution...
Probably funding Hamas remember all them secret meetings Humza had with foreign ministers without the foreign secretary there.
Lol - love the "not to scale" ;)
"A racing Bridge". Love it :)
This was a question on Lateral with Tom Scott recently.
Vattenfall is a Swedish state-owned energy company. The name means "waterfall", so yea, they mostly did hydropower, but clearly they've branched out to destroying ecosystems in Scotland.
The Swedish are trying to drag us down with them
Strange. I was under the impression the scottish were perfectly capable of doing that on their own.
I'm guessing they had an itch they felt they needed to scratch after having to sell those coal plants in Germany.
And Norwegian companies have taken over the coast for fish farming.
Yeah screw em. Lets burn coal instead.
At least trees can be replaced.
This was a question on Tom Scott’s “Lateral” podcast a while back…
Put them up near Trump’s golf course. It’ll drive him mad.
Great idea - can we start a Crowdfunding for that - and add a Solar Farm as well.
He's already there.
Most of the trees in Scotland are grown commercially (silviculture). When they are cut down, they are a crop to be used. They are destroyed only in the same way that wheat is when harvested.
Isn't that additional surface grasscrete, ie the stuff used to create parking space that allows grass to grow through it?
Yep, grasscrete 👍
Evri delivery drivers must be the same everywhere, then. I laughed at the fragile parcel being kicked. It's so true to life. That and parcels being abandoned on front doorsteps in full view of any passing thief.
I'm not convinced that work would have cost £67 million if it was paid for by the companies building the windfarms. But when it's being paid for by the green energy levy that's added onto everyone's electricity bill, then I'm a bit surprised that they didn't charge even more.
The Green levy is yet another example of making ordinary people pay through the nose to support this Globalist ideology along with Ulez's, heat pumps, car scrappage, gas boiler scrappage, oil boiler scrappage etc etc.😡
You don't get a whole lot for 67 million nowadays when it comes to road/rail construction.
It wouldn't surprise me if that wasnt a rather conservative figure.
The job cost £1 million, the heath and safety B/S cost £66 million, including a few brown envelopes to grease a few palms.
Replacing a mini roundabout with a set of traffic lights near me cost them £950,000 15 years ago.
Turbines use energy from the grid to get them going🤦♀️
Government are chucking money at "green" companies because the MP's invest in these latest scams.
Nice to see the Whitletts Roundabout on Auto Shenanigans. It really is a barrel of shite. There's four narrow lanes going round it that are poorly delineated with traffic light control both on and off. Locals, like me, find it hard enough to get into the correct lane once the light goes green, those who are only visiting have no chance. It's a shame the £67 million wasn't all spent on ripping the whole thing up and starting again.
Totally agree there, I'm positive that roundabout would flow much better without the lights. Especially as most don't know how to use a roundabout with bloody lights.
@@missbitch67 what should have been done was to continue the dual carriageway south of Whitletts to the Holmston roundabout rather than have that stretch of single carriageway which was a notorious accident blackspot until they realised three lane roads were a bit stupid. They could then have routed the entire thing through and underpass or flyover with sliproads to a normal roundabout junction.
It's a disaster
Trying to fit these components along roads is the kind of thing I do most every day so I really enjoyed the video and I couldn't be bothered to trawl all the comments but £67M is for the whole windfarm project - the public road improvements would be a significantly lower figure.
Dont know how ive come across this channel, but i can't stop watching them. Ive travelled these roads a lot the last 2 years and was unaware of this til now.
16,000,000 trees
That’s some wood
he hasn't said that they have removed non native specie and replaced them with native ones which is better for the enviroment overall.
Worth noting that it is all man-made managed forest. These trees are a cash crop, not pristine forest, so not such a big deal to clear them
A lot of pallets.
@@paulsengupta971 And houses!
"So it's now a racing bridge" ... you're lucky I finished my tea!!
Excellent job tracking down that £67 million Jon, I didn't realise the SNP were that keen on keeping records about where the money was spent 😁😂
bloody brilliant, love that everi bit
Cheers mate, thanks for watching!
Just had a week in Edinburgh and in all the many towns and cities I've been to I've never known a place where the traffic lights and crossings were so close together. On one section on our way to Leith there was precisely 2 car lengths between two sets of traffic lights. Surprisingly there was a large build up of traffic behind it, completely unnecessarily so.
Barely a junction in Edinburgh without traffic lights and separate pedestrian crossings between those Junctions. Traffic light salesmans dream.
Has it got something to do with the trams? They have been running there since june 2023 (or march 2023 for testing purposes) and trams normally get priority subject to traffic.
"so it's now a racing bridge"
Brilliant 😂😂
Complaining about cutting down conifers that were planted as a crop is like complaining that they cut down wheat to make bread
Indeed. Plus this windfarm takes up less area than the combined floor plans of the houses they power (per house, it's about 75% of the floor area of the average U.K. home), and produces 1/50th the CO2 per power generated of natural gas power plants (Scotland's largest power source in 2002).
You don't cut wheat before its ripe and it shouldn't happen to conifer plantations either, many many of which these were.
No excuses, it was wrong and it will prove itself to be wrong when the windmills go out of fashion in a decade or so.
3.26 - "so now it's a racing bridge". Spat my beer out laughing...!!
Just bite the bullet and build nuclear.
The SNP don't like nuclear - they'd have to be voted out in favour of a party that would build nuclear power stations.
@@RichardWatt So double benefit then 😂
Brilliant video again. Thanks John
Wishing you well hope your OK xx
Nice one, thanks for watching! :)
My council spent £600k on one bus stop 🤷🏽♂️
Blimey, my brother and I could have done it for half that!
government is the best at spending other peoples money
@@Scientist538 Never needed a school, hospital or road then? Well done!
@@richardwebb5317 government sucks at funding these, they just give out the contract to 'private companies' their pals run and leak the auction data to them so they always win then they overspend and deliver late. Much better to let the public self organise.
They need to fix the bloody potholes
I first heard about this on Lateral with Tom Scott and was hoping someone would come along with details. Thank you!
I was going to mention that. When I saw that episode I immediately thought of wind turbine components having to be transported.
Tom Scott doing his usual "one example of a thing means this is everywhere" hyperbole.
Like his questionable claims about vinegar and chip shops.
Nothing new in the 1940 roads were widened and lamp posts moved back from the edge of the road to enable fully assembled Spitfires being ferried to Malta to be moved from airfield where yhey they landed to the docks to be hoisted onboard aircraft carriers
Holyrood and the SNP have been full of wind for years and years
Another information packed video from the constantly brilliant Johnny two hats
if you ever want to cover a non-motorway with a wild story from start to end (litterally) check out the A9
From above on the roundabout at 0.40 you can see the hedges that used to line the lane that existed before the Ayr bypass was built
Is there a special wind turbine blade licence you need to drive that half Titanic length around town? I also read that if one blade is damaged in transit, they have to scrap all 3 blades for that turbine. Due to being balanced to only work with the other 2. Not sure how true that is but sounds plausible.
Probably true as blade in a plane engine turbine are definately balanced during assembly to stop vibration.
Sounds a bit like, adding a (postage) stamp to a helicopter blade will destabilise it .
Sounds plausible, but more than two seconds thought will illustrate what a heap that idea is.
I wouldn't say scrap - I would suspect they'd be matched with other blades to be balanced. I suspect you can also balance blades by adding or removing material.
If they can balance the blades once, they can re-balance them later. (If you have to say or think 'not sure how true that is', maybe the info doesn't need to be shared, or should be re-phrased as a question instead of a statement.)
You can drive it on a normal LGV 1 licence ive a video on my channel of a ex stobbart driver doing a 32m 100 ton bridge beam
I remember delivering containers to the Ben A Tuich? windfarm on the Kintyre peninsular. Several of us had to drive 8 miles off road through the forest on dirt tracks with a 45" trailer, it was not for the feint hearted I all tell you. I'm still wondering how they got the big stuff up there.
Put the wind farms near Holyrood, plenty wasted air comes out of that white elephant daily.
Just up the road from me , was fascinating watching the lorries get through impossible looking roads , and the wind farm looks fantastic , fo nimbies .
Play fair now....those trees, like the Whitelees forest, were planted as a crop and were always intended to be felled. The fact they are replaced with windfarms is a happy outcome. They could just as easily have been a massive housing scheme which would require power rather than producing it. 😁
💚🐇🐴💚
Indeed. Also, that's about 0.01 acres of land to power a home, or less than the floor area of an average U.K. home, for a power source that produces about 1/50th the CO2 of something like a natural gas plant. Renewable energy _is_ fantastic.
@@IstasPumaNevada you do still need to factor in area of the road built to access each turbine.
@@IstasPumaNevadaHow much CO2 was produced making the wind turbines and transporting them?
Brainwashed idiot - no wind turbine EVER produces enough power in its lifetime to even account for the energy used to build, transport, erect, maintain and dispose of it. Every one is a net drain of energy.
Housing scheme - guess where a lot of those trees end up.
Same thing got done in Dundee a few years ago for wind turbine components ended up putting a lane right through the middle of a roundabout (circle for the locals😂).
SNP & Greens - embarrassing Scotland every day.
You are right about EVRI, I've had quite a bit of stuff delivered by them and they just leave it on the doorstep in full view of anyone passing, a wind turbine would stand out quite a lot I'm guessing and the Twatts around here would have it weighed in minutes later if they noticed it.
wait, you actually received your packages from Evri?
@@Ben_B_Artist some items, many I haven't but I don't know if they've been delivered then nicked.
why go round clock wise ?. Just stop the traffic and turn right at the roundabout ffs.
Don’t think it would work. It would need more space on the right. The way they approached it the roundabout is in the middle of a really wide right turn. The blades are lifted above most obstacles, height isn’t usually the issue, it’s the length of the things that causes the problem.
When they came to the roundabout why did they not just go right instead of going left and all the way round all they had to do was altered the carriage way
Not sure if you realised this or not, but trees do grow back. They will also will replant native species which is generally better for an ecosystem.
I get that it was an easy jab though, so I'll let you off. Loving your videos as usual!
They also tend to build the windfarms in forests that are managed for wood production anyway, so they would have been felled then replanted anyway.
The wind turbines last, what 25-30 years? Then they can cut down all the trees again to dig the hole to bury the bits that can’t be recycled 🙂
And newly planted (I.E.young) trees capture more carbon than mature trees .
And those miles and miles of Conifers are Forestry commision anyway (crop trees) and should be replaced with geneticaly diverse native trees .
A bit of a hobby horse of mine, people go on about "ah Scotland miles and miles of trees", but they are all one species normal trees don't grow like that the trees should be of diverse species and of all different ages.
@@CycolacFan I understand, but what's the problem with burying waste? If it's inert bury it. The earth is huge, we can and should be burying this stuff until it makes sense to recycle.
To put this into perspective, the EU will discard about 650k tons of blades between 2044 and 2049, or 130k tons per year. That's less than 300 grams per EU citizen.
@@CycolacFan Taking into account manufacture, installation, maintenance, and end-of-life disposal/recycling, wind turbines still only produce about 1/50th the CO2 (or equivalent) per power generated that a natural gas power plant does.
Unless you're going to convince people to stop using electricity, wind turbines are a great option.
No wonder our energy bills will never ever be low again ! Those days are long gone !
wind energy, basically its a scam lol
Compared to what?
the fuckin irony of you being called "scientist"
4th gen nuclear fission is my favorite up and coming energy source, do some research about molten salt reactors in particular, sadly whilst the US discovered and developed this technology in the 1960s it was mothballed in the early 70s just when they were ready to scale it up for commercial use because the cycle was unable to produce weapons grade material. These days China is at the forefront of MSR development which can be mass produced in factory assembly line (something not yet possible for fission). I suspect after China has perfected this technology the west will rush to try and catch up so it will be then you'll start hearing about it. These reactors are fueled with 'nuclear waste' aka spent fuel and only produce 1% waste of their own which contains important medical grade isotopes and fuel for deep space exploration. The green racket is a scam designed to give an easy play for the elite and extract wealth from tax payers whilst also reducing freedoms of individuals. A keen set of eyes will notice a trend in these types of schemes, covid was a very transparent racket that we've recently endured that massively enriched the architects of the response. Another older example of one of these schemes was the war on terror. Problem, reaction, solution type thinking designed to extract wealth and restrict freedom.@@auldfouter8661
@@auldfouter8661 Hydro, solar, nuclear
@@barrieshepherd7694 They wind the nutters and conspiracy morons up just as much.
Yay! Finally my area!
A719 - better known as Whitletts Road.
The funniest part is it takes more energy to build one than the amount it gives back in it's 20yrs service.
lie
Yes, if by ‘funny’ you mean ‘untrue’.
Coal an oil are the future, much cheaper and readily available 😊
Just blatant misinformation there mate
not just that they could not be made without oil
On Wednesday driving from Glasgow to England and not one wind turbine was turning.
To think how much is spent on feasability studies for this sort of thing, and there's a man in Northamptonshire wearing a Peaky Blinder cap who could tell them it's a carbon positive situation for much less. Bravo Jon!