Why Did Scotland Spend 67 Million Pounds To Change The Roads? 

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

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.

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.

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....

AND waving like a maniac.

I was that tosser as I had my Drone to take photos before & after & survey the route.

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.

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 ?

"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...🤔

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.

They piss peoples tax away when we work our arse off it .

By comparison, this seems like decent value then, really.

Cheers mate, thanks for watching!

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! 😀

Grass cell blocks is another term, used to make a hardened verge.

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.

Cheers mate, thanks for watching!

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!

The Stonehouse one at the petrol station in particular. How I'd love to drive right across that some night.

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.

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

Cheers mate, thanks for watching!

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.

Very few people here are going to know what autoTrack is lol

Nice one, thanks for watching! :)

Cheers mate, thanks for watching!

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.

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.

Cheers mate, thanks for watching!

That’s actually quite practical. Saves dicking around with entrances and exits like they did here. This chaos will continue for many years unfortunately.

I was disappointed with his rendition of Dalmellington though. What's wrong with Da'mel't'n ?

Yep, grasscrete 👍

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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 😂

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.

Great idea - can we start a Crowdfunding for that - and add a Solar Farm as well.

He's already there.

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.

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 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.

Operation Branchform?

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.

Probably funding Hamas remember all them secret meetings Humza had with foreign ministers without the foreign secretary there.

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.

Cheers mate, thanks for watching!

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.

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.

Pleased to hear... if we can keep the "mrs" on side, we're all good.

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.

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.