Last Tuesday, 23rd February was the first flight of Gaunyersel Airways Executive Jet Service from Glasgow to Vancouver. Two of the passengers were staying at the Lodge at Loch Lomond, got caught up in the Tuesday morning traffic jam on the A82, weren't familiar with the side road through Bowling and were 40 minutes late for the flight which had been scheduled for a 10am take off. Fortunately with an Executive Jet, the pilot has the flexibility to delay take off until all passengers are on board.

The traffic jam lasted for three hours and was caused by a 31-year-old woman driver who lost control of her new car and hit the central reservation in a single car accident. The airbags popped in the new car and she was uninjured.

The traffic jam was the direct result of the failure of the SNP Government to keep traffic moving on Scotland's roads.

The function of government is to facilitate traffic flow, facilitate money movement through the financial system, facilitate business interaction etc. In short to facilitate.

The SNP government's actions, inactions and diversions do the opposite. They cause commerce in Scotland to grind to a halt.

Alex and his gang are proposing to spend £9 million of your money on a referendum on Independence. And who is going to govern this Independent Scotland?

The SNP are incompetent. Ditto Labour, New Labour or whatever this week's reincarnation is called. The Tory's have been in opposition for the past 12 years and there are no signs that David Cameron knows what he is doing.

Any competent organisation should have had the damaged car removed from the scene within 15 minutes.

I wasn't on the Gaunyersel Airways flight and returned from the airport to Helensburgh around 10.45am when traffic was being held up by two police women standing in the middle of the A82. From previous reports of traffic problems on the A82, I thought that it was against health and safety regulations for the police to be anywhere near the A82.

I parked in the layby just before the Bowling Roundabout and walked down to the Roundabout to take pictures. I was the only source of information for the stranded motorists. The police must have been back at headquarters filling in incident reports.

I have been driving an S-class Mercedes for the past couple of weeks. The car is a piece of junk (see Hitler's revenge) but it does have a radio that picks up traffic reports. In the course of the past week, soothing jazz has been interupted to let me know of the problems a bomb in Newry is causing as well as the usual difficulties on the M25 in a clockwise or anti-clockwise direction.

This pisses me off since this information is totally irrelevant to my existence. What would be relevant would be information within a twenty five mile radious including problems on the A82 with an estimate of the delay.

All of this is technically possible today just as it was twenty or thirty years ago. Somebody has to have the insight to do it.

It is possible to do a rough calculation and estimate the cost of this single car accident to the people caught in the aftermath. At most the 31 year old woman who caused the whole mess wrote off her car at a cost of about £20,000. Taking the average British hourly wage and multiplying it by the number of people stuck in the traffic jam gives a lower value for the cost to society of this failure to keep the traffic moving. It is a big number.

There are other costs. An ambulance was part of the traffic queue. In a blue light situation, the driver wasn't going anywhere. The Vale of Leven Hospital has been downgraded by Labour/Lib Dem then SNP Government neglect. Most emergency cases have to go to Paisley. With the A82 blocked by two police women standing in the middle of the roadway and holding up traffic, emergency cases are damned.

Any business being innovative and trying "just in time" deliveries to improve efficiencies is screwed.

The role of the police is to keep traffic moving, not to stand in the middle of the road and stop it. The role of the government is to assist all government agencies to keep Scotland on the move

The traffic jam on the A82 on Tuesday morning was one small example of a failure to identify a problem and deal with it.

A failure of the SNP Government.

I was supposed to meet the Gaunyersel Airways flight returning from Vancouver at 7am on the morning of Thursday February 25th at Inverness Airport.

The pilot thought that they had blown a tire on take off from the refueling stop at Goose Bay and decided to divert to Prestwick.

The emergency landing was textbook thanks to the skills of the pilot Captain Simon Masey of Interflight Air Charter.

I did need to talk to the pilot and crew and set off from Inverness for Prestwick driving an S-class Mercedes.

I left Inverness at 8am and reached Aviemore by 9.30am. I did not see a single snow plough on the A9. The roadway was covered by 1 - 3 inches of slush which could easily have been cleared.

The slush on the roadway created dangerous driving conditions on the non-dual parts of the A9 since traffic in the opposite direction caused the slush to obscure the windscreen.

Later in the day, I spoke to two police officers who had driven from Inverness leaving at 7am and they had not seen any snow ploughs.

Bear are the contractors responsible for road maintainence on the A9. "What do Bears do in the winter? They hibernate." The joke among the Chivas tanker drivers who bear the brunt of this failure to meet the basic requirement to - Keep Scotland's roads open

Ultimately, this is a failure of the SNP Government. The roads of Scotland were closed in the week of 22nd February not by snow but by a lack of equipment and determination to deal with the problem.

I got stuck in the snow trying to leave Aviemore. Done in by a combination of no snow ploughing and a Mercedes that is not programmed to deal with snow.

So, I spent a day in Aviemore that was not part of my original plans.

The ski industry in Scotland has spent the past few years complaining of lack of snow. On Thursday 25th February, there was plenty of snow. But the ski area was closed because the access road to Cairngorm was closed.

The equipment exists to deal with this amount of snow effectively and quickly. Any Canadian city manager can describe what is needed.

In Scotland, we don't deal with the problem. We close the ski area.

Another failure of the SNP Government.