Roads are full of unpredictable creatures like humans, many vehicles and some animals which can all behave in erratic ways such as swerving or braking joining the flow of traffic at junctions, thus making driverless vehicles difficult to design. It would have been better to start on the mode of transport with the least interaction with other misbehaving or unpredictable creatures and events – the railway.

Driverless trains would be so much easier to work with. They move on a fixed guidance system, there are no humans in the vicinity and hopefully no animals, no other vehicles should join the flow without permission so with a good GPS tracker system surely it would be relatively simple to produce a system which tracks the location of the train and controls the speed for any given section of track.

Signalling info used to change lights to red could also be fed interactively to the train control system to allow it to stop if needed due to an unforeseen event such as a train failure or to queue when needed on approach to a station.

They would also eliminate all the overtime working which seem to have become a major and ingrained part of the system and part of train drivers’ working life and income.

Neil Robertson, Edinburgh

Lysistrata lesson?

Comments on Humza Yousaf’s Hate Crime Act are everywhere. The battle lines seem clear. Broadly speaking, it is men, like Mr Yousaf and Patrick Harvie on one hand against women like JK Rowling and Joanna Cherry on the other.

Some plucky ladies spoke out on Saturday against insulting male gender activists who dislike real women and call them by insulting names. No doubt, many football supporters also expressed themselves freely in their thousands at the weekend too – many of them men!

Women are not to be under-estimated, however. In the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata, women from the warring cities of Athens and Sparta get together to end the war between the cities. The women decide to force the men to agree to peace by withholding sex from them. The men in Greek society did not consider women to be very important. However, despite the odds being stacked against the women in the play, peace is eventually achieved, though not without difficulty, and all ends happily.

We used to use such expressions as “you’ve a guid Scots tongue in yer heid". Well, perhaps the wives of those who wish to end the free speech we prided ourselves upon when we used to use such weel-kent expressions should take a leaf from the Ancient Greeks’ books? Maybe, that way, women will manage to give us back our freedom? We men don’t seem to be doing much good.

John Fraser, Glasgow

Cart before horse

The biggest problem with the Scottish Government’s new hate crime law isn’t that it is wrong, but that it isn’t balanced by parallel legal measures to define, defend and enforce the right of freedom of expression, and provide proper meaningful protection to those engaging in fair debate and comment from unfair retribution. In this regard, the Scottish Government has allowed the cart to go before the horse.

The role of hate crime legislation (as with the existing laws on privacy, libel and slander) should be to temper and moderate the right of free expression, by placing reasonable and sensible legal limits, without stifling fair and open public debate. But it is hard for it to do this when there isn’t a proper legal right to freedom of expression in the first place!

All this matters because the implications on all of this go well beyond the current fracas on gender identity and extends to more general political debate, press freedom and disclosure of wrongdoing (“whistleblowing”!) and so it is vitally important for our country to get this right.

Although the Human Rights Act 1998 gave us (UK citizens) plenty of “rights”, it failed to enact any real criminal law provisions to enforce them. The result is that, while paying lip-service to the right of freedom of expression, it is only really enforceable against government bodies (not private organisations/companies and individuals), and then only through lengthy civil/private prosecution whose costs (and financial risks) lie well beyond the means and appetite of most members of the public.

Ultimately, protection of freedom of expression is not solely a Scottish issue, but one that affects the whole of the UK, and it is shameful that successive Westminster governments have skirted around and failed to address this issue (due, one suspects, to the broken system of political patronage that appears to be totally compromised and “in hock” to wealthy benefactors keen to avoid increased public scrutiny).

Dr Mark Campbell-Roddis, Dunblane, Stirling

Whiff of hatred

As a pensioner I do indeed welcome the new hate laws which came into force last Monday. Why just the other day while I was in the Thistles Shopping Centre in Stirling a young man broke wind in my general direction.

As this occurred within three metres of my person I consider this to be a hate crime due to my age and have reported it as such. It is so reassuring that the Scottish police will now be able to spend their time investigating such incidents.

Jim Dungan, Alloa, Clackmannanshire

Busy doing nothing

Stan Hogarth (Letters, 8 April), says we have too many politicians with nothing to do. I agree. Anyone regularly watching First Ministers Questions will see the Health Secretary, Neil Gray, sitting in his ‘Thursday Seat’, staring blankly into space whilst Humza Yousaf drones on.

After telling us, just a few days ago, that the NHS is not in crisis, we must assume that he has sorted all the problems therein and now has the time to ponder which job he will take up next.

Bruce Proctor, Stonehaven. Aberdeenshire

Passports ready

Patrick Harvie is railing against government ministers’ failure to act on net zero targets. Given that there is an apparently inexhaustible SNP money pot for foreign travel, why doesn't Harvie avail himself of this to toddle off to China or India to educate them on the need to stop burning coal and oil.

D Mason, Penicuik, Midlothian

Save our squirrels

Your report confirming squirrelpox has reached the red squirrel stronghold north of the Central Belt (6 April) highlights just how vulnerable our red squirrel population has become.

First found in Scotland in 2007 the disease, that solely kills native red squirrels but is carried by invasive greys, is thought to be 20 times more fatal to reds in areas with the disease than through competition from grey squirrels alone. Last year, for the first time, more than a third of squirrel sightings recorded through SWT’s Saving Scotland’s Red Squirrels website were the invasive grey species. Much of the increase was in the Southern Uplands, Fife and Tayside where the species compete.

With squirrelpox becoming more widespread it’s time nature leant a hand. It’s been proven through research in Ireland that the introduction of pine martens into areas where greys are competing with reds significantly reduced the grey squirrel population and in some areas eradicated greys completely. The more agile reds already coexist with martens in the Scottish Highlands and martens catch the slower greys. A pine marten reintroduction programme coupled with continued human eradication of greys in competing territories is the way forward.

The public is urged to take photos of any ill red squirrels and send them to [email protected]. Hopefully it’s not too late to save Scotland’s most loved mammal and conservationists reintroduce native pine martens to appropriate habitats where grey and reds compete.

Neil Anderson, Edinburgh

Do the basics

Despite the Scottish Government’s representation of themselves as responsive to the nation’s needs and their aspiration to be a unifying influence, they’re hardly utilitarian in the philosophical sense. Time and again the greatest good of the greatest number seems to be entirely beyond them, yet they put substantial effort into measures to assist small minorities. While few of the majority would deny such assistance, against the backdrop of signal failures these measures not only seem hollow to the point of irrelevance but border on the insulting.

The sad fact is that the SNP/Green government has had ample opportunity to address issues that concern the majority, but instead we have longer NHS waiting lists, stalled educational attainment, an increasing underclass and a shameful level of drugs-related deaths. The Scottish electorate simply expect to be well provided for at minimum cost and don’t like being told what to do. Such maxims should provide basic guidance even for a moribund administration.

R A Wallace, Kincardine, Fife

Apology

In Friday's Scotsman we printed a letter with a quote attributed to Tom Ballantine from a previous letter. Mr Ballantine did not write the words quoted. We apologise for the error and for any distress caused.

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Readers' letters: Forget driverless cars - how about driverless trains?