I’ve travelled to London for nearly eight years now, flying out most weeks for the better part of a decade. More recently, I’ve managed to cut it down to a couple of trips a month, which has done wonders for my sanity. On a recent trip, I did something I rarely do: I upgraded my ticket to Business Class and paid for it out of my own pocket. It wasn’t for the complimentary champagne, the slightly wider seat, or the lounge access. I paid purely for the privilege of sitting near the front of the cabin, so I could get off the plane first and reach the airport taxi rank before the limited supply of cars completely evaporated.
That is the absurd level of tactical planning required just to get home from Aberdeen Airport.
The taxi situation at Dyce has been a running joke among local travelers for years, except it isn’t funny. There are never enough cars. A restrictive monopoly arrangement remains in place that benefits no one except the operator. To top it off, the airport levies a staggering £7 airport surcharge just for the privilege of being picked up or dropped off. It’s the kind of gouging policy that would make more sense if the airport were run by an aggressive cartel rather than a public transport hub, but here we are. I even raised a formal petition to end the monopoly a few years ago. It gathered over 800 signatures—a small fraction of the city, perhaps, but a concentrated cross-section of the frequent flyers who actually keep our regional economy moving. Yet, like most attempts to fix structural problems in Aberdeen, it ran into a familiar wall: a total lack of interest from the people who actually possess the power to change things.
But this isn’t really a complaint about taxis. It is about the specific, flawed way Aberdeen approaches every major decision: deploying small plans to tackle massive, systemic problems.
The original original sin goes back decades. When the airport was developed, the main terminal was built on the exact opposite side of the runway from the railway line. That single, short-sighted decision locked the city into a fragmented transport layout that makes no long-term sense. Instead of a seamless rail-to-terminal connection like almost every modern European airport, we have an isolated rail station, a shuttle bus to a car park, and a taxi rank that collapses under even moderate weekend demand.
It’s not that Aberdeen lacks the technical capability to build proper, integrated infrastructure. This region has spent half a century designing, building, and maintaining complex engineering systems in the North Sea, operating in marine conditions far more hostile than Dyce in February. The problem is that our civic leadership consistently chooses small decisions—incremental fixes, short-term patches, and hyper-cautious policies designed to avoid upsetting anyone—instead of the bold, structural decisions required to actually solve a problem.
If you look at Aberdeen’s official strategy documents—the masterplans, the glossy PDFs, the animated marketing fly-throughs—you’d think the city was on the verge of becoming a Scandinavian transport utopia. The promotional sites are filled with confident buzzwords about “connectivity,” “placemaking,” and “integrated systems.” It all looks incredibly impressive on a tablet screen until you step off a flight and actually try to get from the runway to the city centre.
The problem isn’t a lack of strategy; it’s that the strategy is fundamentally small. What we actually get is a disconnected collection of isolated initiatives—each one expensive, each one politically safe, and none of them tied to a coherent vision that changes how the city functions. We get bus gates that appear overnight with zero supporting infrastructure. We get a Low Emission Zone introduced before a viable, reliable public transport alternative exists. We get traffic restrictions that look neat on a consultant’s whiteboard but collapse instantly when exposed to real-world human behavior.
Even our triumphs suffer from this glacial pace. The AWPR bypass is a genuinely transformative piece of engineering, but it took decades of political squabbling to approve and build. By the time the first car drove on it, the regional economic landscape had already shifted. It stands as a monument to how slowly this city moves when faced with choices that require scale, ambition, or long-term capital thinking.
This brings us back to the core theme I’ve been exploring across this site. Whether we are looking at the quiet abandonment of our pioneering hydrogen bus infrastructure, or our complete failure to link our world-class subsea engineering skills to Scotland’s booming aerospace and space sectors, the root cause is identical. We have a world-class industrial capability, but we are saddled with a timid, risk-averse planning culture. The decisions being made for Aberdeen continue to be vastly smaller than the actual engineering capability of Aberdeen.
The region does not need to reinvent its identity or draft another glossy masterplan. Aberdeen became the Oil and Gas Capital of Europe because a previous generation made massive, high-risk decisions that matched the sheer scale of a global opportunity. That same raw capability, grit, and expertise sits in our local supply chains right now.
We don’t need more vision statements. We just need leaders willing to make plans that are big enough to matter.