| Comment | The book 'Sunset on the Clyde' talks about this - it's essentially part of a wider move in the 1960s and 70s where, due to the improvements to the road network in Scotland and increasing access to cars, small passenger ferries became replaced by RORO ferries with big capital costs, where the maximum economy was reached by finding the shortest crossing point between two maintained roads and running as frequent a service between them as possible.
In the case of Millport, there did indeed used to be several passenger services into the the village itself, which went bust after the main service was started in 1972 to the upgraded 'tattie pier' in the north of the island.
If you look at the geography, it's clear that a ferry going Largs-Cumbrae Slip can do 3 or 4 times as many crossings per day than one doing Hunterston - Millport. The bus service on the island might be insufficient, but it would be way cheaper to run a second bus than to have a massive ferry running all the way round the coast and tripling the ticket price.
Repeat for pretty much all the Scottish islands until they all have one optimised service running the shortest distance, where there used to be thousands of independent services. |
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