Two Scottish Universities are to set be at the heart of a project looking to decarbonise transport around the country, centred around the design of virtual versions of cities such as Edinburgh and Glasgow.

These “digital twins” will allow academics to test measures on Scotland’s roads, railways, waters and airways, due to the difficulty in carrying out full-scale trials and tests in the real world.

STV is reporting that the technology could also be used to find the best ways to tackle a traffic jam, how to optimise the shipping and movement of freight, as well as giving the public advice for travel during adverse weather.

The Transit Hub, a new national initiative focused on rapidly decarbonising transport in the UK, has secured £46m from the UK Government and almost 70 partners.

Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow are two of eight institutions across the UK involved.

Professor Phil Greening from Heriot-Watt, a logistics expert and joint director of the Transit Hub, told STV News: “We have to do many experiments in a short space of time – we just simply can’t do it in the real world anymore. Now we need to do these digitally, and we will design the future decarbonised transport system based on those digital experiments.

“We can make mistakes, we can afford to fail with our experiments and we can learn from them and we can carry out many, many experiments at no cost.”