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Vice-chair Harald Tobermann said: “A tram line is a fine thing if it is designed well and operated well, but it is a very intrusive thing to bring into the most densely-populated place in Scotland which has already suffered hardship from the previous project.
“We wonder whether the council as an institution has learned enough. If this goes wrong, the people of Leith Walk will pay a very heavy price.”
A shortlist of firms wanting to build the extension from York Place to Newhaven has already been drawn up, but the city council will not make the final decision on whether to go ahead until the autumn.
The timetable shows services operating on the new length of track by 2022. Mr Tobermann said: “It sounds a long time when you say it won’t be up and running until 2022, but they want to go on site in May next year and they have sent the tender papers to the bidders before the consultation is even finished.
“Having failed Leith Walk so spectacularly during the 2007-2010 effort to build a tram route and the subsequent painfully slow remediation efforts, we insist that any further attempt to insert major infrastructure into one of Edinburgh’s premier streets is focused on the highest possible quality of planning, execution and final outcome.”
In a ten-page response to the consultation on the plans the community council criticised proposals for a central reservation with “pedestrian deterrent” paving down the middle of Leith Walk as “wholly unacceptable” and argued there were too few pedestrian crossings in the current proposals.
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