CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
MY bold -
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Once this consultation closes we will work through all of your responses and make changes where it is practical to do so. Any changes we do or do not make will be communicated to you in July 2018 and ahead of our planned second consultation due to take place in Summer/Autumn of this year.
“
https://consultationhub.edinburgh.gov.uk/sfc/tramstonewhaven/
Letters to need to be written to councillors and MSPs to ask them to withdraw the plans and consultation completely, until they come up with something better.
Otherwise everyone is wasting their time trying to polish the proverbial J-word...
"The result last time was that they laughed in the faces of objectors and sent in the long-planned bulldozers to create their island of the dead."
Indeed - and you have to look at this latest free-form textbox council consultation as an attempt to run away from negative quantitative/ordinal data ie no 'Strongly support/strongly oppose' buttons. When was the last time we saw such a 'consultation'?
CEC officials are a bunch of sleekit, cynical, incompetent (except when they want to bulldoze through shockingly poor plans) gits. Hope I didn't offend rule 2 there.
There we are, that word ‘balanced’ keeps cropping up: Cllr Macinnes uses it a lot, now she's got the project director using it.
Problem with 'balance' is that cars, lorries, vans, buses and trams weigh so much more than bicycles and people using shank's pony to get around. So the scales of justice inevitably tip over towards the motorised transportation options...
Unless of course ‘balanced’ is just a polite way of saying that cyclists and pedestrians will be largely ignored? Which I suppose fits with weight tipping the scales.
From the Spokes notes: "Rob Leech said that the consultation plan is just an initial stab which is too zig-zag and will be refined – ideas will be welcomed in the consultation."
Rough translation: "We couldn't be arsed designing proper cycle routes because frankly we are very important, busy people and our design team DGAF about piddling little things like cyclists and pedestrians. However we're up for crowdsourcing the silly wee design details from unpaid cycle lobbyists, that will save us time and money. After all it's them that wants it, why don't they design it if they want it so much? Oh we will get paid for drawing up (I mean "designing") whatever the cyclists come up with. Nice bit of overtime there. And if they don't do our jobs for free, we'll just go ahead with this back of a fag packet nonsense. Job's a good 'un, see you at the bar, mine's a treble! (Your round I think?)"
Is there any way of getting Andy Arthur's work in document form? https://twitter.com/cocteautriplets/status/975857050629693442
There's a twitter utility called something like 'unroll' or 'roll up' which takes a thread and turns it into a web post
Andy linked to one somewhere...
Try this: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/975857050629693442.html?refreshed=yes
“Letters to need to be written to councillors and MSPs to ask them to withdraw the plans and consultation completely, until they come up with something better.”
Yes/no
If everyone on here and all Spokes members and a few others wrote letters it would probably have as much impact as Sustrans -
https://twitter.com/sustransscot/status/976060823994011649
I.e. notalot.
I’m NOT saying don’t bother.
I think we need to get a clearer understanding of ‘why we are here’.
“It’s the tram stupid”
Well yes.
Many years ago a complex process shuffled through the SP and resulted in a very tight set of legal constraints for the tram route.
I am completely unclear as to how much this restricts current ‘room for manoeuvre’ and how much CEC is using that as a convenient excuse for not doing more/better.
IF there needs to be legal modification who needs to do it and how long might it take? Does CEC have to ask or could Humza Yousaf just issue a decree (unlikely)?
Even IF that is part of the problem the bigger one is related to ‘no room’ and ‘need parking/traffic flows’.
Primarily these are political decisions for CEC councillors but clearly they are being ‘advised’ by officials on what can/should be done.
‘We’ think they are all living in the 19x0s (pick your favourite decade) and ‘need to look to the Continent’.
In short they SHOULD pull this plan/consultation - but then they shouldn’t have considered that this was suitable for consultation.
BUT I have no idea how to make that happen.
WORSE I can think of no reason to believe that the system (current CEC officials and councillors) would come up with a better brief for consultants who may or may not want to produce something significantly different/better.
I have no idea where CEC expects to get the money for extending the tram line or whether there would be any chance of conditions being imposed to make ‘improving streetscape’ a requirement.
It’s a mess. The latest mess of YEARS of CEC failing to do better due to (who knows) inertia, vested interests, lack of imagination, stupidity, ‘we know best’, ‘traffic flow is good for business’, ‘parking is good for business’, ‘pedestrians don’t vote’, ‘bus users are losers’.
Re the last made-up excuse, one reason for the tram was that it was believed that ‘people won’t get out of their cars to get the bus’. That was in spite of Edinburgh having higher bus use than most UK cities - not just ‘poor people’.
So hundreds of millions were spent (and CEC wants to spend more) to achieve modal shift.
I’m not arguing against the tram and certainly not against better PT, but there is this complete disconnect at CEC between acknowledging the tram carrot and being willing to use the stick of restricting car use - ESPECIALLY on tram routes.
Makes little sense, it’s not even as though there is a strong ‘motoring lobby’ - they did their best to stop 20mph, but actually it’s what more of ‘the public’ said they wanted.
Of course it wasn’t a BIG engineering project which seems to have its own rules, attitudes and vested interests...
Is there any way of getting Andy Arthur's work in document form?
The original tweeter can also create a Twitter Moment, which is nice way of viewing a thread:
"BUT I have no idea how to make that happen."
Start with some hard numbers on the most-impacted - Leith Walk is mostly inhabited by pedestrians whose road-crossing options are going to be scuppered. Timelapse or count the pedestrian movements, particularly at the north end, where the intention is to have no pedestrian crossings. This sort of data did seem to have had some effect on the George Street plans, particularly regarding offset/staggered/sparse crossings.
Or, persuade Living Streets Edinburgh to do that; it should matter more to them than opposing floating bus stops.
Mindset. Mindset and lack of imagination: I think those are key.
Also, as noted above, we won't inspire people to get on board with change by marshaling detailed arguments that require (frankly confusing to most) plans to understand. We need to sell a BETTER vision.
The overall feeling is one of anger, bafflement and impotence. They're doing it again, how on earth are they still doing this, is nothing we do ever going to get through to them?
It's hard to translate this into constructive feedback without seeming anti-tram. But I want a tram because it will improve my town rather than because it's a tram. If the result is not an improvement then I don't want it.
It's very clear that the plans as presented are not an improvement, bringing the worst of Haymarket/West Princes Street tram interface to Leith Walk and making every side street a cyclist death trap. There will be LW East and LW West and getting between the two becomes an obstacle course.
Meanwhile the council are busy firefighting the backlash with promises of consultations - as if asking for feedback on their work excuses the fact they just delivered a turd in the first place. I guess if flushing money down the toilet is the aim, that is the ideal design.
“It's hard to translate this into constructive feedback without seeming anti-tram.”
Of course it’s a conspiracy theory too far to think that there is a conscious thought here about ‘well the ActiveTravel people won’t object too strongly because that will look like they are against the tram’.
When there was the referendum on Congestion Charging there was pressure not to point out any problems with CEC’s proposals and just support the principle.
“But I want a tram because it will improve my town rather than because it's a tram. If the result is not an improvement then I don't want it.”
Yes though, sadly, the reality is more “because it SHOULD improve my town”!
“
FORMER Transport Minister Stewart Stevenson has claimed the Scottish Government got “value for money” from its £500m grant to Edinburgh’s troubled tram project.
But he acknowledged it would have been “better value for money” if the route had been built all the way to Newhaven for the £500m, as originally intended.
“
It *should* improve the town in the sense that "reason dictates that fast, high-volume, reasonably quiet, clean public transport is good for a town".
It *should* improve the town in the sense that "improving the town is a role that the council has".
Not sure what one you meant...
Both!
Presume people have noticed the plans are dated 2013.
Is that when work started or when they were last updated?
Strange they weren’t available in time for the Spokes meeting.
https://twitter.com/Edinburgh_CC/status/976443805372239873
Beyond parody.
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Do both big infrastructure and neighbourhood infrastructure and link them both together - Anna Richardson.
#ScotWalkingSummit
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https://mobile.twitter.com/reggietricker/status/976444282558132230
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"Male patterns" of mobility have dominated transport planning. People (including women) who do shorter neighbourhood based journeys have different needs where smaller scale or more innovative street improvements may be needed rather than big infrastructure.
#ScotWalkingSummit
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https://mobile.twitter.com/reggietricker/status/976443755761930242
Strange they weren’t available in time for the Spokes meeting.
Not strange at all.
I suspect the plans were deliberately held back until after the Spokes public meeting, in order to avoid difficult questions.
A total scam. Spokes have been totally hoodwinked by them.
Spokes should have rearranged the meeting to a (much) later date, despite any inconvenience. (The inconvenience of course being artificially generated by the trams people)
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Not strange at all.
I suspect the plans were deliberately held back
“
Either that or CEC spectacularly missed a great PR opportunity of presenting their amazing plans to a supportive audience.
"Presume people have noticed the plans are dated 2013"
Actually, although there's a copyright mark dated 2013, these consultation drawings are dated 14/3/2018.
Which means they've been working on them for five years. Let that sink in for a moment.
That's why I've lodged FOIs to try and unlock the trail of how they got to this stage...
I don't have a lot of time for the Council, but everyone knows this show isn't being run by CEC?
Atkins are doing the design and are being overseen by the Councils highly paid consultants
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