stickyI think Cllr Arthur, possibly accidentally, raises an interesting point about resources. We are now in the fifth year of the Scottish Government providing significant annual active travel budgets, genuinely equivalent to the levels being spent in Denmark and the Netherlands per head of population.
So how come the council of our capital city can't afford to employ sufficient staff to design and deliver school streets? One of the most basic transport interventions.
Where is the cash going?
There are clearly huge inefficiencies in the system, such as:
1. Requiring councils to bid for funds from Sustrans. Bids take time and money to develop and, by the very nature of the system, wastes money on unsuccessful bids.
2. TROs/RSOs - enough said.
3. Gold plating of schemes - such as using expensive materials and non-standard designs.
4. Councils reliant on a small number of consultants - largely due to inconsistent "bid" funding preventing the employment of permanent staff.
5. Schemes are announced, and announced again...and then may be delivered at some point (see Meadows-Canal). Budgets are allocated to these schemes, but if they are never built should that really count?
6. A small army of publicly funded active travel NGO staff, e.g. Sustrans Scotland has around 150 staff, all dependent on the Scottish Government for their livelihood - an incentive not to really fight for change beyond what they think their paymasters would accept. These publicly funded siren voices also help to drown out the voices of everyday cyclists and voluntary cycle groups.
Until all this (and more) is sorted out, I suspect a good deal of cash is effectively being flushed down the toilet.
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