CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 16years 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.
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brianjaffa:
Tories and Labour unite to vote through a tram line from Edinburgh Airport to Haymarket costing an estimated £700 million. Good plan?
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/brianjaffa/status/106741088848580608
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No point in digging up Princes Street for the next year then??
So we can go ahead with my plan to fill in the gap in the lines with some sort of semi-permanent substance then? Should be a cheap and simple way to make the road more cycle-friendly and also maintain what's already there on the off chance we find a few hundred million lieing around to get the trams that last few hundred metres from Haymarket to the West End.
*bangs head against wall*
Oh dear. How could they be so short sighted?
The chip wrapper is appalled (naturally) but in this case right to be so.
Is it my imagination or are those councillors also characters from Royston Vasey?
that's it. i'm voting green from now on.
I'm finding it difficult to put my thoughts into words here (no change from usual, you might argue). I suppose the thing that annoys me the most is that this decision has been taken for political gain rather than in the best interests of the people of Edinburgh.
The SNP didn't have the courage of their convictions and vote to kill the project - which would have left them open to charges of squandering a huge sum of money for no benefit. Labour and Lib Dems want to disassociate themselves from the project and claims they were about to saddle the city with a huge debt, but also didn't want to be blamed for getting absolutely nothing for all the money spent.
I could go on but "No personal insults. No swearing"
I'd rather they used the money to give us all a spacehopper each.
@SRD well said.
Single transferable vote or no, there no longer seems any point in voting for any other party. Trams, cycling, they all seem determined to outdo each other in stupidity.
@kirst then we'd need to spend money on the North Edinburgh Spacehopper network.
I'd normally vote Green anyway when have the chance (even though I'm a member of another party!) but really can't make up my mind which was the best option today. There seemed big risks with the St A Sq option - e.g. great uncertainty remaining about the utilities under the roads, so no real guarantee costs wouldn't grow significantly further. Whereas Haymarket option seems far more likely to stick to a given budget, with no road digging needed and most of the structures in place now. Obviously St A Sq would be best for the city economy, but is also a much bigger risk, so I don't think the best choice today was particularly obvious.
HOWEVER, purely from a 'selfish' cycling-only perspective, Haymarket is a great decision...
a. No more onroad tramlines. Reported crashes in Princes St alone are continuing [please report any]. The proposals near Haymarket Stn, especially for everyone cycling from Morrison St to the A8 (i.e. many people every day) were IMO quite dangerous - even the council officers admitted they were not ideal but said they were the best that could be achieved. Maybe if/when extension to St A Sq happens there can be a redesign giving more attention to cycling from the outset - especially if numbers cycling in the city keep rising.
b. We could press for the proposed bike carriage experiment [Spokes Bulletins 104 and 107]to happen much sooner (currently it is intended to wait for 12 months or so, partly to work out when the 'peak period' is). But now there will be much less capacity problems on the trams, and presumably they will be desperate to maximise custom.
Just to repeat - these are not arguments which should be deciding the tram outcome today, but they are a very nice side-effect from the perspective of a bike-friendly city.
Also @cc, don't agree on stupidity re cycling - slightly over the top! Edinburgh's Active Travel Action Plan is probably the best in Scotland, and the council is putting significant staff resources into it. Despite the recent 20mph disappointment the first quality bike corridor still on track to be implemented early 2012.
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I could go on but "No personal insults. No swearing"
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I think that only applies towards other forum members...
However, thank you for your restraint.
"the thing that annoys me the most is that this decision has been taken for political gain rather than in the best interests of the people of Edinburgh"
I don't actually think there is much political gain to be had by anyone. My problem with "best interests of the people of Edinburgh" is to actually know what that might be within the conventional (party) political constraints.
A greater restriction on private car use would probably in the "interests of the people", but too many don't realise/believe this. Politicians know what people 'want' and after years of rule by focus group aren't about to try to lead them in a different direction.
I'm quite sure most people in Edinburgh would rather not be 'where we are now', but neither do they want the Council to borrow hundreds of millions more. It doesn't help that years of "On Time, On Budget" have made people suspicious/hostile.
The project has been so disastrously managed in recent years (not just while the LibDem/SNP administration has been 'in charge' as Labour might wish people to believe) that I find it hard to understand why some people believe that taking the line to St. Andrew Square would make a profit. The Greens backed the LibDems on that one today.
Clearly NO-ONE can state that with any degree of certainty at the best of times - and these are certainly not the best of times!
Whether the tram should be expected to make a profit is a whole other conversation. Generally Public Transport hasn't been expected to. In the UK railways still aren't expected to.
The current Holyrood Government (SNP) took against the tram at an early stage (for whatever reason), and is now being blamed for not being willing to have an open cheque book. I think the Scottish Government should have exercised much more control over the cash (£500m is a LOT to not care about just because the SNP was outvoted at an early stage of being a minority government).
This all began under Labour - in charge at Holyrood and the City Chambers - but it's not clear whose idea it was for the primary tram line to run between the Airport and the Scottish Executive at Victoria Quay - alongside the main rail lines, so hardly on the most neglected corridor. I suspect that the idea didn't originate with politicians - but they were persuaded to take the idea on.
Of course the grand schemes that were planned for transport in Edinburgh - including more tram routes - were to be paid for with a congestion charge. Labour was quite keen on this - though not keen enough to allow it to happen without a referendum. Would there be CC in London if Ken Livingston had been made to put it to a special vote?
UK wide the LibDems were quite keen on CC, locally they weren't. CEC devised a two cordon scheme that some people in favour of CC, in principle, found hard to support. Others voted for it knowing that it was a bad scheme - but 'better than no scheme'.
So without unified, positive, party political support, it wasn't surprising that the majority of those who voted said NO.!
We are where we are. There is no best way forward and ALL political parties are to blame.
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NewsnightScot:
lots on the #trams tonight, as you might expect.
Original Tweet: http://twitter.com/NewsnightScot/status/106804538283016192
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chdot - you are right, perhaps "political gain" isn't the right phrase - more "political position".
I agree there was no "good option" available today - although Councillors are at least partly to blame for that. I also agree that a line to either Haymarket or St Andrew Sq is unlikely to make money - although the latter may be more commercially sound.
I suppose what I meant by "best interests of the people of Edinburgh" was - choose the least worst option. In this case you could argue that this could be cancelling the project, and avoiding annual subsidies and further cost escalations or pursuing the likely more commercially sound option to St Andrew Sq - you could argue that loan repayments of £15m a year are not huge for an authority with an annual budget of £1bn and are certainly less than CEC pay on loans/PPP for other projects. I think (and it is just my opinion) that choosing the Haymarket option best serves political interests and not those of the travelling public, business etc.
Does anyone really think the council will want to extend the line into town once this is all finished? "Vote for me - more trams", hmmm....
What do you call a tram that never runs on a street?
A train perhaps?
Mind you the trams make as much (more?) sense as (than) aircraft carriers with no planes or the Millennium Dome.
I can see how good that is for cyclists, etc, but after all that money, and truly horrible disruption, I just wish we could get something decent out of it and make it have been worth all the stramash. After all, the crashes on Princes Street will still be there in the future, unless they dig up or cover the tram lines. And Haymarket at rush hour is already a bottleneck for everyone, cyclists included (I normally have to wait 2 - 3 minutes at that junction alone, in a 25 minute total journey time, coming down Dalry Road) - goodness, I'm starting to sound like a car driver, I must stop ..
"Does anyone really think the council will want to extend the line into town once this is all finished? "Vote for me - more trams", hmmm...."
At present no.
But IF it reaches Haymarket and is seen to have some merit, and is finished on time(um?), and on some sort of budget that approximates to figures in recent report and all parties can agree on a funding mechanism - i.e. Congestion Charging (preferably without the need for a referendum).
OK so NO then.
"I think (and it is just my opinion) that choosing the Haymarket option best serves political interests and not those of the travelling public, business etc."
Yes, but, and, maybe...
The real problem is that no-one can believe anything tie/CEC says on the tram - a) because of past history (including the past week where the "cost of cancellation" - believed by many to have been inflated - was reduced TWICE!
b) there is no fixed price to get to St. A. Sq. In the past of course it was fronted as being a fixed price all the way to Newhaven - well at least for about 95% of it with generous provision for 'contingencies'.
I was told today, by someone who should know, that there IS an agreed/fixed price to get to Haymarket.
But after the vote the LibDem administration is basically saying that there are 6 days to get the Consortium to agree to do anything other than take the Council to court.
WHO KNOWS....
Brilliant. We've built an off-road light rain system, from a major train station, parallel to 2 major rail lines, via another 2 rail stations to a place where the government vetoed building a rail station serving all directions that would have cost half at much. Utter genius. I hope our politicians are happy in their moment of petty victory.
"built"
We not exactly. There's a big chunk missing between Balgreen Road and Russell Road with difficult ground conditions and the extra difficulties of dealing with Network Rail.
(Plus all the other bits).
Sorry, you're quite right. "We've spent a lot of money on building some bits of".
There's also still the minor matter of building a major flyover of South Gyle Access at Bankhead. I assume that it will cross from Edinburgh Park to the Gyle on a level crossing, before passing under the A8 Gogar Roundabout into the depot.
"There's also still the minor matter of building a major flyover of South Gyle Access at Bankhead."
I'd assumed there was a bridge that was used for the guided busway, but of course that's where the buses got back on the road
There's a big pile of rubble, broken concrete and tarmac being accumulated behind the fenced off area here. My assumption is that it will be used to build the embankment.
@chdot
I commend your optimism, but the new quality bike corridor to KB that you mentioned is not going to be much good. For a start the new, extra parking spaces along what's meant to be a quality bike corridor have already forced cyclists way out into the motorised traffic, making it significantly more dangerous and less pleasant than it was before they started making it a QBC. For another I'd be astonished if this lot were going to ban either traffic or car parking next to the busy Tesco in Causewayside, and I reckon we need both to happen to make that road pleasant and safe to cycle along.
Overall it looks to me as if they're still as far away as ever from putting in a game-changing cycling infrastructure.
David Byrne in his Bicycle Diaries (thanks @LaidBack) quotes Enrique Peñalosa, something like "If a cycle route can't safely be used by an 8 year old, it's not a cycle route". By that measure the quality bike corridor is going to be useless, I'm afraid.
"I commend your optimism, but the new quality bike corridor to KB that you mentioned is not going to be much good."
Wrong thread??
Though I don't remember saying anything about QBC apart from the fact that it's due to happen early next year and it might deal with the red surfacing around the Melville Drive junction.
CEC cares far too much about provided room for parked cars and not enough about 'reallocating road space'.
Looks like the QBC won't improve this aspect.
DdF said it a few posts above-
"Also @cc, don't agree on stupidity re cycling - slightly over the top! Edinburgh's Active Travel Action Plan is probably the best in Scotland, and the council is putting significant staff resources into it. Despite the recent 20mph disappointment the first quality bike corridor still on track to be implemented early 2012. "
Tom Buchanan is talking about putting the trams to a referendum with choices of Haymarket, St Andrew's Square or Leith for destination.
Not a helpful suggestion in my view...
We already have elections here and last local one had 23% turnout.
We have a new management team on trams now so sure they'll make a difference - won't they...? Given the position we find ourselves in I'm not sure what I'd do if I was on the council.
Can I just note for the record - this is possibly the only place I have ever seen the trams discussed in a reasonable and intelligent way with opposite (rather than opposing) views being able to debate the matter in a rational manner.
Do they have reasonable debates about cycle helmets on tram forums I wonder? :)
Or RLJs for that matter ?
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