CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
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http://news.scotsman.com/topstories/Edinburgh-worse-than-Paris-and.6844453.jp?articlepage=1
"The Scottish capital is second only to London for having busy roads clogged with traffic, due to its poor use of bicycles, expensive public transport and poor air quality, the report claimed."
"It is also the third worst of all the capital cities in terms of its residents' dependency on cars"
Car dependency scorecard:
http://www.bettertransport.org.uk/system/files/european-car-dependency-scorecard-2011.pdf
The report highlights, in a shout-out bubble for Edinburgh: poor congestion, poor public transport fares, poor bike use, good walking.
Their accompanying data sources reference list is available at:
http://www.bettertransport.org.uk/system/files/car-dependency-scorecard-data-sources.pdf
although I would have preferred to see tables of values.
There is also a Directory of local groups, but for Scotland, only Road Sense is listed at the moment:
Hmmm, not sure about the robustness of this research, as it applies to Edinburgh. To claim Edinburgh has expensive public transport from looking at the cost of a ridacard and a season ticket to Bathgate seems a bit of a leap, particularly given how cheap Lothian Buses fares actually are in comparison to many places (including in Europe).
The source given for travel to work modal share doesn't mention Edinburgh at all.
Not that I disagree with the thrust of this document - far from it. However, it seems odd to single out Edinbugh for its level of car dependency - which is far worse in other UK towns and cities.
But this report only looks at capital cities which is why it doesn't look at these other cities.
I agree that it seems odd that they call the public transport expensive, however compared to other European Capitals, perhaps it is.
I had a look at the report and some of the sources they use. There's many problems which I won't bore you with. Standout one - they use modal share for travel to work three times in three separate indicators but it is just three ways of looking at the same thing. So, for instance, let's say Edinburgh has high % using car for work then it must have low % using PT and probably low % walking and low % cycling. The %s all need to add to 100%. Logically. So you can't use the same thing three times to score a place.
Public transport costs are used in a similar way - three ways of looking at the same policy of subsidisation - each used as a separate indicator.
The other perhaps subtler issue is how they construct the index. I'd argue that it is wrong to rank, add the rankings and re-rank. This widens gaps where cities might be quite close. They should have scored, standardised the scores, added the standardised scores and then ranked. If they were going to rank at all.
The link to the detailed methods paper was broken but it looks like a piece of 'research' constructed to justify an existing position.
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