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.
Edinburgh North-South tramline: Scottish Government's new comments on funding controversial project
Spoiler: The Scottish Government has said it has "no plans to fund a stand alone extension of Edinburgh's tram network", but also "a bit of a fudge" which left open the door to funding of the line as part of a regional project
From link
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And the reply was: "The Scottish Government has no plans to fund a stand alone extension of Edinburgh’s tram network or directly fund the business case work required to demonstrate the case. Tram is a local priority which was identified by City of Edinburgh Council (CEC), who have solely progressed the business case for and extension to the current tram network.
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Which could be read as - ‘not a chance of funding the Granton Branch, but we might consider a line from Mid/ELothian (of course CEC would have to guarantee it would just stop at its border.)’
Sounds like Transport Scotland should become responsible for the whole thing IF it is to happen.
Or at least building/maintaining the track - like it does for significant roads.
Perhaps ScotRail could take an interest along with looking at options for the South Sub.
Well u gotta dream…
If we're going to dream, we could have a network of "suburbans" (trolley cars), like they used to in the US, upgraded to tram / light-rail...
...that would take in all of the commuter belt towns between and around Edinburgh and Glasgow. If they did it in 1925, they can shurely* do it in 2025.
*Momentarily forgetting that Britain is completely bogged down in a quagmire of bureaucracy
Unusually for a rich country, the taxes raised in Greater Manchester, just as in other city regions such as West Yorkshire, Merseyside and the West Midlands, do not meet the cost of providing local public services. Taxes raised in the south-east of England cover the gap.
Plans for third Edinburgh tram line on south suburban railway unveiled by council
More of a conceptual representation a la Simon Parker than a plan
On checking on Simon I see there is also a different fellow Bike Scot who blogged through Covid as Edinburgh Life. [lot of themes familiar to this site]
Looks like they're coming for the Powerhall line / Quiet route 20
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“Transport is absolutely key in tackling both the population growth question and the economic growth question... Making the choice of taking the tram North out to Granton is about flattening that curve a little bit and investing in an area of the city which…. there are parts of the city, which I know because I speak to people all the time, that feel that they’ve been left behind.”
Councillor Stephen Jenkinson, convenor of the Transport and Environment Committee.
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(More history than “latest”!)
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You probably think I am talking about Edinburgh Trams but you’d be wrong. No, somewhat remarkably there was a direct predecessor to that latter horror show which also managed to get almost everything wrong in and from which important lessons should have been (but never were) learned. What we’re actually talking about is the convoluted, calamitous and remarkably recent history of CERT, the City of Edinburgh Rapid Transit guided busway.
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Edinburgh's SNP group has today said it would back a North-South tramline for the Capital, but did not believe either of the options for the northern section – Roseburn Path or Orchard Brae – offered the right solution.
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What solution do they propose then? Because if you want a route that goes from Granton to the city centre, especially one that links up with the existing line in a functional way, I'm not seeing many alternatives on the map. I suppose you could cut West and run through Blackhall and Ravelston, I'm sure Mary Erskin, the Ravelston Golf Club, and all the well-heeled locals won't have an issue with the Dykes being filtered to ram a mass transit system going through one of the most deprived bits of the city before it reaches them into their neighbourhood...
Any further West and you can't really view it as an express north-south route into the town anymore. And Eastward hardly improves your options: either a bottleneck at the busiest part of Ferry Road to get you to Fettes, then open warfare with the Cockburn Society at all the cobbles you'd have to rip out to get it up Comely Bank Ave. there to face another bottleneck thanks to the hairpin turns at Learmonth Terrace. You could run up Granton Road and go via Inverleith Row, but that has two successive big traffic bottlenecks as each road meets Ferry Road.
Between Swinney's gormless warblings about "energy security"(as if every drop of oil & gas that still comes out of the North Sea doesn't immediately get flogged on the open market at the same elevated price as fuel from anywhere else does) and this kind of rhetorical cowardice(if you oppose the Granton spur of the tram just have the guts to say so, rather than claiming you're open to an alternative solution that geographically cannot sodding exist) I'm going to have to use a spring-loaded peg on my nose to vote for the SNP on the constituency ballot this time.
“if you oppose the Granton spur of the tram just have the guts to say so“
That’s valid!
I don’t think CEC’s SNP Group has handled this particularly well, but it’s ’all about the election’ - attracting more votes without losing others.
The LD’s were bolder (and perhaps more cynical) being early opponents of the RC route. I presume they were/are in favour of the Dean Bridge option?
The other Granton option used to be an extension from Newhaven (intended to be part of a loop up RC). I think the problem was land ownership, but, if so, don’t know why.
The latest ‘plan’ by SNP Group is to favour the ‘idea’ of the route to the RIE and bits of Lothian.
In transport/traffic terms this seems like a sensible idea and (more) likely to get SG cash.
But, SG. Is unlikely to have spare cash, or have trams high on its list of priorities in the near/medium future.
I’m not against trams but have little confidence that anything can be planned, funded or constructed ’well here’.
This is definitely an Edinburgh problem but also UK (and Scotland) problem related to political and public attitudes to public transport, roads and ‘universal’ car use.
Wars, oil price ‘shocks’, increasing obviousness of climate change/emergency/catastrophes don’t seem to make any difference…
Like you say it's all pie in the sky at the end of the day, the SNP at national level are far too carbrained and tightfisted when it comes to non-car infrastructure. Hell they can't even manage to produce a steady, dependable stream of funding for active travel projects and those are cheap as chips.
The party has just been such a disappointment all around in recent years, and I dread to think what kind of state they'll be in after all the Alba people pile back in as they seem to be talking themselves into doing.
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THE first section of Birmingham's eastern tram extension belatedly opened on Easter Sunday. Tracks at the far end are already in place but the central section is blocked by HS2 Ltd, which is slowly building an oversized station there.
Last month groups including the RAC Foundation and Create Streets released a report called Towns and Trams: Learning from the French. French leaders had told them France opens a new tramway every six months, costing an average £35m per mile. Birmingham's extension, one mile long, is budgeted to cost £352m.
The report said all but two French towns and cities with more than 150,000 people have trams (versus eight of 53 in the UK) and that was one reason France builds the 300,000 homes annually Britain can only aspire to. It urged the UK to streamline "elongated British business case processes" for trams, end "gold plating", and overhaul policies on utility cables and pipes under future tramlines. The government has promised to create a taskforce which will assess the benefits of "mass transit" systems and the "delivery barriers"
'Dr B Ching'
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(Private Eye)
…
https://bettertransport.org.uk/blog/towns-and-trams-learning-from-the-french/
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