CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 17years 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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John Swinney has said he is willing to “engage” with Edinburgh council on the proposed North-South tramline, but has insisted it is a “local project” which the council is responsible for.
And he blamed the trams for the slow progress on the dualling of the A9 between central Scotland and the Highlands, saying the funding of Edinburgh’s original tram project took money away from the road scheme.
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The SNP election manifesto includes an explicit rejection of the Roseburn Path option for the northern part of the new tramline, in line with the position of the SNP group on the council, which has also rejected the alternative Orchard Brae route but has suggested work should start on the southern section of the line while a new route is found between Granton and the city centre.
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The council and DLA Piper have now reached an out-of-court settlement. The terms of the deal prevent details of the settlement being made public, but lawyers believe the compensation paid is likely to be measured in tens of millions of pounds and less than half the initial total claimed.
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https://www.edinburghinquirer.co.uk/p/tram-lawyers-pay-up-to-settle-scotlands
Great stuff, now spend the £222m you just landed on implementing the City Mobility Plan…
Yeah City Deal - glasgow is really using this money to rejuvenate the entire centre of Glasgow. Admittedly more run down than Centre of Embra. Oh I recall the Southbridge with the Scientologists trying to trip you in the Street and the people with fleas shopping in WEWW [or Wattys as it was also called in the east]
Can’t say I understand this!
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The council has said under the terms of the agreement with DLA Piper it cannot disclose the amount of the settlement.
However, SNP councillor Danny Aston accused the Liberal Democrat, Conservative and Green groups of “gross misjudgement” over the way the case was approached and said it could have lost the council a big chunk of the settlement.
He said: “When we had two options on the table - whether to pursue this case independently, on our own, and trust the strength of our legal arguments, or potentially give a very large sum of whatever settlement we ultimately received to a third-party funder, despite the strength of our case, that's what the Lib Dems, Tories and Greens decided to do. It’s only good fortune that the case settled when it did.
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In major cities the delivery of the greater frequency of tram services through a city core sees this being resolved by grade separation, and putting the trams in a tunnel under the centre
I've also done a lot of work on the delivery of robust standards for installing steel rails in a range of pavements. In 1999 after the debacle of the 4 new generation tram systems falling apart with rails moving in the concrete and tarmac, I worked to revise the 1870 Tramways Act with a lot of detail on the mechanics of losing control of a bicycle when it hits a raised steel edge. I also looked at rail level crossings and the poor standards for the pavement surfaces in tarmac, timber, concrete & rubber, all of which had caused fatalities to pedestrians and cyclists using defective surfaces which had not been fixed (for Staines the fatality was 12 years after the inspection had called for the issue to be fixed!)
I now have over 10 years of recording the poor detail underlying the construction and maintenance of the Edinburgh Tram track that I really need to get collated as a detilewd piece, and would really like to get the resources to deliver this, based on over 60 years of working with transport systems (in 1968 I was helping to build a new railway line in Wales!)
Over 100 years ago the Caledonian Railway prepared plans for a double track tunnel under Princes Street with some of the core logs at BGS looking to be part of this work and confirming thet the ground conditions are a factor in the continuing movement of the highway pavements along the Edinburgh Tram route from Haymarket to Waverley
Yet along the tram route using the street above, almost every load transfer joint between each section of the upper track slab between these points has cracked (2 cracks about 30 cm apart, and lumps of concrete fall out with patches in a variety of styles, plus many steel frames for access chambers and valve covers come loose and sink with the tarmac falling out - because tarmac does NOT stick to steel at all well - with steel plates covering the worst holes - often for a year or more. This problem required a complete redesign and rebuilding of the on street section on Princes Street with the side shoulders of the track having the tarmac replaced by black coloured concrete before the line opened, but the tarmac still breaks away from the edge of this and sinks/cracks plus the blockwork also moving and coming loose (because it was laid with a slack bond & the gaps filled by brushing in a 'dry mix' mortar which then falls out as it gets loaded by traffic
Drawing from the 1963 project at Oxford Circus in London and a system used in Switzerland now to rebuild a road for the full depth of the road structure by placing a portable steel umbrella over the excavations and constructing the new road under the existing route with traffic still running overhead
From the Core logs this means that the digging along Princes street will be a mix of glacial clay and gravels over a fractured bed of shale with the existing Scotland Street Tunnel neatly in place to remove the excavated material in large quantities, continuously and with minimised dust and dirt on a covered conveyor out to the Water of Leith where it can be ferried away on barges for land reclamation as appropriate
Placing the trams under the main street also enables the ey stops to be moved to better places (Shandwick Place/Maitland Street to the Junction at Lothian Road, and St Andrew Square to a new atrium space directly linked to the lower level of Waverley Market and through to the main bridge across Waverley Station, with the old Scotland Street Tunnel as a pedestrian link to the North & Canonmills
With the new station locations a third or fourth track can be included to regulate the trams from each radial route and even turn services back when an intensive service may be required to move crowds from events (eg at Murrayfield running an intensive service between Haymarket and Edinburgh Gateway when the event ends)
With the tram route under the street the junction for Leith (and also for the Bridges/Regent Road can have track rising up in the centre of Leith Street as a way to sort out the mess of the at grade arrangements of traffic signals etc between York Place and Picardy Place. As in the original tram systems with this continued world-wide (Hong Kong, Toronto, Belgium - & original Glasgow tram routes) trams should run down the centre of the carriageway, and motor traffic should yield to allow pedestrians to cross to a tram stop (the law in Toronto, Hong Kong, Boston) when a tram stops there
It should be interesting to see whether a report or a safety bulletin is produced following the recent pedestrian injury after a collision with a tram on Leith Walk
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