Debenhams fire shows we must ditch City Mobility Plan - Iain Whyte
With Princes Street closed for the foreseeable future Edinburgh is set for a public transport nightmare of epic proportions during the August festival season. But is this just a mini taste of what’s to come in the council’s long term transport plans?
If you think it's bad now with the trams not reaching Princes Street, imagine a future where all the buses go somewhere near the city centre but not through it.
In the council’s “to, not through” dystopian transport vision, you might want to reach Princes Street, but your bus will dump you at Haymarket or Picardy Place. From the south it might mean somewhere near the Meadows. For those in the north it’s just not clear.
If you are travelling across the city there would be a tram from the airport to Newhaven, but everyone else would have to change multiple times.
But changing services is well known as the one of the main reasons people won’t use public transport.
Any further plans for more tram lines to take up the slack are scuppered by the lack of the billions of pounds needed and are decades away from delivery.
Would this encourage you to go to the city centre or are you likely to jump in the car or on a bus to the nearest out of town retail park?
All of this is contained in a little know but glossy tome called the City Mobility Plan. Always strongly opposed by the Conservative Group, it envisages a tram-only Princes Street, a pedestrian and cycling George Street and all other traffic removed from the city centre.
City-wide we would lose all resilience as only a few major routes would remain, with no alternatives when roadworks or emergencies happen.
These wider traffic restrictions would slow bus travel as the plans to dramatically reduce the number of lanes at the Harry Lauder roundabout in my ward show.
Aimed at helping cyclists this will have a huge negative impact on bus journey times.
In June the council held a workshop on the future of Princes Street. The Lothian Buses representative told the assembled great and the good that “disrupting cross city flow would break the model that makes public transport so successful in Edinburgh.”
If the council is to learn anything from the Debenhams fire, it must ditch the City Mobility Plan and protect our current highly valued bus services.