Edinburgh's East London Street: 'Road used for training despite promise to reduce bus numbers'

Councillor questions how seriously bus company was taking residents’ complaints

Bus bosses were running training exercises on an Edinburgh street after promising unhappy residents they would cut the number of buses using the cobbled road, a councillor claimed.

People living in East London Street had complained to Lothian Buses about the noise and disruption of up to 400 buses a day going to and from the depot in nearby Annandale Street and the company said it would reduce the number of buses, but SNP City Centre councillor Finlay McFarlane said it then emerged they had been using the road for training.

His comments at the council's transport and environment committee came after East London Street resident Ross McCallum, who presented a petition calling for council action on the issue, had challenged claims by committee convener Scott Arthur that Lothian Buses were taking the matter seriously.

Buses on East London Street in Edinburgh's New Town. Residents say they are causing noise and disruption for residents all the time.

Cllr Arthur said: “I am convinced Lothian Buses is trying, as much as it can, to deal with the issue.” But Mr McCallum said: "I strongly disagree with you. You call Lothian Buses good neighbours or wanting to be good neighbours, but their actions would suggest they are not. If you were to look at any of the community council minutes you'll find they've virtually never turned up to address the residents."

Mr McCallum told the committee how people’s sleep was constantly disturbed by the buses using the road late at night and early in the morning, with a detrimental impact on their health and well-being. He called for traffic calming measures and repairs to the road surface.

Cllr McFarlane referred to meetings with Lothian Buses and said it had been "quite frustrating" at times. "In terms of taking the residents' concerns seriously, between one meeting and the next it was discovered that Lothian were actually running training operations on East London Street. If there have to be off-service buses using this road due to its proximity to Annandale Street, to then find out they're running additional things, training exercises on East London Street, more buses on, was just really disappointing in terms of how seriously they are taking this."

Cllr McFarlane later told the Evening News the matter emerged at a meeting he held with Lothian Buses last year. "We were questioning whether the reductions they had talked about had occurred because residents were saying they hadn’t seen the decrease. One of the Lothian Buses people was saying that, as with any kind of change, there was a process of mistakes getting corrected, so people using that route, and it was during a conversation along those lines they said they had realised there were some loose threads that needed tidied up, which they were doing. It was some kind of training or some kind of thing like that. It was acknowledged as a mistake and very quickly stopped."

And Cllr McFarlane added: "We are in a much better place now with them taking the issue seriously but I did feel at the time it was being a wee bit dismissed out of hand. At subsequent meetings, that has absolutely shifted and the numbers have dramatically come down."

Lothian Buses said it did not conduct training on East London Street and had reduced the number of buses using the street to less than half of what it was in 2019.

In response to Mr McCallum’s petition, the committee agreed officials should produce a report for its October meeting on options to deal with the issue, taking into account points made and looking at air quality, noise levels and traffic speeds on East London Street. Lothian Buses will be invited to the meeting.