Edinburgh Trams; the final straw - another tram for the museum? Is this a record?

Submitted by actionman on Tue, 8 Jan '13 5.37pm

You would think that the delivery of the last tram to make up the 27 that we will have clogging up the Gogar Depot, that this was some sort of a major triumph in the way it was reported in the press and generally in the media!

The fact that Council officials have front loaded this project and spent many, many millions of taxpayers pounds on unwanted and unnecessary trams, rails, overhead electric cabling and poles, to mention but a few of the many extravagances of the Council officials, should be a cause for extreme anger and heads should roll - but they wont!

We have the same inefficient crew telling our Councillors what to do, who were the architects of the Central Edinburgh Transport Management plan, which was a disaster and then the same bunch failed miserably over the Congestion Charge proposals. Now they are blundering about over the tram project - but no one will go - perhaps the Councillors are afraid to get rid of them?

Just think, for the close on £1 Billion that the Council are spending on a tram to nowhere, which no one actually wants and which is going to clog up the city centre for years to come, we could have had eco-friendly buses, an expanded ring road and reinstated the internal city railway links, as well as put a station by the airport linked to the rail network.

Perhaps there would have been money over for a down payment on a northern relief road too! Can anyone think of a more catastrophic city transport plan which has been delivered with such breathtaking incompetence? Pass me the Guiness Book of Records because this one deserves an entry!

The council want this to be 'over'...the whole thrust of their PR spinning is that 'it's finally done' and 'almost here', every delivery of digestive biscuits to the works canteen is greeted like a triumph of logistics.

This narrative would have us believe that: "The sad history cannot be changed, but we are now living in a new age of tough management and a project yanked back on course by people who cannot be blamed for the well publicised catastrophes of the past."

The fact is that this new lot have put a massive, once and for all bet on that the public health science linking traffic pollution to illness and deaths is wrong.....

If they are correct and the science wrong---then they win big...if they are wrong and their policies lead directly to illness and deaths increasing then they lose big...far bigger than anything in the dismal recent profile of the city on the world stage...