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Trams Debt - Edinburgh Braces Itself for the Poor House

Submitted by actionman on Fri, 2 Sep '11 11.57pm

Edinburgh Councillors decided today to embark on a high risk - high spend - high borrowing strategy, which will without doubt have an adverse effect on every citizen in the city. To borrow £231 million for a project is one thing, but to borrow this amount of money, which carries with it a £15.4 million annual pay-back requirement, at a time when the Council are simultaneously embarking on a series of cuts and cost saving measures simply defies any kind of logic.

To do all this when there is absolutely no guarantee that the tram extension to St Andrew Square can be completed within the estimated figure given, must be the most foolish strategy imaginable. 

One must ask, would any of the Councillors who voted this morning have embarked on a project like this if this had been their personal money? Of course not! So we will have to wait while this open ended contract grinds on and on, discovering more and more problems.

The decision was taken in spite of the Councillors knowing full well that there were some 550 "conflict points" along the route which should have alerted them to the extreme dangers of the plan they were supporting. Nevertheless, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP combined together to force it through. And all this took place while Steve Cardownie, the SNP Deputy Council Leader was protesting that he was "still against the tram project" - have we all gone into some lunatic asylum?

To the citizens of Edinburgh it seems that we are being led by  a group of utter incompetents.  Have they not heard about the economic crisis?   Do they think that Edinburgh is somehow immune from the effects of the downturn?

Councillors today again turned a deaf ear to a presentation from residents which pointed out the acute dangers of increased pollution. This is because the tram will force more and more traffic through residential areas with much increased pollution and greater danger to health.   The Council blithely ignored their own figures which show that a further 134,500 households (at least 269,000 people) will suffer considerably worse pollution due to the tram forcing traffic into the residentail areas - where there are also a large proportion of schools.

This will not show up immediately as increased poor health, but the pollution will shorten the lives of many Edinburgh residents.  It is a ticking health time-bomb which will open the way for a host of legal damage claims in the years ahead and for which the present set of Councillors will be held responsible. Today the LibDem and SNP City Councillors did not care.

But what is also extraordinary is that no one from the Council has consulted the Board of Lothian Buses who, we are led to believe, will be subsidising this loss-making tramline as part of Transport Edinburgh Limited (TEL). This will have the effect of forcing cuts in bus services and will considerably restrict the investment that Lothian Buses will be able to make in new vehicles and cleaner engines. In the end, the need to subsidise the trams may well force the sale of Lothian Buses to a private operator and there are plenty of these who would be glad to take over the highly successful and efficient operation. 

Today there were many representatives from Lothian Buses who were extremely angry at the way the tram proposals had been forced through without any consultation with either their Board or with the Unite Union. As far as they are concerned this may not be the end of the matter.

Jenny Dawe, Steve Cardownie and Sue Bruce may think that they have got their way, but actually their troubles are only just beginning.  As costs escalate and traders find sales are dropping, this foolish project, which misguided organisations such as the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce and Essential Edinburgh strongly supported, may gradually appreciate that their enthusiasm for this crazy project was totally misplaced.  Why on earth Edinburgh opted for the longest, largest and widest light rail vehicles in the world one will never know, as this has blighted the whole project. 

Once services start running, it will be interesting to see the effect of the tram on bus services and bus timetables, because, at the moment,  the buses use the area of the tram tracks to pass, however, once these are in use the whole public transport system will just grind to a halt.   Then perhaps a public outcry will force the trams to be removed from service and confined to their smart Gogar Depot where they can rot in peace.

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Edinburgh City Council

Edg asks for options and yes, there are some available, which have been proposed constantly by those of us who can see the impending disaster closing in on the city.   We are now in an open ended contract running for the project, which is "fill your boots time" for the contractor - and Bilfiger Berger still has some scores to settle, so the Council would be wrong to expect an easy ride from now on.

The project has been misconceived from the start with the huge light railway rolling stock; we need smaller, and more traffic friendly vehicles, which can share the road space with other traffic.  To consign all general traffic from the main east-west through routes to be forced through residential areas is utter madness.

So a pause in the project is needed to plan this change.   The outsize tram sets need to be found a home, so they need to be sold off or used to supplement rail services for one of the operators who would probably snap them up at a bargain price.

But the whole project has to be looked at with a more pragmatic approach to road sharing, keeping pollution levels low and leaving what remains of the New Town intact.

I agree with the sentiments that one should always be wary of getting what one wishes for.

Especially in this case where the amounts are discussed glibly as if we are all so used to large numbers they don't matter.

Reality has a sense of breaking through when times get tough as RBS will no doubt find during their day in court in the USA, along with it's major shareholders (us)as the Americans are being quite clever in realising that a fine is harder to evade than a tax imposition, and the Government, having hit hard times, want to show the people whose votes they need that 'they are listening.'

By next Spring even the political parties sleepwalking the corridors of City Chambers may suddenly realise there are people whose votes they need.

As for the SNP, complete about turns aren't any thing new in politics ---but the bizarre idea of continuing to make statements that are direct attacks on the thing you are unanimously supporting as you are in the act of making the vbote is more than a bit dd, and possibly a true political first.

I know there have been very knowlegeable people saying that the trams are too long and heavy for Edinburgh but I find it hard to believe that - even with all the mismanagement - they chose the wrong type of tram at the start. I've seen the tram, sat in the tram, and yes it does look more like light rail transit that should run on a specially constructed raised track or through a underground system, but the design was something that we've known about from the start. We knew it would run on the road for the Haymarket to St Andrew Square section. This was an engineering choice - engineering teams on both the contractors and client side (ie Edinburgh) - would have appraised it at the start.

The tram you sat in when "on display" in Princes Street was indeed the type selected, but like everything else in this disastrous scheme it was not thought through. There were some arrogent assumptions made by the Transport Initiatives Edinburgh (tie) executive which assumed that the whole thing would be forced through no matter what and they did.     They did not care about displaced traffic, as this was deemed outside their remit, so could be picked up later by the Council.

You just imagine being stuck in a long line of buses in Princes Street and unable to move for ages while empty tram cars whizz past - this is not going to please the shopping public who will find other places to go which are not beset with such inconvenience. The tram stops so infrequently that it is virtually useless for the shopping public; it does not take you where you want to go, so you may have to make two or more related changes and, to make it worse, you will probably have to pay if you have a concession card! Why bother?