Tram, bam, no thank you, man – we didn't need pointless project

Published on Friday 25 April 2008 23:04

YESTERDAY morning, another communication from Trams For Edinburgh flipped through the letterbox. Dear Resident or Business Occupier, it said, and then fell to explaining that the company was rescheduling some of the utility diversion work in my area – relaying pipes and power-lines, to make way for the trams – from late April to early June. This, it promises, will create useful "synergies" with other work being carried out at the same time.

Well, it's all one to me, as they say. As someone who doesn't drive a car, and doesn't live on the actual tram route, the disruption affects me less than some. But I find it difficult, all the same, even to look at one of these letters without thinking how vividly the Edinburgh tram project – run by a private company set up for the purpose by Edinburgh City Council, and largely funded by the Scottish Government, despite the opposition of the current SNP administration – represents everything that is dysfunctional about our current political system, and the way it interacts both with the economy, and with society as a whole.

For on one hand, a tram system for Edinburgh is clearly the kind of development – in broad generic terms – that modern governments, both national and local, should be promoting. If ever we needed a reminder that something has to be done to wean our society off its total dependence on cheap fuel and the car-culture it supports, after all, then this week's events at Grangemouth might have been designed to give us that wake-up call. In essence, Edinburgh's city fathers and mothers – backed by a majority of MSPs – have convinced themselves that a tram scheme will help lure the city's great middle classes out of their cars, thereby easing congestion, and inaugurating a brand-new age of public transport in the city. And what, on the face of things, could be more sensible, inspiring, or far-sighted?

Except that the further the city wades into the tram construction project, the more likely it seems that this is simply the wrong scheme, in the wrong place, in a city where much better options were available. For a start, the cost of the scheme is simply colossal. At 600 million and counting, the tram project is hoovering up resources which, if differently applied, could have been used to transform and streamline every other aspect of Edinburgh's transport system, in hugely imaginative and forward-looking ways.

Secondly, the planned route of the trams is, to put it bluntly, odd. If the whole thing had been financed by the current developers of Edinburgh's waterfront, its loop-shaped line linking the coast to Princes Street and the airport might have made some economic sense, at least, but as a facility designed to meet the current transport needs of the people of Edinburgh, it seems at best irrelevant, and at worst downright damaging. Thirdly, the levels of disruption involved in its construction are astonishing, and must be costing the city countless millions in traffic delays, interruptions of trade, and loss of tourist income.

Worst of all, though, is the way it seems to ride roughshod over the existing rhythms of the city's life: over the most successful aspects of its present infrastructure, over its most vulnerable transport users, and over the once-remarkable beauty of its streets. For a mere fraction of the cost of the tram project, for instance, the quiet but impressive recent success of Lothian buses could have been rewarded with a fleet of new tram-style vehicles, and even better state-of-the-art information systems than the ones currently in place. But instead, the buses seem set for a period of ill-deserved decline, with the tram company itself predicting that 75 per cent of its passengers will be transferring from buses rather than private cars, and with many popular routes set to be disrupted both by the need for passengers to make bus-tram-bus journeys where one bus used to do, and by the vast half-mile distances between tram stops, which will exclude many elderly users completely.

Edinburgh's much-loved South Suburban railway, likewise, could have been revived with no major construction work at all, and kept going for 15 years or so, for a sum not much greater than the mere increase in tram costs announce this week. And for the price of some loose change from the tram project, provision for cyclists and pedestrians throughout the Lothians could have been completely transformed, pointing the way towards a genuine transition to new times.

But all that, it seems, would require too much imagination, too much lateral thinking, and too much genuine responsiveness to our beautiful capital city and its needs. It's easier, it seems, to buy into the latest government-sponsored fashion in big, macho-looking public transport projects. If you want to see how 21st century western government fails to represent the people, in other words, all you need to do – if you live in Edinburgh – is to consider the mess of roadworks at the end of your own street. This tram system is not what Edinburgh's people wanted, and it's almost certainly, in civic terms, not the best value for the vast sums being spent on it.

But it's what Edinburgh is going to get, all the same, because it suits so many powerful interests to have it so. And we, the people, will just have to learn to live with it, not only with the trams themselves, but with the growing sense of popular powerlessness they bring in their wake, and which increasingly weakens and disfigures our whole society.