Edinburgh tram expansion plans must not see loss of beloved cycle paths – Aidan Smith

We need artists like WH Auden or Benjamin Britten to rally Edinburgh folk to the defence of their cycleways

“Trams to blame” ran the front-page headline alongside a photograph of a five-storey tenement, hastily evacuated because of the risk of collapse. It wasn’t the most auspicious day for the unveiling of plans for the latest expansion of what many insist is a vanity project.

Edinburgh is always accusing the trams of something. Of costing £1 billion for a start. Of being all sleek and smooth-running while cars scud into potholes on rotten roads because there’s no money for repairs. Or, because there’s no money for filling in teaching posts either, the trams continue on their merry, environmentally friendly way but a generation of kids switched on to all the planet-imperilling crises are left in classrooms watching movies. This happens to my Greta Thunberg outrider of a 12-year-old daughter most weeks and has done since high school began.

Doubtless civic leaders will argue there’s no direct connection, that other departmental piggy-banks weren’t plundered. They must seriously hope there will prove to be no direct connection between the works to finally – finally – finish the line all the way to Newhaven and 3cm-wide cracks suddenly appearing in the homes directly across the road from the terminus.

But how are they going to persuade Edinburghers that a proposed new route – involving stealing part of the much-treasured cycleway network – isn’t the tram fetish gone mad? The north-south line – from Granton to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and beyond – would run along the former railway line at Roseburn which for almost 40 years has been enjoyed by folk getting on their bike. A walkway would be preserved alongside the tram tracks but cyclists would be banned from a favourite path.

Not very green, far from pleasant

In other words, just so we’re clear, trams would oust bikes. The great panacea for a clean and healthy capital would kill – at least at this juncture – the joy and well-being opportunities, both physical and mental, of pedal power with devotees being diverted onto the not very green and far from pleasant Queensferry Road.

Now, just so we’re clear, I’m not anti-tram. For many the network is the white elephant in the room – that is, something which isn’t off-limits, but if anything has been debated too much, and invariably in a negative way – but as a Newhaven resident I was pleased or at least relieved last summer when at long last the white carriages proved not to be ghosts after all and showed up at the bottom of my road.

The journey uptown pays proper respect to Leith Docks. It’s not hard to imagine what life, and work, was like in the port’s stirring past while admiring all the regeneration. And hopefully others are copying the example of a gaggle of grizzled journalists and commandeering the tram for pub crawls along the length of Leith Walk to boost businesses battered by the double whammy of first the track-laying disruption and then Covid.

Corridors of green

But while I’m learning to like the tram, I’ve always loved the cycleways. They constitute one of the wonders of Edinburgh and should be protected at all costs and from all threats, even an environmentally conscious rival. They’re not just frequented by whippet-thin men – and women – in luminous Lycra, determined and panting in their efforts to beat personal bests on the morning commute, although there are plenty of that type.

Many don’t have bikes and will walk the paths, blissfully distanced from road noise and fumes. Within seconds of leaving the car-clogged streets behind, they are moving along long corridors of green. First-timers are always amazed at the speed with which, off the beaten track, they can get from A to B and as a bonus, stress-free.

Then there are the incidental pleasures of how, just around a corner, the familiar assumes a different, quirkier or more handsome aspect. How, peering through clearings in the trees, the whole city is transformed. The routes can get quite hectic with dog-walkers, mums and dads with buggies, some of them power-walking, and whole families in biking convoy plus entire pre-school nurseries in matching bibs on the march for art-themed explorations of the wooded areas. But I have never once seen an incidence of “path rage”. Weaving in and out, everyone is respectful of other users.

The paths are also popular with wild-flower enthusiasts, berry-pickers and those who smoke interesting cigarettes. The gloomy walls of some of the many tunnels have become canvases for fantastic graffiti art.

Birthday greetings

As you may be able to tell, I can get hopelessly romantic about the cycleways. En route to the local swimming baths with my six-year-old son on Sunday morning, even the shopping trolley shoved down an embankment into a stagnant pool seemed like the kind of local colour a keen-eyed film-maker would want to capture.

Any documentarist shouldn’t miss the birthday greetings on bedsheets hung from the “Red Bridge” at Drylaw – or, farther south in a more genteel corner outside St George’s School for Girls, the message spray-painted in big letters which politely begins with “Please … ”

And maybe that’s what the campaign to preserve the cycleways needs: a homage to WH Auden and Benjamin Britten’s Night Mail which celebrates their status as a jewel in Edinburgh’s crown, the envy of other cities in Scotland and beyond, albeit one delivered really by accident.

For, as old stations turned into homes and offices remind us, these routes were originally laid for trains – and ominously, an information sign at Murrayfield I hadn’t stopped to read before states that they “may one day be replaced by a brand new tram system… very quiet electric vehicles… fast journey times”.

All very admirable but we are an obese nation and one increasingly troubled by mental health. For these reasons alone, bikes should trump trams.