There was a rare victory for common sense this week when the good citizens of Scotland’s capital city forced their council into an about-turn on the much ridiculed new traffic scheme.
Common sense doesn’t usually get much of a look-in with sentences including the words “council” and “traffic”, particularly in Edinburgh, where the local authority appears to have taken leave of all its senses in recent years. However, such was the uproar over the latest experiment that it would have been political suicide for Labour’s city fathers to stick to their guns.
Is it too much to hope that Edinburgh’s trials will serve as an example to the rest of the country?
Having already spent £3.5m on installing electronic pop-up bollards in the middle of busy high streets, erecting traffic lights with the same gay abandon it strings up Christmas lights, inexplicably blocking access between main thoroughfares and creating bottlenecks where none existed, the council now admits that it might have misjudged the public mood.
Many of its most hated measures — which defaced the beautiful and historic New Town with fat red and yellow lines, narrowed pavements and concrete blocks — are to be reversed. Screaming anti-car signs, warning motorists away from forbidden zones, are to be removed. Roads are to be reopened.
As the Edinburgh writer Roddy Martine noted recently: “Streets are like arteries. You cut the flow and the body dies.” That is what was happening. Retailers lost more than £1m last month, after completion of the Edinburgh traffic management scheme. Shoppers, exasperated by the baffling obstacle course and weary of £60 on-the-spot fines for transgressions, decamped to the Gyle or to Glasgow.
The Chamber of Commerce bombarded the council with complaints. The city’s own official urban designer, Sir Terry Farrell, called the scheme a disaster. Residents wrote letters to their afternoon newspaper by the sackload and drivers rebelled by ignoring the new layouts. Even the police refused to enforce some of the restrictions because they didn’t understand them. Now things will go back to normal — more or less — within three weeks, the council says, and the cost to us, the taxpayer, will be negligible.
In fact, councillors are congratulating themselves on their remarkable bravery. Donald Anderson, the council leader, said: “The scheme just wasn’t working. So from my point of view we have a responsibility to be brave enough to admit that we made a mistake and be honest enough to say we will do our best to put it right.”
Putting it right may cost another million, maybe a bit more. Who knows? In all, introducing and demolishing the “mistake” will set Edinburgh back at least £5m, and that’s not including traders’ losses.
It should be remembered that this is the second traffic-related embarrassment in a year for the capital. In February, councillors tried to impose a congestion charge and were humiliated in a referendum by a three-to-one defeat. That also cost millions, although it was evident long before the council’s campaign that Edinburgh would never vote for a road toll.
So, does this week’s climbdown spell the end for people like Anderson, the “brave” council leader who played Monopoly with council taxes, and Andrew Burns, the transport leader, who if he had his way would gladly topple George IV from his plinth and shut off Hanover Street?
No fear. Not only do these men have no shame (or they would have resigned in the wake of the congestion charge fiasco), but they are on a mission that, unfortunately for Scotland, is part of a wider movement.
Burns and his team of technocrats are disciples of one David Begg, a former Edinburgh Labour councillor and the original anti-car zealot who masterminded the first road closures in the city and whose sole aim is to inconvenience drivers. After Edinburgh, Begg went to work in London, as chairman of the Commission for Integrated Transport, the chief independent adviser to the government on transport. He saw it as his opportunity to coax people out of their cars, and alter their lifestyles.
But Begg said “the agenda changed” and he was regarded as too anti-car. He parted company with the commission earlier this year, has come home and is ensconced at Robert Gordon University.
Last weekend he addressed the Scottish Greens at their annual conference in Dundee, confessing that he voted for them in 1999. He said that people who criticised Greens were “sexually inadequate”. “It’s a male thing. You’ve got to have a lot of horsepower. A big car means virility, that’s the way these guys look at it. If you have a bicycle and if you’re Green you sometimes start to question your sexuality.” Crazy.
Worryingly for all Scotland, this kind of hardline environmentalism, which puts Green issues before everything — before house building, hospitals, road maintenance — could hold the balance of power after the next Scottish parliament elections in 2007.
But Begg’s and Edinburgh’s war on the motorist is misguided environmentalism. Princes Street has become a race track and pedestrians will soon have to wear breathing apparatus or be overcome by the diesel fumes of nose-to-tail buses. Idling traffic and long jams — a by-product of traffic mismanagement — have done nothing to decrease carbon emissions.
As Edinburgh goes down a one-way street, other cities across the world are returning to two-way street systems because they have been found to slow speeding traffic. As Edinburgh heads towards a £1 billion tram debacle, cities across the world have opted against trams because they are too expensive and don’t replace car travel.
Capital dwellers have so far not been duped by the Green argument. Law-abiding motorists have seen through ploys — from congestion charging to the mad-cap traffic management scheme — to criminalise them. They will not be bamboozled by scary gurus who wage crusades against the motorcar. Nor must the rest of Scotland be. Edinburgh’s red-faced councillors performed a U-turn not because they saw sense but because they foresaw their fate at the next elections. They did it to save their skins.
A majority of Scottish voters are drivers and in favour of increased mobility, which, until public transport is hugely upgraded, comes with cars. A majority will not be bullied up any more blind alleys.
