Capital is textbook example of how not to build a municipal transport policy

Andrew HN Gray rightly draws attention to the litany of missed opportunities which exemplifies Edinburgh’s traffic planning policy over the past 50 years. In the 1970s I was one of those campaigning for the late Professor Arnold Hendry’s light rail proposal which would, at a stroke, have given thecityafastmodernmetroon dedicated track based almost entirely on redundant railway tunnels, culverts, marshalling yards and the South Suburban Line. At the same time Cockburn Association Secretary Oliver Barrett was pleading with the council to build a station under the Lothian Road goods yard, which was about to become one million square feet of office space.

Tragically, our politicians, bedazzled by such delusions as an inner ring road freeway and an elevated road through the Meadows, killed such proposals off, then later tried to redress their failure by building a Trumpton tram for over £1 billion which most of us have no use for, and which stupidly duplicates the existing bus link to a polluting airport.

There is now much debate about the city’s deteriorating air quality, the direct result of this institutionalised myopia, and they continue to foul it up, despite the fact that the Royal College of Physicians estimate of more than 40,000 annual UK deaths from air pollution has now been almost doubled. There may be a few glimmers of hope, such as Richard Leonard’s belated adoption of a proposal for citizen’s free bus passes which I made last year, yet even Friends of the Earth fail to grasp the urgency of this, given that its director, Dr Richard Dixon, a board member of SEPA, meekly accepted that regulator’s decision to raise no objection to a massive hotel development in the Cowgate which will further exacerbate toxic emissions at a point where international standards are already breached, despite an alarming report from the council’s own environmental officers.

Those in need of a how-notto-do-it municipal transport policy would be well advised to study Edinburgh’s failures.

DAVID J BLACK Glanville Place, Edinburgh