Fight moves up a gear to stop reopening of estate to traffic
Residents are stepping up the fight to stop their Edinburgh estate being reopened to traffic.
People living in Morningside’s Braid estate have launched a petition calling on the city council to rethink its decision to scrap the road closures introduced under the Spaces for People programme during Covid, including the Quiet Route for cyclists and pedestrians.
Instead the council plans to install a segregated cycle lane on Braid Avenue and Hermitage Drive and reopen the estate to through traffic – the option favoured by 48 per cent of people in a consultation.
But a spokesperson for the group of residents organising the petition claimed no-one was going to be happy about the new arrangement. She said: “A lot of people don’t understand what the implications are. Some motorists seem to be under the impression everything will go back to the way it was before, but that’s not the case.
“Cyclists believe it’s not going to be safe. It’s not going to be as helpful for children trying to cycle to and from school because Braid Avenue has a very steep gradient and at the moment, with the Quiet Route as it stands, they’re able to zigzag through the estate. I don’t think the motorists are happy with it, the cyclists don’t like it and the residents aren’t happy with it either.”
The residents used Freedom of Information to obtain notes of a meeting about the options in which officials acknowledged reopening the roads was “likely to result in net increase in traffic back to 2018 levels”.
The spokesperson said: “When we found out they were going to put options together, we did our own survey. We went door to door on Braid Avenue to find out what the feeling was on the street and over 80 per cent of people said they wanted to keep the current layout, but that wasn’t an option in the consultation”
She added segregated cycle lanes were not suitable for residential streets where cars would be reversing out of driveways across the cycle lane. And she highlighted concerns about the removal of parking along both sides of Hermitage Drive and one side of Braid Avenue. “To open up the entire estate again to through traffic and dismantle the Quiet Route and undo all the good it has brought just seems like a completely backward step,” she said.