Apparently the west end of Princes St to Shandwick Place and the east end at St Andrew Square are to be closed for 16 weeks while workers move pipes and cables in preparation for the trams...
Hang on, so you mean we've got to go through more roadworks on the same stretch of road in the future? Oh yes, when they start laying the tracks, sometime in the future... In the meantime, they're just going to fuck about a bit, and piss off all the folk who are trying to commute in Edinburgh - Shandwick Place is a bottleneck for bus services at the best of times...
Some guy from Tie was quoted by the BBC as saying:
"The work will be completed before August so as not to impact on the Edinburgh Festival."
Of course what he really meant to say was:
"The festival is the be all and end all of life in Edinburgh, and we wouldn't want to give the tourists a bad impression, so in the meantime, we're going to fuck up the roads because we think Edinburgh's residents are cunts and don't care how this unwanted trams project effects the city. "
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The whole project is such a nonsense - huge amount of money for a ling which is no use to 3/4 of the population because it won't go near their home or work. And yet we not only have to pay for it we have to put up with all the delays and frustrations - repeatedly - over the works associated with it.
And even when it is finished (and over budget no doubt since they managed to spend millions before even doing any work at all) what then? If like me and most other folks in town the bus service you rely on (because the tram goes nowhere near you) has to cross over a tram line or share a road with it, what then? Vague mentions of trams getting priority and vague reassurances about all the systems being 'integrated', whatever that means (probably means buses have to wait each time to let trams pass at junctions like Haymarket). And if you try to be fit and green by cycling, oops, there go a bunch of the cycle lanes we paid for to make way for the tram too...
The basic problem is that just because a tram is running on a tramline down the middle of the road doesn't mean it takes up any less spsce than an equivalent bus running down the middle of the road. I have yet to see any explanation, as opposed to asertion, why these trams will reduce congestion. In which case buses could do the job exactly the same except for the £600 million & all the digging.
I can see a case for an overhead monorail, which would cost more to instal (or at least more than a tramline installed in countries where most of the cost is the engineering not the paperwork) but could be automated, thus cheaper to run & far faster (literally above the traffic jams) & would genuinely reduce congestion.
However trams are PC, buses aren't & monorails, having only been about for over a century, a litle to newfangled so a tramline it is.
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