The Council’s Transport and Environment Committee on 22 May will consider a report recommending priorities to deliver the City Mobility Plan. We’re surprised, and very disappointed, to see no mention of some key initiatives which we were able to get included in the CMP delivery plan. Especially disappointing after the committee decided to freeze footway maintenance while increasing spending on roads, only last month. We’ve therefore sent councillors this message.

Dear Councillor

I’m writing in connection with the report on City Mobility Plan priorities, Item 7.5 on the TEC agenda for 22 May bit.ly/43ktlep  The recommendations do not adequately reflect the CMP’s ambition to effect “a transformational change in walking and wheeling in Edinburgh”.

Over two years ago, two new initiatives were introduced into the Active Travel component of the City Mobility Plan: ‘Action for Better Crossings” (ABC) and the “Edinburgh Accessible Streets Initiative” EASI). These programmes (both proposed by us) finally offered the prospect of a strategic, rather than piecemeal, approach to addressing some of the most fundamental problems with getting around the city as a pedestrian – for example:

• the time that you have to wait for the green man at traffic lights,
• the thousands of missing dropped kerbs on pavements,
• narrow footways, 
• pavement clutter, etc.

As we understand it, effectively nothing has been done yet to implement either initiative as a coherent programme. We had hoped that they would form a key part of this report. However, there is no mention whatsoever in the report of either ABC or EASI, despite Council having confirmed them as at the heart of CMP policy only last year (see attached).

Instead, some elements of ABC and EASI are simply noted as part of the ‘rolling programme’ in Appendix 4b. Paragraph 4.14 of the report states an expectation that these will be funded at “an overall level roughly equal to recent overall investment”. This isn’t good enough: there is no indication of how much money is budgeted for these schemes; certainly there has been no systematic investment at all in recent years in widening footways. Many of the other aspects like the pedestrian crossing programme and the crucial school streets reviews have huge backlogs owing to lack of resourcing.

These vital programmes need to be considered alongside, and on the same level playing field, as the active travel and public transport listed in Appendix 1. Councillors should be able to consider whether investment in school streets, road safety, ABC or EASI is more or less worthy than these projects, whether they be George Street, Hawthornvale-Salamander Street, the Lindsey Bridge or Dalry 20 Minute Neighbourhood. Otherwise the opportunity to consider where best to invest both staff time and capital funding is lost and a ‘silo’ approach is entrenched.

We also have serious concerns with the overly-complex methodology for assessing projects in Appendix 1. It gives no weighting to walking and wheeling (“top of the travel hierarchy”) and doesn’t sufficiently value schemes relatively modest but important to pedestrians such as Calton Road and the Causey. These projects fail to score highly enough only because work on them has already been “paused’ for years.

However, the fundamental weakness of the report is to take too narrow an approach to evaluating a limited set of projects. We would therefore like to see the report deferred perhaps for two cycles, and a new report brought forward with a more strategic approach to future investment, including the programmes mentioned above.

David Hunter

Convener