Item 7.8 Capital Investment Programme Annual Update: ‘Liveable Neighbourhoods’
Living Streets Edinburgh Group is the local voluntary arm of the national charity campaigning for better conditions for everyday walking and wheeling.
We are asking TEC to approve funding for the ‘Liveable Neighbourhoods’ scheme as part of the review of capital priorities. This would make small-scale local improvements to streets – things like widening narrow pavements, fixing dropped kerbs and improving junctions – the kind of things which people across the city want to see.
TEC decided which active travel schemes should ‘proceed’ or pause’ last May. ‘Liveable Neighbourhoods’ ranked 71st in the evaluation matrix, just missing out on ‘proceeding’ by a single point, largely because it was ascribed an extremely high (but arbitrary) budget of £44 million. In our view, this would be the single most important of any active travel scheme in improving conditions for walking and wheeling in Edinburgh: much more so than many expensive, highly-engineered schemes which were ranked higher.
However at that meeting, TEC also agreed to receive an update on:
a) the equality and poverty impacts of the reprioritisation exercise and whether the prioritisation needs to be adjusted to better promote accessibility and poverty reduction
b) whether any larger projects (in excess of £10m) that have been paused could be split into smaller elements to allow some elements to be delivered.”
So we are disappointed that the report to TEC (Appendix 7) continues to recommend ‘pausing’ Liveable Neighbourhoods. This is hard to understand given that the whole rationale of the scheme is to split street improvements into manageable local packages.
We understand that there are around 17,000 (!) missing or inadequate dropped kerbs in the city. A City Mobility Plan KPI (#30) is to deliver 400 per year. But we’re told that the Council’s Active Travel team, which holds the central dropped kerb budget, delivered kerbs at only 8 sites in 2025/26 (we acknowledge that other teams, like road maintenance, will also have made improvements). A similar mismatch applies to pavements: hundreds of city pavements are less than the minimum acceptable width specified in both local and national guidance.
In the face of these challenges, the current rolling programmes cannot deliver the Council’s big ambitions for Edinburgh’s streets. Not for the first time, we also see a need to reiterate the agreed transport hierarchy – which has walking and wheeling at the top.
We therefore ask councillors to look again at ‘Liveable Neighbourhoods’ and to now approve a pared-down budget. This would potentially benefit residents in every ward and deliver many equality and poverty impacts that councillors want to see across the city.
November 2026
