Edinburgh rejects congestion plan

Edinburgh's congestion charging plans have been comprehensively rejected, with 74% of voters voting against the council's proposals.

It's too simplistic however to see this as a rejection of congestion charging per se, although many in the car lobby will and have already done so: it is much more of a rejection of the Council in general, and in particular its [in]ability to manage traffic issues.

Edinburgh has had long-term traffic problems [for 60+ years - see the 1949 Abercrombie Report for examples], and successive Councils have failed to address the problem. Traffic control/management problems are widespread in neighbourhoods across the city, and the Council's responses are weak and ineffectual - many Edinburgh schools are still not surrounded by 20 m.p.h. zones for example, and commuter traffic in residential neighbourhoods is a major issue.

Much of the congestion on the city's streets is caused by buses, not by cars, but it is hard to see how the Council will tackle this, given that the Council owns the dominant bus company and has a vested interest in preserving its dominance against its commerical rivals.

The central problem, which we have always known about, is that there is no high-capacity route that commuters can use to get in and out of the city, and with increased growth on the fringes of the city [aided and abetted by the Council, first through the development of the office park and then the mall at the Gyle, and now through the growth of the retail park at Kinnaird] the problems are only getting worse. If you are on one side of the city and wish to get to the other you have little alternative to driving through the city centre.

And then there's the city centre. The Council has long has an aim of getting cars out of the city centre, and has reduced the number of parking spaces and agressively enforced parking regulations. At the same time, the Council has been increasingly hostile to retailers in the city centre, most obviously through a refusal to tackle the precipitous decline of Princes Street over the last decade, while agressively promoting the development of alternative out of town retail locations.

And despite all that, the Council argued that it, and its arms-length transport company, had the solution to all these problems that they'd previously ignored, arguing that if their proposals weren't accepted traffic would get worse, communities would be negatively affected and so on and so on, ignoring the fact that this is already the situation today. The Council would much prefer the silver bullet of congestion charging, rather than having to actually do any work mitigating traffic levels in residential neighourhoods and restructuring the existing public transport network. For the Council, congestion charging is the easy way out.

But people have no faith in a Council that is widely [and accurately] seen as both anti-car and anti-city centre. People don't take their cars because they feel like it: they take them because they can't get around/across the city otherwise, and don't feel they should be penalised for this. A minor detail, but there it is.

This wasn't a referendum on congestion charging. This was a referendum on the Council, and it got the result it deserved.