July 14, 2006
Into the distance
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May 17, 2005
City extends Princes Street car ban
Traffic has been banned from travelling along Edinburgh's Princes Street. Councillors also say it will significantly improve local bus services to the capital's famous shopping strip, which runs below and alongside Edinburgh Castle.
Which is all very bizarre, because the side of Princes Street that suffers from congestion is the side that cars were already banned from driving down.
But hey, since when has the council let facts get in the way of a stupid decision??
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April 24, 2005
Council rejects simple solution in favor of complex and unworkable one. Again.
City leaders today warned against introducing a local income tax in the Capital after branding it unworkable.
Because it's so very simple and easy to administer and requires almost no effort on the part of the council [as it will invariably be collected by the Inland Revenue], not to mention much more efficient [remember Edinburgh's just sent out nastygrams to a third of households who haven't paid last year's council tax yet...] the Council is against it.
Once again, the flat earthers win.
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April 19, 2005
Preparing for the G8
McDonalds is planning to close all of its city centre branches during this summer’s G8 protests
It's hard to say what will happen then the G8 meeting happens, but it certainly seems that Edinburgh fears the worst... Hard to say if all the protest [etc.] stories are true or just media speculation, but they're increasingly unsettling.
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April 11, 2005
Edinburgh trying to attract immigrants from London
Edinburgh has lifestyle options that are very attractive to workers in London because it is not such a crowded city, property is cheaper and journey times are shorter.
Such pithy but completely wrong comments are of course the raison d'etre of Donald Anderson, Edinburgh's erstwhile Council Leader, who is guaranteed to be habitually wrong about just about everything.
While not as crowded as London, Edinburgh's not bloody empty, property is already immensely over-priced, the education system is pretty shocking, and journey times are much higher [you're not going as far in Edinburgh, but you're going slower]. I know, details, details.
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April 08, 2005
It'll be a quiet summer... Part I
Historic Scotland has cancelled all six of this summer's outdoor concerts at Edinburgh Castle. Apparently tourists can't tell the difference between the Castle, the staging for the Tattoo, and tour buses. Or they get confused. Or the castle really is just there for tourists, not for people who live here. Some weak-ass excuse like that.
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It'll be a quiet summer... Part II
One of Edinburgh’s best known festival venues has been banned from playing jazz in the afternoon - because it interrupts Bible studies.
Divinity students are among those who complained about the level of noise coming from the Spiegeltent, in George Square, last year.
The only reason this happened is because the University of Edinburgh owns George Square... if they didn't, the poor wee lambs would have been told to get stuffed. Probably. Bah humbug.
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April 01, 2005
Edinburgh Council still in denial...
I love the fact that the Council is blaming the congestion charging debacle on the voting law [which wouldn't give them access to the complete electoral register, hence disenfranchising a chunk of voters] rather than accepting that their plans were poorly thought out and resoundingly rejected by the ratepayers.
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March 29, 2005
Lawrence Lessig in Edinburgh, April 2nd
[via Boing Boing]
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March 23, 2005
Foods with outlawed dye still on sale in Edinburgh
As seems usual in the UK these days, store owners have been 'warned' when they should have been 'prosecuted'.
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March 01, 2005
A third of Edinburgh households have no savings...
If the percentage with no bank account is from the Scottish Household Survey, then that's actually 9% of households with no account, so the real number of adults with no accounts will be somewhat higher...
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February 22, 2005
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.
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December 28, 2004
Politics and demographics
Methinks that our friends in the Guardian may have gone and confused individual post codes with postal sectors, which are a much more useful thing to work with - both because there are far fewer of them, 9,900 vs 1.7 million, and because there's enough information aggregated at this geographic level them to make them analytically robust. For more information on UK postal geographies see the relevant National Statistics pages.
The interesting thing about Mosaic's classifications are the way they try and subdivide areas based on income, home-ownership, number of children, occupations and so on. Not sure which [if any] of the Mosaic groups the parties are allegedly targeting [Cultural leadership, Symbols of success, Fledgling nurseries, Upscaling new owners, Affluent blue collar, Coronation St, Rustbelt resilience, Corporate chieftains, Burdened optimists, High technologists, Semi-rural seclusion, Golden empty nesters, Provincial privilege, University challengers] I fit into, but then living in a Labour safe seat I doubt if any of the parties care much about my vote.
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City girls are not short of a miniskirt
Now that's something that would be pretty obvious to anyone in the City Centre in the evening... it's full of lamb dressed as mutton, as the saying goes.
There is also a curious belief that black mini-skirts should be paired ONLY with nude-coloured tights, just to make sure that your legs look as chunky as possible.
But hey, you didn't expect anyone who bought their best party gear in Sainsbury's to be much of a fashion icon, did you??
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December 15, 2004
Speaking of madness...
The contractors, who have yet to be selected, are due to finish up in July, with any remaining work taking place after the Edinburgh Festival.
Oooh boy. No contractors selected, project starting within a month, 60 roads closed... finished by the festival?? No chance.
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More roadworks muppetry
angry traders argue that the huge encampment set up by contractors has scared away customers and left them badly out of pocket
What the contractors have built is a large white dome that stretches all the way across the Royal Mile and halfway across the junction... and since you can't see over/around it, if you didn't know any better and were walking up the street you might think it marked the end of the Royal Mile and miss the Lawnmarket behind it.
And the Council/contractors haven't closed the surrounding roads either, so cars drive up to the dome before having to do a three point turn and go back the way they came.
Brilliant planning.
Those of us who have lived in Edinburgh for a while will remember that the council also had to rebuild the intersection of the Royal Mile and the Bridges, where the pretty cobblestones were laid on a bed of dirt, which promptly washed away under the weight of traffic and which had to be replaced by a concrete foundation. Whoops.
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How not to run a referendum...
Just when you thought that Edinburgh Council's plans to run a referendum on congestion charging couldn't get any more farcical, it emerges that 57,000 of us won't get a ballot because we asked for our details [i.e. name and address] not to be sold by the Electoral Register.
This cuts down on junk mail, but apparently the council's ballot is classed as junk mail, so we won't be getting ballots unless we happen to either notice the council's advertising campaign on the subject, get flyers in the mail, or notice the relevant ad in the Council's free newsletter [which has yet to be delivered].
If you want to get a ballot you have to phone the Council's hotline - telephone number not printed by the Scotsman [thank you yer much...] but it's 0131 529 4877. According to them, half the flats in my building aren't on their mailing list.
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November 14, 2004
Fees and 'foreign' students from south of the border
But it wants to go further and impose even higher fees for medical courses because so many English students come here to study medicine then return south, leaving a shortage of doctors in Scotland.
While I hate to ever admit that 'student' leaders are right [particularly as the National Union of Students - the NUS - doesn't even represent all universities, not to mention all students...] if the Scottish Executive was really concerned about admission rates of English students in particular courses surely they could just have a wee chat with SHEFC, the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council about it???
After all, the odds that English students would come up to Scotland to do a law degree and then move back to England does rather beggar belief [as the English and Scots have separate legal systems].
The real issue is that some Universities orient their medical schools more to English students than Scottish students, and as the English and Scottish school systems are markedly different this is a serious structural disadvantage Scottish students face.
PS: I wonder when everyone who's so upset about the lack of dentists in Scotland will start asking questions about why the University of Edinburgh was allowed to shut its Dental School in the early 90s...?
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Too few bobbies on beat after shake-up
And how is this different from the way things were before they reorganised themselves??
There is a bit of a myth that there are police on the street at night in Edinburgh, because if they are then [with the notable exceptions of those working on Lothian Road...] they're invisible.
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November 12, 2004
Vow to fight Princes Street tanning salon
No Mr Anderson, it's not, and that's why they want to open there. Princes Street has been in decline for quite a while, a decade by my estimate.
Major retailers are either bailing out being priced out, or considering large-scale reconstruction. Even Mr Anderson recognises that much of the street is unusable .
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November 05, 2004
Transport guru in call for free shop parking
Which is of course completely useless for shoppers who park on the street...
Transport guru my ****. But then we are talking about the man who allowed cars to park in bicycle lanes, so we shouldn't be too surprised.
A better alternative would be to tax out of town parking. That would even things up a bit...
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Walk's on the wild side
The funny part is that the closest police station - Gayfield Square - is 50 yards from the top of Leith Walk. So much for deterrence, hmm?
On the train on the way home I was sitting just along from three... hmm... ned-ettes?? who were discussing one of their number's upcoming court appearance... when one admitted serving three months, and told the defendant that she might have to serve time she shouted [loud enough for the whole carriage to hear] "but it's only my first offence...!". I wasn't surprised they got off at Polmont.
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November 03, 2004
Scotsman - 'Difficult' start for new rail operator
There are a couple of marked difference between ScotRail, who used to run the passenger railways in Scotland, and First ScotRail, who took them over at the end of October...
- Punctuality is even worse than ever, and trains seem even less likely to leave on time than before.
- But we get an apology when we arrive, just to make sure that we've noticed that we're late.
- They no longer tell you at Glasgow Queen Street where the next Edinburgh train will leave from if it's not arrived. Which means you end up with 100 people standing in front of the ticket barriers not knowing where to go and getting in the way of other arriving and departing passengers.
- Trains are a damn sight dirtier.
- And worst of all, the trains are smaller/shorter.
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October 29, 2004
New adventures in policing - the drunk tank
Would you believe that in Scotland, with its drink culture and culture of drink-related violence, there isn't a single drunk tank?? Not even in Glasgow???
If Eric Milligan ever went out on a weekend in Edinburgh he'd envisage several people being taken in every bloody hour...
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October 03, 2004
Recycling, or not.
There is no more typical British approach to a problem than this: thinking that we can be encouraged to recycle more by designing a new recycling logo.
The fact is that many of us, particularly in Scotland, have no home/kerb-side recycling facilities, which in the 21st century is quite the [under] achievement.
September 24, 2004
Not enough...
BBC NEWS | Scotland | Journalist sparked palace scare
Lothian and Borders Police have launched an investigation into the palace breach.
Senior officers are reported to be angry because at the stunt as considerable resources had to be diverted there from other places.Translation: Lothian & Borders Police don't have enough officers to look after high profile events and the rest of us simultaneously. They'll have to choose one or the other, and the media will howl if it's not the high profile events/people/places, so the rest of us will have to live with officers being re-assigned and not dealing with local issues [like crime]. Lovely.
September 20, 2004
How to waste your Council Tax
Hate to say it, but its been pretty obvious [at least to me...] for the last year or so that the whole Blindcraft saga had disaster written all over it... I'm not sure what is worse, the fact that significant numbers of disabled workers are going to lose their jobs, or the fact that the plant was allowed to lose almost £2 million last year... what on earth is the Council doing wasting all that money???
Methinks there are lots of people who should lose their jobs over this, and none of them are blind... except to opportunities to waste our taxes.
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September 07, 2004
The lie that will not die
Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Scottish parliament building
Back in the late 90s when Scottish devolution began to be implemented, there was talk of building a new parliament to house MSPs, as the Royal High School was felt not to be suitable for a variety of reasons, some symbolic (as there was a desire to see a new beginning) and some practical (it was too small for everyone - though there was a perfectly good, indeed rather attractive, Art-Deco office block just yards away that was already used by the Scottish Executive, and the court that currently sat there would need to find a new home as well...).
But what would such a building cost?? Politicians (and, it must be said, civil servants) being ever economical with the truth, replied that a building with the required floorspace would typically cost around £40 million to build. Note that this wasn't the actual cost of the building that they were proposing to build: that hadn't even been designed yet. And this was just the construction cost - it didn't include many professional fees, VAT at 17.5%(And just why is the Scottish Executive paying VAT?? That point has always confused me...), or the costs of buying the land the building might sit on.
Despite all that, this figure has been taken as the original price for the building that Mirales was supposed to design. The fact that the final project was re-designed innumerable times as construction progressed, and is now twice the size of the original design after every vested interest who could possibly affect the final design made sure that they bloody well did - and that includes the media, who were unhappy about the media facilities and wanted them expanded - are of course merely small and irrelevant details. And then people go and confuse construction costs with final costs, and the two are vastly diferent (the latter includes fees, VAT, the cost of the land, and the costs of rennovating Queensbury House, and that wasn't cheap in and of itself).
Yet people still go on and on about £40 million being the original estimate. It was an estimate, but not the one for the complex that was actually built (and it is a complex, with 2 office buildings and the parliament buildings themselves, and there seem to be four of them).
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September 04, 2004
An unexpected delight...
Scottish Hospitality
And do bring an umbrella. It rains. A lot.
I regret to report that today the weather failed to perform as expected and it was not only sunny in Edinburgh, but it was even WARM. This is unheard of, at least this year...
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August 16, 2004
Defending the indefensible
Council Leaders defend a bigger Kinnaird
A massive expansion of the Fort Kinnaird shopping centre will be "in the best interests of the whole city"
Well, the expansion won't be massive, and it won't be in the best interests of the city as a whole, but it will certainly be in the best interests of the City of Edinburgh Council, who are desperate to get every penny in taxes out of retailers that they possibly can.
Another two fingers to the city centre retailers, but then the council doesn't seem to think much of them anyway, so that's no real surprise.
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Spot the difference...
between Extra funding for capital police force and City police cash blow.
The former is ooh, extra £600,000 for Lothian and Borders Police, isn't that great, while the second points out this is rather less than what L&B Police actually asked for... and that the police have already spent the money anyway.
There are two real issues here. The first is that for a very long time the L&B Police have been woefully underfunded, stretched to their limits and increasingly unable to do all of their jobs.
The second is the increasing lack of nuance in the BBC's online news, which I think has become more and more noticeable over the last year. Increasingly the BBC seems to package "news" as a collection of facts, usually presented without context, and summed up with bland and sometimes arbitrary conclusions masquerading as analysis. Maybe this is because their online news articles are just so damn short...??
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August 13, 2004
Would you pay...
£137,000 [i.e. $250,000] for this?
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August 12, 2004
Recycling reaches all-time-high
BBC NEWS | Politics | Recycling reaches all-time-high
But not, of course, in Scotland, where we appear not to believe in such things.
<sarcasm>Perhaps the native thrift make such things unnecessary...?</sarcasm>
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August 11, 2004
On the decline of urban architecture
Marginal Revolution: Has urban architecture declined?
Wandering around Edinburgh, Tyler ponders a perceived decline in semi/modern urban architecture. There are a couple of reasons for this he misses:
1. Postwar architecture developed free of the design constraints inherent within the pre-war planning system in the UK. The post-war need to rebuild meant that local authorities lost the ability to refuse planning permission for eyesores [etc.].
2. Postwar planners developed a love for eyesores, and a deep longing for the ability to redesign cities in a 'rational' way [particularly to suit the needs of the automobile...]. It will take at least another 50 years to fix these mistakes in the UK.
3. The regeneration of housing stock, particularly the very poor housing for much of the working class, was the impetus behind much post-war suburban design/development, rather than the continued development of upper/middle class suburbs.
Tyler is right to say that we do idealise times past - in urban terms not only do we idealise past times but we also often profoundly misunderstand them. The Royal Mile today is very much not a "historic" street, but a product [mainly] of the 1890s and the 1990s.
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/964722
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