Dear Councillors and Council Officials
One month after the Debenham fire, Edinburgh’s public transport network continues to face unprecedented challenges due to the ongoing Princes Street disruption.
In your response to our first open letter on 13 July, you stated your three primary objectives:
- Ensuring public safety
- Protecting important built heritage impacted by the fire
- Keeping the city moving during its busiest period
We recognise the enormous resources required to achieve these objectives and fully support them, provided they are pursued in parallel.
Everyone will be grateful that public safety has been maintained over the last five weeks and it is welcome news that building stabilisation is expected to be achieved roughly nine weeks post-fire.
But we believe more must and can be done. Public transport users need not just be kept moving, but delays and extended journey times experienced by them across the entire network need to be reduced.
We appreciate the cancellation of the George Street “Summertime Streets” initiative and note the measures taken to improve westbound bus flow at the George Street and Charlotte Square bottleneck. However, Lothian Buses was recently forced to reroute three services entirely away from the New Town to mitigate George Street delays. Furthermore, tram users have had no dedicated replacement service, resulting in abandoned journeys and negative local economic impacts.
We therefore urge you to allocate a portion of the £5,000,000 Scottish Government support toward the following measures:
- a) Step up temporary bus prioritisation measures at all locations where congestion is causing delayed journeys
- b) Establish temporary bus stops on George Street to accommodate at least some diverted services – a key measure benefiting bus users with mobility difficulties and city centre businesses
- c) Provide immediately usable information about diversions at all affected bus stops
- d) Introduce a dedicated bus replacement service covering the tram route between Shandwick Place and Newhaven, should the reopening of Princes Street in both directions be delayed past the end of August.
Looking ahead, we are keen that lessons are learned from this crisis. This should start with the collation of comprehensive data on delays across all bus services and include the development of ready-made contingency plans for similar single-point-of-failure incidents in Edinburgh – perhaps by expanding the remit of the long-delayed Strategic Infrastructure Forum.
Edinburgh Bus Users’ Group (EBUG)
Representing Edinburgh’s bus passengers.