e2toe4's blog

An OPEN LETTER  has gone to various people in the City of Edinburgh council pointing out NEW DANGERS from traffic in the city.

In 2007/8 the council DISMISSSED detailed scientific concerns about the  EFFECTS OF AIR POLLUTION ON HEALTH by people worried at the massive dislocation to the City's traffic flows that was being planned to accommodate the Tram project.

We've made the point repeatedly that the Edinburgh Tram raises levels of pollutants in our city...  it cleans up the showpiece central streets, takes the pollution from there, increases it, and dumps in residential streets.

We don't think many people believe us, mainly because it just seems too difficult to believe....  Trams?  CREATE pollution??  Everybody knows that's wrong---don't even have to think about it!

Throughout the tram project the Council administration has followed a divide and rule policy toward not only separate interest  groups, (thus trying to create a completely false cyclists v car drivers opposition) but also even neighbourhood v neighbourhood opposition.

The *we can't do anything for you - because it would not be fair to them* argument is invariably used to do nothing for anybody.

"Churchill was distressed at what he saw as sophistry and evasion. He was convinced he was upholding a basic principle a basic of principle of (Parliamentary) democracy, that the Government must act honestly in its evaluation of information, and draw the correct conclusions from those facts, however embarrasing or alarming they might be, rather than twist them to fit the policy."

(From the recently deceased great historian Martin Gilbert's biography*Churchill: A life* pg 528).

Edinburgh Council called it "prudential borrowing" in 2011...after blowing £500M+ with absolutely nothing to show for anything on the Edinburgh tram project...they were desperate.

Desperate enough to decide saving their face was worth another £500M or so of OUR money.

They wanted *something*...anything...to give even a pretence of *success* in a project that had turned into a worldwide byword for incompetence. And so the decision was made to throw another Half a Billion or so after the one already spent.