Councillors curtail Edinburgh tram project as costs rise

26 Aug 11
The fiasco of Edinburgh’s new trams has plumbed fresh depths of chaos, after city councillors unexpectedly reversed a previous decision and voted to terminate the one line that survives from the originally planned network well short of the city centre.

By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 26 August 2011

The fiasco of Edinburgh’s new trams has plumbed fresh depths of chaos, after city councillors unexpectedly reversed a previous decision and voted to terminate the one line that survives from the originally planned network well short of the city centre.

It leaves the council’s chief executive, Sue Bruce, with the unenviable task of trying over the next few days to renegotiate terms with the project contractors, with whom the city has been locked in long, expensive and vituperative dispute.

A split in the council’s Liberal Democrat-Scottish National Party coalition, with the nationalists abstaining, let Labour push through a motion to end the line in from the airport at Haymarket in the west of the city, instead of running it on along Princes Street to St Andrew Square.

Labour claims that the foreshortened route will save the city from having to borrow an extra £231m, though there is little certainty about any of the financial numbers.

Twice in recent days the notional cost of binning the entire project, on which July’s initial decision to take the line through the city centre was based, has been revised down, from £750m to £670m and then £651m. At the same time, the council estimates that a service operating only to Haymarket will lose £4m a year.

The original vision for a three-line network covering much of the city was launched in 2002 with Scottish government funding of £375m. But timetables and budgets soon ran awry. Three lines became two, then one. The Haymarket option amounts to just the western third of the remaining line and could cost upwards of £700m.

Meanwhile, citizens and businesses have had to endure years of disruption, as streets were dug up all over Edinburgh. The arms-length company set up by the council to manage the project, Transport Initiatives Edinburgh, underwent numerous changes of leadership and is now being expensively wound up.

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