Edinburgh Trams Earn City a Private Eye 'Rotten Borough' Award

Submitted by actionman on Mon, 2 Jan '12 1.07pm

That well known and very popular satirical magazine, "Private Eye"  has given Edinburgh an award under its "Rotten Boroughs" Awards for 2011. 

END OF THE LINE AWARD

To Edinburgh city council, which despite scaling back plans to build a tram network consisting of three lines to just half-a-line, is still £200m over-budget and six years behind schedule.

With the pollution increasing across the city and the City Council awaiting a report on its handling of the trams project by the UN Aarhus Commission in Geneva, this has not been a year of great distinction for the City Council administrators or the Councillors.  

The prospect is looming of yet more disruption and misery for the city as the Council forces through the tracks for the light railway , oh, sorry, 'the tram' into St Andrew Square and on into York Place, so reducing the main east- west artery to two lanes.   

The Council are extracting a terrible revenge on the citizens because they threw out the ineptly structured and ill-thought out Council plan for a Congestion Charge scheme some years ago.

Nothing will change until the Council, as a corporate body, face facts.

While they persist in living in a fairy land of wonder where it is all good and everything is always marvellous; we'll all keep paying the price in the real world. 

The main fact they need to understand is that there's no point just pushing on with something like this hoping it will 'come good in the end' and 'everyone will then forget all the mess, waste and bad stuff."

It just isn't ever going to come good in the end...and far from 'forgetting', the Tram will trundle for decades as a constant reproach to the present generation and an example of how even an apparently good idea (like a Tram) can be messed up bryond belief, if badly planned, executed and managed.