I’m chasing Kim Harding down a hill. We’re heading from the Royal Mile to Princes Street on the kind of descent one rarely encounters, living as I do in a very flat part of the country.“I love that hill,” he says as we regroup at the traffic lights.
Like Athens and Rome, Edinburgh is built on seven hills, but perhaps more akin to a “lumpy” city like Bristol, those hills don’t deter people from cycling in relatively high numbers by UK standards – 6% of journeys to work and school are by bike, or 2% of all journeys.
Where Edinburgh stands alone is that its city council is committing a percentage of its transport budget to cycling – starting from 5% in 2012 and rising 1% each year to 10%. It’s currently at 8%, or just over £2m, with funding from the Scottish government on top. I’m curious to see what they’re spending the money on, and whether it’s making a difference.
Harding, co-founder of Pedal on Parliament, and the Edinburgh Festival of Cycling, has kindly agreed to show me around during my week-long visit to the city.
Where the money goes
Cycle around Edinburgh and you’ll wonder at first where the money has gone. There’s the familiar – and predictably useless – advisory cycle lanes, “protected” by a dotted line that vehicles regularly drive and park in. Bike racks are few and far between, meaning long searches or long walks once you arrive at your destination.
That’s not to say nothing has changed, rather that much of it until now has happened in places you wouldn’t immediately think to look – or, some might argue, cycle.
The lights change and we cross the new tram tracks on Princes Street, of which I’ve developed a mortal fear since arriving in the city – more on this later – and head uphill once more to George Street.
For now George Street – a straight, flat, half mile shopping street bookended by parks – boasts one of Edinburgh’s first sections of two-way segregated cycle track, a New York-style temporary trial that’s part of an east-west route from Roseburn to Leith Walk. This is the current focus of the council’s cycle infrastructure spending. Cars park on the outside of the lane, and on the inside there’s seating and temporary shops.
So far so good.
However, today there’s a van blocking the entire entrance to the cycle track. Harding points out a gnarled metal bracket on the ground where a post was once anchored – people have been driving down them, he says, since the street was made one-way for motor traffic. Then, halfway along George Street the cycle lane crosses to the other side of the road via a roundabout, with only a few white dots on the road to mark the route, which feels dangerous.
As it’s only a trial it won’t stay like this: following consultation a new segregated route will likely replace it (the design is to be decided). The thing is, there’s barely anyone cycling on it.
“There’s a reason it’s quieter than Princes Street [which runs parallel],” Harding says. “It’s up a hill.”
The fact is most people cycling east-west across the city centre use Princes Street, despite the tram tracks, because it’s the most direct – and flattest – route. That incline, and the fact the George Street bike track currently ends with a shared crossing with pedestrians before a series of right and left turns, is enough to take the George Street route off the desire line for many.
Campaigner Dave du Feu, of prolific local campaign group, Spokes, has been fighting this fight for years. He says: “We have always felt the east-west route should go through Princes Street – it was the route used by a lot more by cyclists than George Street, and it connects into residential streets much better.
“The majority of cyclists are in South Edinburgh, coming from Lothian Road and The Bridges, and the first thing you meet is Princes Street; you don’t meet George Street.”
However the council is set on George Street, partly because it’s on the National Cycle Network (NCN) route, and because of the tram, bus and taxi traffic on Princes Street.
When I talk to Lesley Hinds, the city’s transport convener, she seems genuinely baffled about what the problem is.
“Why would you want to go along Princes Street if you’re a cyclist?” she says.
Taking on the tram
The tram is infamous for cycling injuries. Thompsons Solicitors Scotland reports that it is dealing with 100 cases of cyclists suing the council following injuries sustained from crashing on the tracks – including broken legs, teeth and collarbones and the loss of the end of a finger.
My daily commute to my home for the week took me west past Haymarket Station, where the tram track continues straight while the road bears gently round to the right, putting you at exactly the wrong angle to cross the tracks. This is where most injuries have occurred.
Harding says: “You can’t always choose your line, people cycling are bullied by taxis and buses, and that’s when you crash on the tram lines.”
The council put a work-around in for bikes, a lane like a jug handle, which puts you at almost right angles to the tracks but involves waiting at a set of lights. Many risk the tracks instead.
Outside the offices of Sustrans Scotland, there’s a bike lane painted on the ground between the tram track and pavement that’s so narrow it overlaps the tram line, and when the tram goes past the whole thing is engulfed. The problem, I’ve heard some argue, is the tram was designed in isolation of pedestrians and cyclists, and now everyone has to muddle around it.
However, the four years of its construction, when parts of the city were closed to traffic for long periods, did have some unexpected benefits.
Harding says: “It got too hard to drive so people stopped trying. So we have seen a massive upsurge in cycling because it became a lot easier to cycle into town.”
Success stories
Harding and I stop for a drink beside the popular Meadows cycle route, which runs through city centre parkland, with a cycle counter regularly logging 1,600 cyclists per day. One of Edinburgh’s success stories, it was doubled in width recently, thanks to the cycling money, and the route is now being extended east and west on roads to the Innocent Railway and the canal respectively. There’s a new segregated cycle track leading out of the park, via a toucan crossing, one of the first signs of a growing city centre bike network.
Later, on the phone, du Feu says: “They have had this budget for quite a few years but you don’t really see it if you’re cycling around the city centre; up until about now most of the money has been spent further out.”
“Those are easy routes, politically, that don’t require that we take space from cars.”
One of these out-of-town routes is a lovely wide, smooth bike path separated from the busy A90 by verges, fences and kerbs that leads seamlessly, and safely, back into the city from Queensferry and the Forth Bridge in the north west.
However, as du Feu puts it: “If you want to get high proportions of people cycling you have got to aim for the central areas where lots of people live, and that’s why things are starting to move in that direction now.”
These city centre routes, Edinburgh’s transport convener, Lesley Hinds agrees, are the next challenge – linking up the outer routes and park cycle paths to the city centre.
Hinds believes Edinburgh has a good story to tell with increases in cycling, tram and bus use, and a growing number of car-free households. It’s also, she says, the first city to trial bikes on trams off-peak, which has now become permanent.
There is a palpable sense of frustration among those who want to see change happen faster, and Harding worries thecouncil is “spending an awful lot of money on consultations that go nowhere”, and they should be getting on with more and different trials on the ground instead.
There is still a long way to go: many of the city’s wide streets have no cycling provision at all, and too many cycle lanes are painted optimistically between bifurcating lanes of fast-moving traffic. The red stone chips, used to mark out the cycle lanes because they are cheaper than paint, are barely visible at night.
There are the bold moves too, though: 20mph is being introduced in all residential and shopping areas, and the city centre. Trial bans of traffic outside six Edinburgh primary school gates at rush hour have started. The George Street cycle lane trial ended at the beginning of September, after a year, and the council will now work on designs for a permanent bike route based on feedback from those who use the street.
Edinburgh was the first UK city to sign up to the Charter of Brussels, now followed by Bristol, to have 15% of journeys by bike by 2020 and reduce casualties by 50%. Unlike most UK cities, money for cycling is guaranteed year on year, which makes forward planning possible.
As du Feu says: “It’s a question of councillors building up the courage: doing something, getting positive feedback and then trying something better”.
It’s about the political courage, he says, to build the network of decent routes that are beginning to appear in the city centre, that are protected from traffic and that cars can’t park or drive in.
That way Hinds’ – and the campaigners’ – vision of more people cycling for everyday journeys, without the need for special clothes, can be realised.
