Roads are like arteries for cities. Roads get you places. Cyclists, walkers, buses, cars, trucks, etc, all need to use roads. The place would grind to a hault if it wasn’t for roads.
Unfortunately, Edinburgh has the most dug-up roads in the world.
I went into town the other day. I saw miles and miles of roads being dug-up. The entire length of Princess Street is being dug-up for the second time in three years, because some idiot signed-off the tram work when it was defective and the work had to be re-done.
Haymarket is a mess. Shandwick Place is closed. A few months ago they put down some nice new cobbles on Castle Street, and now they’re digging a trench down it! They’ve been digging up North St Andrews Street for years now. And that’s only what’s happening in the very centre of town.
Bus routes are diverted all over the place. Roads are closed for hundreds of yards. Shops suffer. Everyone suffers.
You’d think that there would be some urgency to get the work done, but no! See if you can spot anyone actually doing anything in the two photos below. Shandwick Place is usually very busy. It’s right at the west end of the centre of town.
Shandwick Place - looking west
Shandwick Place - looking east
Shandwick Place - a few months ago
It’s actually not that long ago that Shandwick Place was resurfaced, as you can see in the centre of the road above. Soon after, they came along and dug up the edges where they’d previously put down a green, bus-route surface. And now they’re digging it ALL up again!
This will go into the history books alongside the great fire of London and the 30 years war. Whoever had the original brainwave should be executed. Think how many state-of-the-art buses you could have bought.
Sadly the powers here are planning trams through the city, insisting on learning the hard way.
By: Albert on February 23, 2012
at 8:44 am
Exactly.
By: Roddy MacLeod on February 23, 2012
at 10:30 am
It is a bit of a mess, isn’t it?
By: hotboy on February 23, 2012
at 11:07 am
The photos make me so sad. I wonder if this has to do with what we hear about your “austerity measures”? Are there no taxes to keep the road construction workers on the job?
By: Kay on February 23, 2012
at 6:46 pm
Hi Kay,
I think it is a case of not enough urgency. They are spending, in effect, £100,000 per metre on the trams. And they seem to like digging up the roads a lot.
By: Roddy MacLeod on February 23, 2012
at 7:35 pm
Where I live, they resurfaced the whole harbor bridge last month. This week they’ve had to start filling in the first potholes. Is there some cosmic phenomenon going on?
By: Albert on February 24, 2012
at 2:59 pm
Maybe they employed the same company that made a mess of Princes Street the time before last that they dug it up.
By: Roddy MacLeod on February 24, 2012
at 3:19 pm