Pretty, but Waste of Money

Photo smsm1

Seems City of Edinburgh Council’s Road Services is on a mission to ‘restore’ some of Edinburgh’s pedestrian and cycle ‘facilities’. Recently it refurbished the gates at the mouth of the St. Leonard’s Tunnel by replacing the long absent hoop which impeded touring cyclists.

Predictable howls of protest (mostly by e-mail) from some of the many cyclists using the Innocent Route, resulted in the offending item being removed a week later. Councillors for the area have been told “instruction was to repair and re-paint the existing pedestrian guardrail and gate at the East Parkside entrance to the innocent railway tunnel.  It appears the hoop was installed by the workshops based on the original design of this feature and the remains of a metal post at this location.”

This would explain similar work at Brunstane (photo), but not the additional, attractive, paving. The litter bin is an added bonus, which should be repeated on all off-road paths – especially those near secondary schools (e.g. Trinity)…

However as smsm1 points out on flickr “there are a significant number of cyclists who are just avoiding the gates by going over the grass on the left hand side of this picture”. So no chance of discouraging illegal motorbikes then. Perhaps the money should have been spent on tarmacing this short section of Sustrans’ prestigious NCN1.

If you know of similar ‘issues’ in Edinburgh please comment below or add photo to barriers to cycling in Edinburgh flickr group.