Back to HOMEPAGE TIE chief Richard Jeffrey says Edinburgh trams
will be worth the wait
Mike Wade
Columnist: The Times
Filed 03 Jul 09
©Mike Wade
This article was originally published in The TImes on 3rd July 2009.
It is reproduced here with the kind permission of its author and of the newspaper.
Two floors beneath Richard Jeffrey’s office in Haymarket, Edinburgh, tram works are in full swing. Cars inch into side streets, cyclists wobble past traffic cones, and above the noise of drills, you can almost pick out the sound of residents gnashing their teeth.
But not even the harshest critic of TIE — the company delivering the city’s tram network — could accuse Mr Jeffrey, its chief executive, of avoiding his problems.
Over the past two years, TIE (Transport Initiatives Edinburgh) has faced merciless criticism: for disrupting trade and traffic, for wasting money, and for a contractual row which halted work in March.
The effects of that dispute linger. Cost and delivery are key issues for Mr Jeffrey, who has already announced that trams will not begin running as scheduled in July 2011, and may not be in service until 2012.
While negotiations over prices and timetables continue, he will not speculate on their outcome, only admitting that “delays cost money”. In practice, what he euphemistically calls a “phased opening” is now a possibility, allowing him to keep within his £512 million budget. A section of line, from Ocean Terminal to Newhaven, could be delayed beyond 2012. Work there still has not started, though a first contract is imminent.
Whatever the outcome of contractual talks, Mr Jeffrey, the former managing director of Edinburgh Airport, is braced for more bad publicity. His “network”, originally a dream of three lines criss-crossing suburbia, is already just “Route One: Airport”. Is it all still worth it? Absolutely, he insists. Trams are lauded by transport experts, and every city that operates a system is delighted with it.
Dublin is his touchstone. Trams were introduced in the teeth of local opposition, but five years after inception they are hugely popular because of the ease of movement and development opportunities they offer. Mr Jeffrey tells his staff: “One day you’ll be able to tell your friends, ‘I helped build the Edinburgh tram’.” Right now it’s not a great gambit. People are not on board with the concept of the tram.
But while Mr Jeffrey accepts that it is important to maintain public interest and approval, “there is a time and a place when people will be receptive to those messages and it is not when you are digging big holes outside their shops”.
Then there are the hostile politicians. The tram was a Labour initiative, but for two years, the SNP has held sway at Holyrood and forms half of the coalition on Edinburgh council.
Nationalists were conspicuously unhelpful during the recent dispute. Stewart Stevenson, the transport minister, announced that he would not help with more money, while Steve Cardownie, a senior SNP councillor, warned that the tram might have to be abandoned.
“Anyone who took this on and was unaware of the politics would be walking round with their eyes closed,” says Mr Jeffrey, who took up his post after the dispute. “There is a level of complexity that even an informed observer would struggle to understand. That’s why I say it is the most complex civil engineering project in Scotland for a generation. Not because there is cutting-edge engineering but because of all the different pressures — contractual, political, media, financial.”
In the end he passionately believes that the tram will form part of an “integrated transport system” and “future-proof” the city’s infrastructure. But how does that square with the observation that there is just a single tram stop between Coates Crescent in the West End and St Andrew Square, a long mile distant?
The answer, apparently, is that design is always a compromise. “You have to go back to the designers and ask why they emerged with that solution,” Mr Jeffrey says. “Was it because they ignored issues? Or because they were incompetent? Or was it because, when they took everything into account — cost, programme, practicalities, other city centre users, design, footfalls and flows — they concluded this was the right solution?”
But doesn’t that prove there was never enough budget to deliver the original vision? “It is a reasonable assumption that there was a trade-off between cost and design,” he says. “Of course there was — I have never worked on a project where there wasn’t. I might get a few people writing to me saying, ‘I don’t like the design’, but I’ll never get one saying, ‘I wish it had cost more’.”
©Mike Wade
Further reading recommended by Land-Care
Wade, Mike (2009). SNP 'inertia' over Edinburgh trams fiasco.
Article reproduced by permission from the Times, 21 March 2009
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