Edinburgh tram project: a right royal mile - The Guardian

It's a story familiar to everyone who uses public transport. You wait for ages, the fare keeps going up and then the journey is cut short before you even arrive. Except that in Edinburgh the story is worse: an ambitious plan to build a city-wide tram network that has come perilously close to disaster. This summer, trams should have begun rattling between Leith and the airport. Instead the system has been delayed, and delayed again. Directors of the trams agency have been kicked out almost as fast as drunks at closing time. Scots have been left with a probable £1bn bill – twice the original estimate – together with business-wrecking disruption and tracks along Princes Street that require nearly a year's remedial work.

How did Edinburgh – a city famed for the prudence of its citizens and an excellent municipal provider of local buses – end up in this mess? The answer lies partly in the squabbling of local politicians, partly in an ill-thought-out rush to acquire a trophy for a capital city, and very largely in the incompetent drafting of the contract between the trams agency, which was to manage the system, and the conglomerate building the tracks.

The fault lies in Scotland – but the lessons for infrastructure investment apply to all of Britain. In glossy computer mock-ups Edinburgh's trams looked a good idea. The city has too much traffic and a limited local rail service. The plan was to link the airport in the west to the waterfront in the east of the city, in need of regeneration. Flush with cash, the Scottish government promised £500m; transport economists worked their wonders and declared that the trams would both boost growth and run at a profit. But construction, when it began in 2008, proved much slower and more expensive than predicted. Engineers inflicted mayhem on the city centre, angering businesses.

As costs overran, the planned system was pruned, then cut short in the city centre near Waverley station. Last month councillors voted to stop the line even earlier, at Haymarket, which would have made it almost useless. Yesterday, a change of heart extended it back to the centre. But Edinburgh will have to pick up the soaring costs of its truncated line and may have to sell Lothian Buses to raise cash. One moral is that officials and politicians find it easier to be seduced by transport schemes than build them to budget (Cambridgeshire's guided busway system has suffered similar woes). The other is that trams are more glamorous, but often less use, than buses. Manchester's trams work, albeit at great cost to build – but in Edinburgh, where the last tram ran in 1956, citizens must wish the council had never plotted their return.