Edinburgh residents are set to be barred from the city centre in a controversial experiment this summer. City chiefs want to make the world famous old and new towns a tourist-only zone over the festival period.
If passed by committee it’s a decision that will infuriate Edinburgh citizens and campaign groups say they will fight the proposal ‘tooth an nail’. One community group said consultation over the proposals has been woefully inadequate.
A spokesperson for the city’s Transport and Environment department explained: “Most people will understand that it becomes almost impossible to travel in the city centre over the summer months. Public transport is put under a tremendous strain and our roads and pavements become almost impassable.
“As you know the city council is already introducing a number of measures to transform our city centre, and what we now propose is to make our beautiful city centre even more welcoming by making it tourist-only over July and August. This will ease the pressure on our public transport system and enable our lovely visitors to access our popular (if expensive) tourist attractions and festival venues.
“We’ve still to work out the fine detail of the project and there could be some minor operational issues at the outset, but everyone should know full well by now that a few little teething problems have never stopped us before! We do realise of course that this experiment may prove inconvenient for some citizens but most of them don’t really ‘do’ the festival anyway, do they?
“Anyway, our customers citizens will have unfettered access to the city centre for the other ten months of the year so they won’t really have much to moan about – unless this experiment proves to be a huge success, in which case we will close the city centre to residents over the Winter Festival period too. Merry Christmas!”
A spokesperson for the Old Town Community Association said: “We are absolutely disgusted. The council said there was a ‘comprehensive consultation programme’ but let’s be honest, a half hour session in the Scandic Hotel between 8.30 – 9am on a Sunday morning is hardly comprehensive, is it?
“Despite the inconvenient timing I tried to attend, but I couldn’t get out of my tenement for Burke and Hare, a Deacon Brodie lookalike and their ghost tour parties blocking my stair door.”
No-one from the Transport and Environment Committee was available for comment. It’s understood senior committee members and officials are attending an important international conference, ‘Re-imagining brown bins and other rubbish’, in Las Vegas.
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