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🤝 November 2026 Transport & Environment Committee - Agenda

The City of Edinburgh Council's Transport and Environment Committee ('TEC') meets for the last time in 2026 this Thursday, 12th November; if you look closely, you can see our periscope jutting out of the mound of paperwork that's landed ahead of this meeting, trying to scout for enemy ships cycling-relevant items on the table this time round.

💜 Special thanks to Spokes and others who have reached out ahead of this meeting with information and feedback on agenda items to cover!

⬇️ Jump to:

🌐 Meeting Page & Agenda | PDFs: 📑 Full Agenda Reports Pack | 💼 Business Bulletin | 📋 Work Programme

💼 Business Bulletin

📄 Business Bulletin [PDF] »

The Business Bulletin is home to less significant items that don't warrant a full report, or further updates on more significant past reports.

📦 Leith Walk: Side street loading (page 1, 2)

Following on from council actions around 'incorrect parking on the tram line', Officers are looking at loading and servicing for local business and additional loading provision on Arthur St, Balfour St, Casselbank St, Manderston St, Smith’s Pl, Lorne St, Jamieson Pl, Dalmeny St, Albert St, Brunswick Rd, Brunswick St, Annandale St, Montgomery St, Gayfield Sq, and Blenheim Pl.

This is good to see, and could even lead to less vans and HGVs with identity crises sat in the cycleways on the street...

📡 Communicating road improvements (page 2)

At TEC in April it was agreed Officers would look at how information on maintaining and resurfacing roads around Edinburgh "...might be made accessible to the public online, including the ability to search by location to find the condition of a road and when scheduled maintenance or resurfacing is next planned."

Officers are expecting to have this launched ahead of the next Capital Investment report in April.

🚂 Powderhall Railway Line (page 4, 5)

After the awaited response from the Scottish Government about the SNP's manifesto pledge to 'support' the route:

In summary, the Scottish Government recognise the potential benefits the project could bring to active travel connectivity in Edinburgh, notes responsibility for active travel infrastructure sits with City of Edinburgh Council, notes that discussions between the Council and Network Rail regarding land arrangements, infrastructure requirements and associated costs are still ongoing and these would have to be finalised before any future request for funding can be considered.

It will be interesting to see where this goes, with so many of the parties to it claiming that they want to see it happen continually finding ways to avoid moving it forward.

🔥 Princes Street update (page 9 to 11)

Following the major fire in the former Debenhams store, this is a lengthy update on transport impacts and the commendable effort to use the 'downtime' with trams not running in the North and sections of Princes St closed to bring forward other maintenance projects to make use of time with the carriageway already shut.

This includes an update that by the end of the year we should see the occupied carriageway in front of the site restored for normal passage, which will be most welcome as it's currently a tramline-adjacent pinch point and a bit hairy on a bike.

🗳️ Items for Decision

📋 7.1 Petition for Consideration - A Trial of New Bus Lane Operating Hours between East Milton Road and London Road

📄 Report [PDF] »

2,000 Edinburgh residents and sixty businesses would like to carry on parking, loading and driving in bus lanes because they value private convenience over a successful public transport network. Change is scary, and what could possibly be gained from making an alternative to congestion-causing private car use faster and more attractive as a transport option?

An inbound deputation from Edinburgh Bus Users Group is yet to be published — one would assume backing the 7-7-7 lanes! - and Spokes have published a written deputation [PDF] on the matter backing them also.

When we improve the bus network, everyone wins. Do the council have the political will to ride this one out and do it anyway? Watch this space.

📋 7.2 Petition - Urgent Road Safety Improvements Required on Station Road and High Street, Kirkliston

📄 Report [PDF] »

The petition calls on the Council to implement urgent safety measures on the Station Road/High Street bend in Kirkliston due to speeding traffic. The petition also calls for improved junction visibility mirrors, clear and prominent warning signs and safe pedestrian crossings near bus stops.

Notably this road leads to the A89 cycleroute into Edinburgh and to the (former railway line) Queensferry path, so undoubtedly has an impact for cycle users too.

Along similar lines, the next item 7.3 Petition for Consideration - Broomhall Road, Road Calming Measures [PDF] was deferred from last TEC as the petitioners were not in attendance, and represents another community coming to the committee to ask for safer streets free of dangerous, speeding traffic.

🌆 7.6 City Centre Public Realm Proposals

📄 Report [PDF] »

Appendices:

This significant report brings together a number of city centre projects, lists them along with their status (main report PDF, page 6 onwards), and also proposes a way forward specifically for the stalled George St project.

These projects, under the council's City Centre Transformation project, are also being assessed and catalogued under a new report coming in January 2027 (and fleshed out further later in the year) called the City Centre Transformation Operations Plan or 'CCTOP' (assumedly this will be provided with a long beard, sunglasses and a fluffy guitar). This takes the list of projects underway and examines how they will function together to deliver the City Mobility Plan, Our Future Streets Circulation Plan, and overall fundamental shifts to the transport landscape in the city.

TEC are being asked to:

✏️ The George St 'Reduced Design'

The original design - also laid out in the appendix, as the first couple of pages - was around £34m and blocked by the SNP group close to the end of the redesign process, feeling that Princes St was being neglected while George St was being gold-plated, and that both should be considered 'in the round'. The group also felt that the aims of the scheme - to pedestrianise George Street with cycle access - was being watered down significantly over time with more and more planned vehicle incursion.

To reach a compromise, the proposed designs have been 'value engineered' to a reduced cost of £19m:

The Reduced Design for George Street aims to deliver meaningful cost efficiencies while maintaining the core objectives of the project. This is achieved primarily through a revised material palette, including the use of more standardised carriageway materials and a streamlined specification for street furniture.

While the design moves away from some of the natural materials originally considered for the carriageway space, it provides a cost-effective solution that supports project delivery and long-term maintainability. Importantly, there remains an opportunity to introduce setts as part of a future phase of works.

The planters will continue to contribute to the quality and character of the street environment while supporting a range of placemaking and amenity benefits, despite not containing trees.

Access bollards will remain in place to help manage vehicle movements during pedestrian and cycle priority periods.

To summarise; the few trees in the design have been removed, making excavations simpler and less need for moving utilities; the 'cycle superhighway' [it's a road] feared by our dear friends in the Conservatives will now haste ye along on asphalt rather than setts; and other materials have been dialled down in places to save further.

The appendix also offers a planter-less 'Above ground'-only design for £4m less, which looks pretty bleak; but for that kind of saving I think we're unlikely to see it settled for come Thursday.

It's past time to move ahead with this project - as the representatives of Essential Edinburgh, Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce and the George Street Association have stated in a recent letter to TEC Convener Cllr Stephen Jenkinson - not to mention completing this vital central section of the City Centre West to East Link cycle route.

🧭 7.7 City Mobility Plan – 2026 Review

📄 Report [PDF] »

Appendices:

The City Mobility Plan ('CMP') is reviewed every two years, and was last reviewed in 2024. As per that page:

It has been prepared alongside the City Plan 2030 to help Edinburgh connect through a safer and more inclusive carbon neutral transport system - delivering a healthier, thriving, fairer and compact capital city and a higher quality of life for all residents.

The plan is central to a clean, connected and net zero carbon future. This sits along with other innovative schemes we are delivering, from City Centre Transformation to a Low Emission Zone, expansion of the tram network and a range of exciting active travel projects connecting communities.

It will help people make greener choices about how they move around the city, through improving walking, wheeling and cycling options and creating better links to public transport.

The CMP has a corresponding Implementation Plan, which is comprised of several documents - this is, of course, complex and wide-ranging planning work, trying to wrangle an entire city's networks into shape under one programme.

There's the CMP itself; the Implementation Plan, and 'Delivering actions..' documents for active travel, parking, public transport and road safety. These 'delivering actions' documents will be updated depending on what is agreed at TEC this week; you can see the current trove of information here, last reviewed in 2024.

📉 Lies, damned lies, and statistics

It's slightly impossible to be across all of this, as you might imagine - but one aspect did jump out that's worth examining.

Appendices 2 and 6 back up a claim made by an Administration Councillor at full council last week that there had been a 17% reduction in vehicle traffic since 2019 — an assertion that we found odd given that it runs counter to Department for Transport counts of vehicle kilometers travelled in Edinburgh across the period to 2025, which show that traffic had returned to the same level it was at prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As it turns out, CEC have been conducting their own counts - not of journey lengths, which DfT measure, but of vehicle volumes. As such, the Council claims in updates to the City Mobility Plan to have seen a reduction in vehicular traffic already.

A map of counting nodes around Edinburgh, focused largely on the City Centre
Image: City of Edinburgh Council, 7.7 City Mobility Plan - 2026 Review Appendix 2

It doesn't take a Cartography PHD to recognise that's not a great spread of counter data - large areas of the city are not counted and the bypass is excluded entirely, with most of the counting taking place in the City Centre.

By counting traffic volumes rather than estimates of distance travelled — the standard measure of traffic volume by the Department for Transport and others — the Council looks to be establishing their own proprietary metrics as the means by which to measure the success of their interventions, which is an interesting move particularly once you start to look at the supposed trends from this data.

A chart showing a reduction from 2019 to 2025 with 26% less buses/coaches on the roads, 16% less cars, 3% more cycles, 26% less heavy goods vehicles, 9% less vans, 31% less motorcycles and 44% less taxis, totalling 17% less motor vehicles overall
Image: City of Edinburgh Council, 7.7 City Mobility Plan - 2026 Review Appendix 2

From 2019 to 2025 — a time period across which the Office of National Statistics reports a 9.2% uplift in online shopping — we're somehow concurrently seeing 9% less vans on the city's roads and 26% less HGVs?

Does this gel at all with your own experience of moving around the city?

The report itself notes:

While public transport patronage has not increased compared to 2019, it is notable that, following a significant dip during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, overall public transport patronage has now returned to pre-pandemic levels

So we now have 2019 levels of bus patronage on a network supposedly seeing up to 26% fewer buses (and coaches) on it?

Above my pay grade, yes - but there's surely something not right here. Others discussing the metrics agree.

I really don't want to just become another crackpot with a tinfoil hat saying the council are marking their own homework. But it's hard to believe a council so resolute in its inertia when it comes to demand management and meaningful change have moved the needle at all on motor vehicle dominance when the level of congestion and continued effects on transport so strongly suggest otherwise.

☝🏼 7.8 City Mobility Plan – Capital Investment Programme Annual Update

📄 Report [PDF] »

Appendices:

Less theoretical than the CMP itself, this is the annual update to how the CMP's 'active and sustainable' projects are being prioritised. They're scored against a number of criteria (Appendix 5B) and ranked to set out how their delivery will be scheduled, along with how they'll be funded - mainly externally.

Rolling programmes like secure on-street cycle parking in 'hangars', and the rolling programme of upgrading 'Travelling Safely'-era routes from defender bollards are not included - these are budgeted separately in Appendix 4.

In summary, while many projects have been renamed, merged or split - and a number of bus projects have been folded into wider projects with several geographic interventions - there are no huge surprises in this year's prioritisation recommendations. A replacement for St Mark's Park Bridge makes an appearance and is recommended to proceed; Town Centre Footway Widening and works at Hunters Sq funded by the Visitor Levy also newly proceed.

A number of projects concluded, and around twenty new projects were added all at RIBA stage '0' ('Strategic Definition') that are paused but show a continuing pipeline of active travel projects will continue to trickle in and join the queue. These alone are enough for a standalone article!

🔎 Items for Scrutiny

These items may or may not be discussed at the meeting, depending on whether there are questions or points raised by Councillors on the day.

🚌 8.1 Motion by Councillor Kinross-O’Neill – Bus Journey Times

📄 Report PDF

This continues a process set in motion back in January 2026 looking at Bus infrastructure, but there's actually a fair few active travel measures included in the upcoming projects intended to tackle bus delays - primarily the list in Appendix 2 of the report, with projects listed from page 6 onwards.

It's interesting to see how so many of these projects improve bus journey times and so are eligible for the Scottish Government's 'Bus Infrastructure Fund' Tier 2 funding, but along the way are slated to make more holistic improvements including loads of cycling infrastructure and pedestrian realm works.

🔎 8.2 Road Safety Audits and Traffic Regulation Orders - Motion by Councillor Mowat

📄 Report PDF

This report responds to an adjusted motion by Councillor Mowat at the Transport and Environment Committee on 2 April 2026, and provides a summary of the purpose, process and management of Road Safety Audits (RSAs) and Traffic Regulation Orders (TROs) and sets out how officers consider these in relation to safety and the legal process.

If you've ever wondered, it's your lucky day!

🦺 8.3 Road Safety Delivery Plan 2026/27 - Six-month Update

📄 Report PDF

Appendix 1 for this report [PDF] has a list of Toucan crossings, junction improvements and build-outs in the Road Safety works pipeline, as well as details in the main report of further 20mph rollout and school travel audit progress.

✍🏽 Motions and Amendments

⛔ 9.1 Motion by Cllr Cuthbert - Closure of Kinauld Tan Works Footbridge

📄 Motion [PDF] »

Rather a decent motion regarding this closed footbridge on the Water of Leith pathway near Currie. While no mention is made of the possibility of a temporary bollarded cycle lane on Lanark Rd while it's resolved, the motion appears to cater to both cycle user safety and cycle travel convenience, which has had me blearily double-checking the originating political party a few times as I write this.

⛏️ 9.2 By Councillor Munro - Cycle Hangars and Road Resurfacing

📄 Motion [PDF]

This motion raises a lot of questions, both written and inferred. Chief among them for me are:

So for the record, we want to create a (probably) unnecessary and costly logistical issue and then also complain about it, in one fell swoop?

A beautiful return to form for the Conservative group after a frankly confusingly friendly 9.1. Bravo.

The Transport & Enviroment Committee will meet this Thursday, 12th November 2026, and we'll have a round-up in our subsequent issues...

🪧 Edinburgh Critical Mass will be protesting the slow, painful pace of change outside the City Chambers on the Royal Mile from 8.30am on the 12th.

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