title: Influence of public transport'on the growth of Edinburgh
title: The influence of public transport'on the growth of Edinburgh
titleType: AlternativeTitle
Creators: name: Page, Peter John
Publisher: name: The University of Edinburgh
Year: 1972
Subjects: public transport
Edinburgh
public transport routes
high densities of urban development
urban development
old railway network
railway network
housing areas
suburbia
peak work journey times
congestion
land use pattern
Alternatives for Edinburgh

description: Many people assume that there is a close relationship between public transport routes and high densities of urban development. In Edinburgh at least this is not the case. Until the advent of the Green Belt policy in the 1940s sought to contain the radial extension of the City there was no great scarcity of building land which might have encouraged high densities. Moreover, the middle and upper income groups who formed the bulk of those moving into the suburbs, at least up to about 1920, were doing so in order to find the space which implies a low density of development. Fashion played a very large part in determining the exact location of the new housing, but public transport was a necessary condition for development to take place beyond a walking distance from the city centre. It was not however a sufficient condition. Because the City Corporation controlled both public housing and a large part of the public transport system, including an easily extensible network of motor ’bus routes, in the City after 1919, the suburban housing estates for lower income groups which they built could be located solely on the grounds of potential accessibility. These estates form most of the higher density suburban developments, and many lie in areas poorly served by public transport other than the ’buses laid on specially to serve them. The result of these many factors is that there is very little correlation between the patterns of urban development.in the City and the non-'bus public transport routes, existing and defunct. The lack of correlation with the old railway network, now largely disused for intra-urban passenger services, is particularly disadvantageous because such a correlation would have allowed these disused routes to be reinvigorated as rights of way for a new and competetive public transport system. Because of the way in which the City has developed, retaining a major concentration of employment in its central area whilst the housing areas serving this concentration have been devolved into suburbia, serious problems of congestion have arisen in and around the core, particularly at the peak work journey times. This congestion has been seriously aggravated by the increasing use of space consuming private cars in place of the public transport which first allowed the City to spread beyond a pedestrian radius. If past development were such that a new public transport system approaching the competetive ideal could be inserted into the existing city there would be a possibility of alleviating this congestion by attracting sufficient people away from their private cars to reduce the demand for road space to a level which could be accomodated adequately by the existing road system. In fact the possibilities for such a solution are limited, and, for economic and aesthetic reasons, so are the possibilities for large scale new road construction in the central area. Thus the answer to the congestion problem lies in a compromise between accomodation of the private car, development of public transport, and an adjustment of the land use pattern. The actual solution adopted may therefore well be akin to that suggested as a prefered scheme by the City's planning and transport consultants in their 1971 interim report, 'Alternatives for Edinburgh'. Similar considerations are likely to apply in other cities insofar as their growth is similar to that of Edinburgh, whilst,overall, the most important lesson to be learnt from the study is probably a reinforcement of the concept that, unless a city is consciously designed around its transport system, it will be likely to experience problems due to the malfunctioning of that system, as Edinburgh is now doing.