Edinburgh would be encircled by an elevated six-lane ring road under a proposal brought forward in response to sustained population growth, principally from the United States.
Arrivals from America have passed 400,000 since 2023. Morningside has an unofficial residents’ association operating on Eastern Standard Time. Three separate streets in the New Town are now owned in their entirety by people who first visited on a nine-day itinerary and did not go home.
The consequence, transport officials say, is a city centre that no longer functions in August, or increasingly in the eleven months around it.
The proposal
The road would run on a viaduct at an average height of 30 metres, clad in sandstone described in the documents as “sympathetic”. It would pass at roof height along the southern edge of the Old Town, cross the Cowgate twice, and connect to a multi-storey structure on the site of a currently unremarkable car park.
Historic Environment Scotland responded to the consultation with a document of forty-one pages. The first page contains one word.
“We are being asked to consider a raised motorway through a World Heritage Site. I want to be fair to the people who drew it. They have clearly never been here.”
A heritage officer who asked not to be named
The trucks
A specific and repeatedly cited pressure is vehicle size. A significant proportion of recent arrivals have imported vehicles from home, and Victoria Street was not laid out with those vehicles in mind. Neither was Circus Lane, the Grassmarket, or the entrance to any multi-storey in the city.
Council data records 1,340 incidents last year of a vehicle becoming wedged, of which 210 required a crane.
Also proposed
- A cable car from the airport to a terminus near the Royal Mile
- A one-way system for the Royal Mile itself, with pedestrians moving downhill only
- Widening the Cowgate to four lanes, which requires removing the buildings on both sides of the Cowgate
- A second Forth road crossing for the second Forth road crossing
The timing question
The most common objection raised at public meetings has not been heritage, or cost, or the crane statistics. It has been delivery.
The tram extension to Newhaven took, from first vote to first passenger, the better part of two decades. Residents have drawn their own conclusions about a 12-kilometre elevated motorway, and several have pointed out that at the same rate of progress the ring road would open in 2094, by which point the projected arrivals figure is 2.1 million and the road would need to be considerably larger.
