Dublin today, Edinburgh tomorrow?

Per RTE news:

21 people have been injured, three seriously, after a collision involving a Luas tram and a bus on O'Connell Street in Dublin.

The driver of the Luas had to be cut from the wreckage by emergency services. The accident occurred just after 3pm this afternoon.

There is widespread traffic disruption in the city following the accident and gardaí are diverting traffic away from the O'Connell Street and Parnell Street areas.

Luas Red Line services are only operating between Tallaght and Smithfield as a result.

Most Dublin Bus services, that would usually use O'Connell St, are diverting via Gardiner St instead.

O'Connell Street northbound is closed and will remain so until at least 7.30pm this evening.

However, the southbound side of the street has re-opened.

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No tram funding

So, some news of the Edinburgh Tram scheme, and it is not good.

First, line 1B has been abandoned due to the "economic downturn." In business-speak, the line has been "postponed" but the expectation now (as indeed, when the plans were first mooted) is that line 1B will not see the light of day.

Second, after the collapse of these plans, further questions have been raised by Lothians MSPs over the funding for line 1A which is meant to run from Leith to the airport. The SNP's Shirley-Anne Somerville doesn't believe the line will be delivered "on time and on budget" while Tory MSP Gavin Brown suggests there may now be a £6m shortfall because of a deal negotiated for both lines 1A and 1B.

Meanwhile, the guys who are in charge of delivering the whole scheme have been paid nearly £1m in bonuses before a single piece of track has been laid.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. This is a damn fiasco that is worse even than the building of the Scottish Parliament - at least the city wasn't torn up for that vanity excercise.

Have we come too far to call the whole thing off?

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Tram fools

So here's an idea.

Let's find a capital city somewhere.

Let's have a huge, international festival, have some of the world's biggest stars and draw thousands of people to the city.

Let's run the best bus system in the country in that capital city in 2007 and 2008.

Then let's dig up half the city to lay tram lines, closing streets and seeing businesses lose masses of their turnover (this, of course, before the credit crunch).

Then let's close the main street in that city to put in the ground work for a tram system.

Then let's allow the company who are doing the work to hold the council to ransom for an extra £80m on top of a fixed contract, close the main street but down tools and then delay the conclusion of the project by 16 months.

You probably couldn't make it up.

Yet that's the situation in Edinburgh as I currently see it.

Now I know there are some here who can't wait until the trams are up and running and others who think they are the biggest waste of money since Tore Andre Flo signed for Rangers (£12m lest we forget - comparatively speaking, a bargain).

I don't have anything against trams in principle. I've been in several cities (Bilbao, Toronto) where they work well (albeit the former only has a single line and seems a bit pointless). But I think that if this was going to work it needed the backing of the whole city - and it needed leadership from the Council which, given the divisive nature of the project, it was never going to get.

It's a mess now, pure and simple. And Edinburgh, with the need for new schools etc, looks like it will be paying the price for a long time.

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