I’ve been looking into the details of the latest streets in which Dundee City Council proposes to install walking, wheeling and cycling lanes.
With time on my hands I had a look at the area in question, around the forthcoming Bell Street Car Park Active Travel hub.
I varied my visits – rush hour, lunchtimes, mornings, afternoons. There were a few cyclists and wheelchair users/scooters, but not many.
On the wet and windy Monday of this week I saw no cyclists, no wheelers, and very few walkers.
This is pitifully unscientific, I admit.
But – install cycle racks at the car park and hope hordes of cyclists suddenly appear? That’s also pretty unscientific.
I made these visits because I’d wondered just how desperately these paths are needed.
There was troubling news last week to make that question very pertinent.
Shona Robison is about to impose unprecedented cuts to public services.
What savings will Dundee be forced into?
The grant for the travel hub is £14 million, but the project’s total cost is quoted as £16m.
Is the city to pay the £2m shortfall? If not, where is it coming from?
I’d like the council to explain. Reveal exactly how much Dundee has to pay in the financial years 2024/25 and 2025/26.
Because £2m is a significant outlay in a year financially tighter than any for three decades.
Every council service, every council-run project, every council employee – if their funding stops, or they’re made redundant, they’ll react with fury if £2m was splurged on a few street surfaces instead.
Remember the Big Noise Douglas and Grey Lodge Settlement anger? That, but multiplied many times.
What will Dundee City Council prioritise?
This anger will come from your constituents, Dundee City Council.
Your voters in your town reacting to your priorities.
Councillors, in your self-congratulatory fug you are unable to see that the proposed level of spending on paths isn’t proportionate and isn’t being done in a sensible timeframe.
You drench your pet projects with cash and beggar others.
Continuing to buy shiny gewgaws when there’s no food in the house is how a child would act; you don’t seem to have an adult in the room to point that out.
Any reasonable person should question how a shrinking budget is spent when old people require care, we desperately lack affordable housing, the DCA is struggling, and the education system is in meltdown.
The timescale of the path plans needs a re-think. Bank the grants for a few years. Any reasonable person, or government body, will applaud the fiscal shrewdness.
Councillors, with this tunnel vision you are acting like gilded fools who see only the ideological value of winning an argument, not the tangible value of a responsible truth.
I ask again, a simple question that will enable council tax payers to come to an informed opinion: how much of Dundee’s money will be spent on walking/wheeling/cycle paths in the next two years?
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