r/Scotland • u/brigadoom • 10h ago
Beyond the Wall Edinburgh Has Been Named One of the World’s Best Cities for Public Transport
https://archive.ph/gQH4023
u/brigadoom 10h ago
Edinburgh has just been named one of the best cities in the world for public transport, taking fourth place in Time Out’s new global ranking and beating the capital to the UK’s spot on the list.
A whopping 92.4 percent of Edinburgh locals gave their public transport top marks. Only Taipei, Singapore and Hong Kong scored higher, and the Scottish capital finished ahead of some transit heavyweights, including Zurich, Vienna and Seoul. [1st, 2nd and 3rd in the TimeOut Survey?]
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u/Abject-Plankton4620 10h ago
I think our public transport is decent, but for London not to be above Edinburgh, or indeed most other places is hilarious
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u/fisico002 10h ago
And I’ve been in plenty of European cities who have better and cheaper public transport
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u/Abject-Plankton4620 9h ago
Which European cities are on the scale of London with better transport?
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u/parkchanwookiee 10h ago
It's probably because London is so sprawling and massive that navigating it using public transport is a big headache regardless of the fact that the various services are doing better than can be expected
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u/wheepete 9h ago
The tube makes navigating a massive incredibly busy city and absolute breeze. The only issue is it's hot in summer and busy at peak times.
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u/alittlelebowskiua People's Republic of Leith 10h ago
I think the places where people go when visiting London isn't the experience most people who live there have wrt transport. Londons underground and overground network is massive, but it's not comprehensive. There are around 5m bus passengers a day in London. And the buses aren't quick.
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u/WildHaggis92 9h ago
My Lothian bus does this really cute thing where if you show up on time or a couple minutes early, it already left 5 minutes ago. But if you show up 5 minutes early to catch it, it's 10-15 minutes late. There's no in-between.
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u/brigadoom 9h ago
They are amazingly punctual since they all got GPS. Sometimes they wait until the official departure time if they are early. The 'real-time' boards at many of the stops aren't always accurate though.
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u/Flaky-Walrus7244 10h ago
People who whinge about buses in Edinburgh obviously haven't lived elsewhere. Compared to most places, the public transportation system is great!
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u/Scunnered21 6h ago
Edinburgh public transport is fine. Verging on good. But it is in no way close to top 4 in the world, sorry.
I think people go over the top about the buses here. They are good, and better than nearly any other city in the UK outside of London. But that says more about how poor bus systems are in the UK than how great Edinburgh is. The reality is it's just as good as any standard, decently-run municipal bus system on the continent. No more. But that's fine.
Where Edinburgh falls down is having next to no suburban rail network or dedicated metro / rapid rail transit network of any type to do the heavy lifting. Except for the recent addition of a single relatively slow tram line, with minimal dedicated right of way.
It's a historical legacy of not having the industrial demands of other cities, that fixed rail was never all that extensive (Glasgow's extensive suburban rail system as one example, which often gets overlooked in these rankings, being a legacy of that). Although there have been opportunities to develop metro-type lines in the past that didn't come to anything, unfortunately.
The idea that a city so utterly reliant on buses could be top 4 in the world for public transport, is faintly ridiculous.
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u/Bossman_Mike 5h ago
Yet the bus service is still more expensive and less extensive than it was when I was a teenager. Where my parents live you used to be able to get a night bus easier than a kebab, nowadays that bus route no longer exists.
They were also very late in going contactless. Literally years after London, and a whole 18 months after FirstBus in the English shithole I lived in at the time. Very hard to justify.
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u/Duvet_Capeman 10h ago
Public transport here is very good, obviously can always be better but there's a lot of options.
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u/CoffeeTableReads 5h ago
Guessing they haven't been squeezed onto a 2 carriage train at rush hour to Fife?
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u/quartersessions 9h ago
Barely any inner-city rail, a single-line tram, no underground and buses that got contactless payments later more than a decade after London - and still haven't implemented any sort of forward ticketing, to my knowledge.
Who did the transport department bribe for this?
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u/brigadoom 10h ago
TimeOut 'aving a giraffe, innit?
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u/HaveYuHeardAboutCunt "Active Separatist" 10h ago
Having been to Vienna this year this poll must have been taken by people that had recently fallen down some stairs a smacked their heads.
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u/soprofesh 10h ago
Total nonsense. Only lived in Edinburgh a year - the crap local transport and cycling infrastructure being major reasons I wanted out.
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u/outlawsmokeyscottish 10h ago
Yeah so awards ceremonies goes. The more you donate to the event and the bigger table you requested and closer to stage.... All racks up but gets you advertised with a wee gold statue of a kebab. How to advertise without advertising it's rather clever actually.
Save your money small business you know your good and you know your selling shite by the custom you get or don't get. Don't fall for the trap because either you spend 2k+ for nothing or you get overwhelmed to hire new folk just to lay them off after 3 months when the new fad has died to stolen with the next award show ran by the same cloak and dagger folk who will award the shop across the road the next week because they too paid 2k for a picture in the local paper.
Here the scam is only bigger and aimed at Germans or people with autism my jury is still to rule here but aye sorry for spoiling the magic to the show with awards.
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u/ASubtleEmphaticShift 8h ago
They should be, given the amount of cash they've had spaffed at them at the expense of Scotland's other cities and rural communities over the years.
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u/wobzomby86 10h ago
I see a lot of folk living in Edinburgh moaning about Lothian buses
Try living in places with out Lothian buses such as Fife , Scottish boarders or Orkney, it’s a case of charge as much as possible and turn up when we feel like it