Taexalia

wild.life

Potential

I was reading this article about the potential increase in costs, or perhaps the potential failure, of the Edinburgh Trams Project and I was struck by a few of the details...

Now before I go on I need to state that I am often accused of nit-picking. I am often accused of nit-picking as if it is a negative thing. The thing about nit-picking is that if you don't pick nits you will end up with a very uncomfortable head.

Or to put it another way:

"If you think that something small cannot make a difference, try going to sleep with a mosquito in the room." - Anonymous

Now, much has been written and spoken about the Edinburgh Trams Project. It has been touted as a transport solution, a transport revolution even - when it is really a potentially expensive way of transporting tourists from the airport to shopping centres, with the only possible benefit to citizens (the people who will pay for it all) being that photies of the castle might be taken on board the tram instead of causing those infernal pedestrian pile ups created by someone just randomly stopping in the middle of a fast moving pavement.

Quite why a rail link could not be added to the line that is already in place, and is so close to the airport that you can actually see folk pretending to pay attention to the in-flight safety announcements as they queue for take off, is beyond my ken.

Today we are told that the spur line, the part that may potentially have actually served some residents, is once and for all dead in the water. Because it is dead in the water the single tram line will now cost £6,000,000 more to build.

Apparently, line 1b was planned based on the potential erection of 30,000 new homes on the waterfront - homes that now won't be built because of the global recession.

So basically the council who thought all this up, at the time it was a Labour council, sold residents and tax payers down the Water of Leith by instigating an expensive building project that actually had no existing foundations - based on the potential homes that may never exist (rather than servicing the thousands of homes that actually do exist).

Similar, really, to the ludicrous behaviour of the various banking institutions who helped run the world into recession by lending money that never existed in the first place.

Similar, really, to the wild stimulus packages announced by various politicians that involve unfathomable amounts of money, which is also money that doesn't exist, that basically provides the bankers and other untouchables with ludicrous pensions for a bad job well done.

Money that is really debt that will be paid for by citizens' tax bills.

I wonder who, behind the scenes, is really going to benefit from the Edinburgh Trams Project project. Not the citizens, I'll wager.

Perhaps it is time to be looking at more sustainable ways of investing in potential.

Like growing tomatoes...