It is nearly 30 years since Professor David Begg pioneered a project to speed-up buses across Edinburgh.
The ‘Greenways’ scheme, introduced in 1997 by the then Edinburgh transport convener, made bus lanes on major arterial routes in and out of the city operational for 12 hours a day, six days a week, cutting journey times.
“That was a really effective scheme to significantly improve the speed of buses,” he says.
Having materially enhanced public transport for tens of thousands of commuters, it is a legacy Prof Begg, who has since served as a transport adviser to the UK Government, is unashamedly proud of.
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But in the years since, it has been gradually chipped away: bus priority was removed during off-peak hours in 2015, and enforcement of bus lanes has weakened too.
With higher levels of congestion, bus journey times in Edinburgh have increased by nearly 20% over the last decade on certain corridors.
Now living in London, he continues to keep a close eye on his home city - especially when it comes to public transport - which means new plans to add more tram lines haven’t escaped him.
As a distinguished and respected transport guru, it’s no surprise that Prof Begg doesn’t want to get drawn into a “buses versus trams” debate. But he believes that making Edinburgh’s renowned, publicly owned buses faster and more reliable - something he once achieved - should play a much bigger role in discussions about the capital’s transport future.
“The way I would phrase this is,” he said in an interview with The Herald, “ignore buses at your peril, because they are still the backbone of Edinburgh’s public transport system.”
On the debate over the Roseburn Path - a former railway line now used as an active travel route, where a two-kilometre stretch between Roseburn and Crewe Toll is being considered as part of one of two proposed routes for the new northern tram line - he’s similarly keen not to take sides.
However, the reality of the choice put to the public by the council in an ongoing consultation is inescapable for a veteran transport expert.
The council’s alternative route to using off-road path - which formed part of the original 2006 plan to take the trams to Granton, before phase 1b was cancelled three years later amid a funding shortfall, as chaos engulfed the project - diverges the West End, crosses the A-listed Dean Bridge and through Orchard Brae. It is a significantly more costly and complex option largely along roads which are already heavily congested with traffic.
“If you've got a cycle path, on a former, disused railway, it means it's much easier to put a tram down because you've not got all the demolition and the same amount moving all the roadworks and everything and the same disruption as when you’re going down, say Leith Walk,” he says.
“So it's much, much easier to do — but it comes at a cost for people who value that now as a cycleway and walkway, right? So not quite straightforward.
“I'm not taking a position on it. I'm just saying from a financial point of view it's a damn sight easier to do that than putting a new tram down a busy road.”
He highlights the UK’s road hierarchy: “That says, that priority should be one pedestrian, two cyclists, three public transport users, and then fourth motorists. If I’m a campaigner for pedestrians and cyclists, I would be pointing to that road hierarchy.”
Prof Begg also acknowledges the appeal, for some, of rail transit over buses. “The funny thing about trams is,” he says, “people really like them. Even when they go slower than buses.”
He adds: “The chattering classes love trams. There's a case for it - I'm not knocking it.”
It’s not just rail nerds, he appears to concede, adding there’s also a “psychological” element for travellers. “I think it’s the quality of the ride - the certainty of timing,” he says. “They're never quite sure that the bus is going to achieve its timetable based on congestion. It usually does.
“And even though in Edinburgh there was so much opposition to them when they were being built, there's now a clamour to get a tram service.
“But you don't get as much excitement about bus priority. Nobody goes along to their local councillor's surgery and says, ‘I want more bus priority,’ but it really matters.”
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He adds boosting bus priority measures is “much more cost-effective” than building new tram lines, and describes the Scottish Government's £500m Bus Partnership Fund, which was paused last year amid budget pressures, as “the best transport project I've seen in Scotland in the last decade”.
“It was dependent on Scottish government money, and it had a benefit-cost ratio of 13 to 1, which is phenomenal. You'll never get anything like that in any other transport project.
“But the Scottish government ran out of money and didn't fund it. That was a plan to introduce significant improvements in bus journey times from outside of Edinburgh coming in.”
Another bus priority initiative to trial 12 hour bus lanes in Edinburgh, known as 7-7-7 where they operate from 07:00 to 19:00 seven days a week, effectively reintroducing the scheme pioneered by Begg 28 years ago - has also been held back. A council pilot was due to introduce the measures on Lothian Buses 44 route from Juniper Green to Musselburgh earlier this year, and has been delayed to February 2026.
“If I was to pick out one statistic which will tell me whether bus patronage is going to grow or not, it would be bus journey times,” Prof Begg continues.
Recent research he conducted found every 10% increase in bus journey times leads to a 10% drop in passenger numbers in Edinburgh. “If you don't address that, you're going to lose bus passengers.
“So you can have the shiniest, fanciest tram system in the world, but the backbone of the public transport system - the bus - is going to be less effective and you're going to lose passengers.
“If you get fewer passengers, because bus journey times are deteriorating and the bus lanes aren't being enforced as properly as they should, and you're not rolling out more bus priority, it means less income, less profit for the council, less investment in buses, because you've got less money to invest.”
This can be turned from a “vicious downward spiral into a progressive spiral where you're improving bus Johnny times,” Prof Begg says.
“One thing about Edinburgh is that the council owns the bus company so they take the dividends and the profits. If you've got more passengers who are generating more income, the council could actually earn more money.
“It can actually earn quite a lot more money instead of whatever it is, £3 million a year in dividends. You could multiply that by 5, 10 if you get buses functioning really well.”
The reason for buses slowing and congestion rising is not as straight-forward as more cars on the road, he says. “there's a number of reasons, but one of them is that the mix of traffic on the roads now means that all traffic's getting slower because you've got more delivery vehicles now.
“There’s a huge number, and here's an interesting thing about delivery vehicles: if you’re running a delivery service, whether it's Amazon or whatever, and traffic gets worse, you actually need to put more vehicles on the road just to hit your targets in terms of delivery time.
“One vehicle will do less work because they're stuck in traffic so you need more vehicles.
“Whereas what happened in the past was when traffic congestion got bad and you’re a motorist, you make a decision, ‘well, I'm not going to travel today, or I'm going to travel at a different time to avoid the traffic’. You can't do that with delivery vehicles. You've got to be out whatever the traffic.
So the mix of traffic is changing and congestion is increasing. That's a disaster for buses.
“I always made the argument that you can't reduce traffic congestion by good public transport on its own. That's true anywhere; if you look at London, you needed the congestion charge and high parking charges and parking restraint.
“When I was chairing the Glasgow Connectivity Commission, one of the key conclusions I reached was that it’s too easy to park in Glasgow with too many car parking spaces, that you're not going to have that car traffic restraint and you're not going to grow a public transport as a result, because it's the usual carrot and stick.
“You need to improve public transport, but at the same time you have to make it less attractive to drive, and that’s difficult for politicians because politicians want to be nice to everyone. They don't want to do the dirty work by making car travel less attractive.”
While still far higher than he’s like to see, Prof Begg remarks that an “Armageddon in terms of car traffic volumes” he predicted 25 years hasn’t come to pass. “I thought we were never going to cope with this growing car traffic and that good public transport on its own isn’t going to be enough, so we’d need road pricing.
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And he was “amazed at how good public transport was” on a visit to Edinburgh this summer.
“I was coming up Leith Walk and I thought, wow, this is working really well. And then the ticketing system they've got now where you can do everything contactlessly speeds everything up, and bringing the buses in the tram under the one management system seems all smart.
“So I was coming home thinking, I'd never thought that public transport would become so good, so quickly in Edinburgh.
“The trouble is, when people are there at the time, no matter what state they're in, they always see all the faults and they don't see the good things.”
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