un-paused

Since the twenty-first of February this year this particular bit of road has had no form of public transport vehicle whizzing along it, nor trundling lethargically along it behind a string of similarly-velocity-inhibited public transport modules, trickling slowly along except when speeding up to pull out into the path of a taxi or when attempting to overtake a cyclist in order to be able to attempt to force them off the road when pulling into the next bus-stop. Whilst the road had thus been made slightly technically safer for all (non-tram-construction-related) vehicles (by forcing them to attack each other elsewhere) the pedestrian experience (rather than being made pleasant and relatively carefree through the absence of fast-moving, smoke-emitting and homicidal-tendency-exhibiting motor traffic) had been made considerably less pleasant, mostly due to the concentration of a larger than normal volume of pedestrian traffic (at least once some people realised that sitting on an almost stationary bus as it edged along George Street was doing no-one any favours and started walking from the Bridges to the West End) into a much smaller space, the closure of the south pavement being an unforeseen appendix to the closure of the road (and an unfortunate arrangement seeing as the shop-free side of the street was usually much easier for fast-walking people to make their way along (given the relative lack (but not the complete absence, worryingly) of people dawdling along gawping at the shiny baublery in every shop window (and taking (flash) photographs of the castle))). It took the construction crews a couple of weeks to properly arrange their barriers and on a couple of occasions I wandered along a pavement I was not prevented from entering which turned out to be impossible to escape from half-way to the destination by any technique other than completely retracing my steps.

After the first month or so everything settled down, the few crossing-points were established and remained relatively static and the changes in distance one had to walk up South Charlotte, Castle, Frederick, Hanover and South St David Streets before reaching the point at which the road could be crossed became almost entertaining, especially if the construction crews were playing randomly-obscure-the-crossing-point-with-an-excavator or a pile of those purple tube things they stick in holes to keep the rats dry whilst they chew the cables. I tended to only really have to cross the street at some point when heading from one office to another for the occasional meeting and was only occasionally caught out by the unpredictable and fluid nature of the arrangement of crossing-points at the Lothian Road junction when going any way other than through St Cuthbert's graveyard, across the gap in the works and up South Charlotte Street. The crossing between South Charlotte Street and the exits from the graveyard and Princes Street Gardens only changed once as far as I noticed but once was enough to end up looking slightly daft when I ran up the steps, turned swiftly left and walked towards what turned out to be an unbroken line of barrier-fence.

Although the relatively recent appearance of actual tram track would seem to be the final stage of the works I wasn't aware until early last week that the expected re-opening date was the morning of the 29th of November. The occasional presence of workers still toiling away late-ish into the evening (sometimes even when it was raining) was more than outweighed by the frequent absence of anything much happening (and the observation thereof by a small crowd of the inactive construction-operative's co-workers) and towards the end of the week the likelihood of everything being finished in time was looking small, at least if everything was to be finished tidily and with everything put back where it was supposed to be, especially considering the regrettable tendency for the frequent passage of large, heavy double-decker buses to make a considerable mess of initially acceptably-flat roads, especially roads which haven't been sufficiently rollered by a sufficiently heavy rollering-vehicle and whose sub-surface can be further compacted and caused to subside when buses full of people start whizzing (or trickling lethargically) over them. Apart from a few bad joins and the ongoing sealing of the edges by a few stray yellow tarmacadam-application modules the only noticeably improperly-finished rush-job (so far) was the rather hasty-looking stonework in the restored middle pavement (considerably missed since it was removed sometime last year as it permitted almost completely unhindered pedestrian travel along most of the length of the street) whose rush-job appearance was enhanced and accented by frequent patches of hastily-dabbed-in asphalt whose protruding edges look able to be chipped off by a few swift-moving feet, never mind the occasional wheel of a bus which misjudges the tightness of a turn.

Still, at least it means the lucrative Hogmanay street party can proceed as planned, though what will happen when an inebriate foot or precarious shoe encounters the large gap beside the rail remains to be seen.