Holyrood Park Outline Strategic Plan: Car Free Holyrood Response

In September 2023, Historic Environment Scotland (HES) published their long-anticipated draft Holyrood Park Outline Strategic Plan for a 12 week public consultation. The plan includes a new vision statement, principles and objectives to guide the park’s strategic direction for the next decade to 2034. 

Over the last two decades, the management practices and legislative context of the park has become increasingly out of date as the external context has shifted: more park users, more vehicle traffic cutting through the park, increased focus on accessibility and diversity, and greater awareness of the importance of biodiversity and the need to use the park for climate adaptation such as flood prevention.

It is worth reading the plan in full and, of course, responding to the consultation before it closes on 19 December 2023.

We will discuss our response to the draft Outline Strategic Plan in three key points in this blog:

1. Ending Vehicular Traffic and Facilitating Access for All in the Park: We welcome Objective 4 (Create a truly inclusive park) and Objective 5 (Make active travel the dominant travel mode through and to the Park) and outline what these changes should look like.
2. Why is this important: While the draft Outline Strategic Plan acknowledges benefits for park users around safety and enhanced park experience, removing motor vehicle through-traffic will also lead to long term, structural outcomes including supporting health, wellbeing and accessibility, legitimising low carbon modes of transport, and strengthening public transport networks around the Park.
3. When is it happening: Historic Environment Scotland has proposed 18 months of consultation on the ten year strategic plan, including two full 12 week consultations, before any action is taken. However, with the LEZ enforcement coming in June 2024, if HES takes no action until 2025 (or later), they will instead be committing to: higher traffic levels and a worsening experience for people walking, wheeling and cycling in the Park; continuing to induce demand via a convenient shortcut for drivers into the city centre; and exacerbating our climate crisis. We know what is required, how to do it, and what the consequences of not acting are – HES must take immediate action to remove motor vehicle through-traffic from Holyrood Park.

Ending Vehicular Traffic and Facilitating Access for All in the Park

We welcome Objectives 4 and 5 to create a truly inclusive Park and “substantially reduce, or remove all, vehicular through traffic from the Park”, “reflecting wider societal trends away from a car dominated urban environment”. These two objectives are included in full below:

Holyrood Park Outline Strategic Plan, page 35

Objective 5 largely aligns with the campaign’s key ask: to end motor vehicle through traffic in Holyrood Park. We note ‘very substantially reduce’ is a subjective term which could mean different things to different people, however we welcome the intention to make active travel the dominant travel mode through and to the park. We believe this should mean replicated vehicle road closures from the weekend (High Road, Queens Drive, Duddingston Low Road) to 24/7, ending motorised through traffic and maintaining access to car parks at Meadowbank, Duddingston, and Broad Pavement. We have called for more disabled bays in these car parks  – there are currently none in either Meadowbank or Duddingston and a minimal number in Broad Pavement. Our calls have not included management changes to roads (Horse Wynd to Holyrood Gait) around the Scottish Parliament; these already have different road closure procedures than the areas of the park which are regularly closed at the weekend.

One of the most common questions for our campaign is: why are you campaigning for 24/7 vehicle closure? What about campaigning for smaller changes: speed restrictions; more closures on the weekdays or evenings; improving crossings; signage to discourage commercial vehicles from using the park? We’ve written about this in our FAQ; full closure with accessibility measures is feasible within both public sector budgets and the regulatory context of the park which prohibit most physical alterations, and solves the root of the issue rather than the symptoms. If we look to make the park roads more people friendly by adding table crossings or widen pavements or reduce traffic speed, we may make some improvement, but it does not recognise that the very reason these are an issue at all is because motor vehicles are invited to take a scenic short cut at speed through a park directly into the city centre during a climate emergency.

Perhaps most importantly, these smaller measures do not bring the huge amount of health, wellbeing, accessibility and climate benefits outlined below. HES should not look to spend public money on adding asphalt to an SSSI and heritage site as a sticking plaster when we can use the infrastructure already in place for a paved and accessible road space that is safe and welcoming to people walking, wheeling and cycling of all ages and abilities.

Why is this important?

HES’s reasons for including Objective 5 are “to significantly reduce conflict between users and vehicles” and to “improve the quality of user experience in the Park”. These two aspects are just the beginning of why HES should be looking to remove motor vehicle traffic from the Park, and we want to further articulate these reasons.

There are a number of immediate, tangible benefits for park users with the removal of motor vehicle through traffic:

• End of speeding and traffic in the park.
• A safer park for children and families.
• Elimination of air and noise pollution in the park.
• Safe and pleasant space for walking, wheeling and cycling for all ages and abilities. 
• Prioritising people over motor traffic in Edinburgh’s most iconic greenspace.

More practically, unlike the status quo, we will have continuous, wide, paved and accessible space from which to experience the park which means we will see:

• People have space for social experiences side by side, even if using mobility scooters or pushing prams, without traffic noise interfering.
• People on bikes of any age, from age 3 to 103, can feel comfortable using the paved space without having to worry about negotiating with traffic and the current incomplete, narrow cycle paths that flood and ice over in winter as well as create conflict between people on bikes and pedestrians.
• Children have space to play on scooters and bikes.
• Enhanced park user experience in lower-lying areas of the park like St Margaret’s Loch.
• More attractive walking, wheeling and cycling experiences in the Galloping Glen and on Duddingston Low Road.
• More opportunities to engage with nature without traffic noise and more people staying on the paved spaces because they can engage with nature there rather than further degrading the unpaved park network, a problem which is outlined in the draft Outline Strategic Plan.
• The community using the road space for other uses. Parkrun was only possible when the Saturday road closures began and we want to start a Cycling Without Age Scotland chapter in the Park, what else will the community do with the chance?
• Joy!

Holyrood Park’s parkrun 20 August 2022

However, there are much larger, structural outcomes that this decision will support too:

• By reducing conflict, we make walking, wheeling and cycling more attractive and will see higher levels of physical activity in the Park – increasing the general health and wellbeing of the user population.
• People visiting the park will see others using active travel to move around and live their lives: cycling with children and/or shopping on a cargobike, walking into the city for work or a special event, using a wheelchair attachment to get up the High Road. This further legitimises low carbon travel behaviours and car-owners living around the park may decide, for example, to use their car less, a financial, health, and environmental win.
• The extremely attractive shortcut for drivers through the park into the city centre has long meant driving was the most attractive way to make that journey. This has further disincentivised people from choosing the bus, spurred car ownership in areas where people could afford it, and lowered the profitability for bus routes around the park, ultimately weakening the surrounding public transport network. By ending an attractive shortcut into the city centre, different journeys by public transport or active travel into the city are encouraged and, hopefully, strengthens the business case for a better public transport network in park adjacent neighbourhoods.

We also are pleased to strongly support the objective to “create a truly inclusive park” with access for all and for the “active travel needs for less able users and those with mobility requirements including manual and powered wheelchairs and other mobility devices, integrated into proposals with significant access improvements”. This directly connects to our efforts to establish a Cycling Without Age Scotland chapter in Holyrood Park and calls for an inclusive access hub. 

I want all this! When is it happening?

We don’t know when all this might happen.

The draft Outline Strategic Plan references 18 months of consultation, which would be completed in early 2025. During that time, there is the current draft consultation open for 12 weeks until 19 December. This will be followed by a rewrite period including writing an action plan, and yet another 12 week consultation on the final plan. By extending and doubling the consultation period – which is not required by legislation or conventional practice – five years will have passed with no change since the overwhelming feedback of the 2020 Spaces for People consultation that speed and volume of traffic were an issue in Holyrood Park and four years since the Traffic Management Survey in 2021 which showed clear support for more road closures and greater accessibility. 

…to not act until 2025 on traffic management in the park is entirely too late.

The traffic management aspects of the plan, which are clear, actionable, and follow national and local policy, should not be further delayed because it has been wrapped into the larger plan which involves much more challenging and unclear actions around land management.

There are three reasons that to not act until 2025 on traffic management in the park is entirely too late.

1. The Council has set both its 30% reduction in car kilometres target and net zero target for 2030. The Council have committed to doing this through their City Mobility Plan 2021-2030 (CMP), where “Edinburgh will be connected by a safer and more inclusive net zero carbon transport system delivering a healthier, thriving, fairer and compact capital city and a higher quality of life for all residents.” The delivery of the CMP remains in the works, but there’s no doubt this will be a complex, multi-year roll out. The CMP currently designates Holyrood Park as a secondary route for motor vehicle traffic (we submitted a deputation about this in December 2022 and a consultation response in July 2023). The CMP is currently written to continue, with no formal agreement between HES and the Council, to use Holyrood Park as a private, subsidised shortcut for the Council’s traffic. As the road manager for the City, the Council has a responsibility to fully account for its traffic, while HES is responsible for managing the park in accordance with the new (draft) vision statement “rooted in community, climate and place”. Closing the park roads to motor vehicle through-traffic is much simpler than managing the complex, multi-year roll out of the City Mobility Plan, and should therefore happen first.
2. It is worth reiterating that 2025 will be a further 2 years down the line of the climate crisis. Transport is Scotland’s highest emitting sector. We cannot afford to delay on what is, frankly, one of the easier changes required to improve the safety, ease and appeal of walking, wheeling and cycling. Each year, HES will be responsible for further emissions from vehicle use in Holyrood Park; we’ve previously calculated that the emissions from the vehicles travelling on 1km of park roads is equivalent to 20% of their reported Scope 1 and 2 emissions across their entire estate.
3. Finally, most pressingly, starting 1 June 2024, enforcement will begin on Edinburgh’s LEZ which has boundaries adjacent to the park. It is likely that this will push more traffic into the park and further degrade the experience for people walking, wheeling and cycling. It is imperative that HES close the park roads to motor vehicles traffic before this so that new travel patterns which involve use of the park as a through route cannot become embedded.

If HES takes no action until 2025, they will instead be committing to: higher traffic levels and a worsening experience for people walking, wheeling and cycling in the park; continuing to induce demand via a convenient shortcut for drivers into the city centre; and exacerbating our climate crisis.

If HES takes no action until 2025, they will instead be committing to: higher traffic levels and a worsening experience for people walking, wheeling and cycling in the park; continuing to induce demand via a convenient shortcut for drivers into the city centre; and exacerbating our climate crisis.

There may be a case for two full consultation periods for certain aspects of this Outline Strategic Plan. Different land management actions will need to be weighed up and decided upon which will ultimately take a decade as trees grow, biodiversity is strengthened, and community links are forged. However, traffic management in the park is a different story – we have the Traffic Management Survey results from 2021 and we know what is required, how to do it, and what the consequences of not acting are – and it should therefore be treated differently in the consultation timeline proposed by HES.

The consultation closed on 19th December 2023.