Dead CERT: the thread about Edinburgh’s disastrous dalliances with guided busways

April Fools' Day marks a suitable 30th birthday for the City of Edinburgh Council, a body which upon its establishment found itself in charge of a scheme promising a cheap and easy transport fix but which proved to be anything of the sort. It was a scheme hallmarked by political intransigence, a perfidious PFI consortium, chaotic project management, acrimonious landowners, repeated threats of legal action, massive cost overruns, a timeline that would slip almost a decade and a final route that was only a small section of what had been first intended. Most remarkably it was a scheme that wasn't Edinburgh Trams! No, there was another project before that, indeed its direct predecessor, which also got almost everything wrong too in a very similar manner. What this thread is actually talking about is CERT, the City of Edinburgh Rapid Transit guided busway.