We are looking at a combination of measures for the A8 corridor: a park and ride in West Lothian, bus priority on the A89 and bus priority on the A8. In 2015, West Lothian Council, the City of Edinburgh Council and Transport Scotland did a joint piece of work to configure what that might look like, broadly speaking. In 2016, a very comprehensive transport assessment was undertaken in west Edinburgh to consider the future of a national development site and the growth of Edinburgh airport. That was published in 2016, and it included the outputs from the 2015 study.
That piece of work became a material consideration when we were discussing the Edinburgh city region deal. As part of that deal, there was an agreement for a west Edinburgh public transport investment project. A total of £36 million is being provided, with £20 million coming from Transport Scotland and £16 million coming from the City of Edinburgh Council. That is being taken forward under the governance of the Edinburgh city region deal that Alison Irvine referred to earlier, through the transport appraisal board.
There are three stages to the delivery of that project. We are in stage 1, which is to go into the final configuration of that core package of measures. We are about to appoint consultants to undertake that piece of work, which will develop that core project.
We are also mindful of the Scottish Government’s announcement of the bus priority investment fund. In that context, we will develop an enhancement of that core package, which could form a further bid to enhance that scheme. That core package should be delivered in the next three to five years—it will probably be closer to three years. The development work on the enhanced package will be in line with the programme and timescales associated with the investment fund.
Turning to the A90 corridor, we have a range of short, medium and longer-term aspirations. We are fairly well advanced on our short-term plans, which revolve around improvements to urban traffic control systems—those are about to be implemented. In the medium term, we have identified locations along the corridor where it would be possible to reconfigure junctions and increase the opportunities for bus priority.
I am keen to emphasise to the committee that, given the scale of in-car commuting into Edinburgh and the problems that that causes, we are in the process of preparing our new city mobility plan, which will go to committee next Thursday. That has been prepared within the context of the climate emergency and the city moving to a net neutral carbon position by 2030. At the moment, as a whole, in-car commuting into the city is in the order of north of 60,000 per day—that is the journey to work, at the morning peak.
As the A90 and the other corridors come into the city and start to focus on an increasingly narrow area, the impact of congestion is hugely magnified. As we touched on earlier, the opportunity to continue to afford bus priority as we come into the city becomes increasingly difficult. We take the view that there is little more that we can do on corridor improvements beyond what has already been done and that we need to start tackling the fundamental issue of people and how they make the choice to travel from their starting point.
That is the point that I was making earlier: we need to think about the end-to-end trip and what is influencing people to choose to drive rather than take public transport or a make a journey that involves a combination of public transport and integrated active travel. How do we go about making that latter option as attractive as possible? We are thinking about journey times, as well as the reliability and service quality of the journey into the city. That is at the core of the thinking that we are doing on our mobility plan and in our discussions with Transport Scotland and other colleagues, particularly through the city region deal governance. We want to work out how, collectively, we can influence and design the public transport/active travel option to make it as attractive as possible.