Edinburgh councillors have voted to remove several traffic filters in the Braid Estate after written errors by council officers made most filters ineligible for approval.

However, an amendment from the council’s Green group has allowed certain filters to remain along Braid Road.

A report before the Traffic Regulation Orders (TRO) sub-committee recommended that councillors officers propose that councillors approve the full Greenbank to Meadows Quiet Route – but without filters on Braid Avenue, Hermitage Gardens, Braid Road, and Canaan Lane after officers raised issues with written descriptions used in statutory notices – which were prepared by the council.

Modal filters at Whitehouse Loan will remain unaffected.

The removal of a filter at Canaan Lane was only featured in the updated document ahead of the meeting, but as with other filters impacted by the “inaccurate” descriptions, these were “not identified by officers until after the TEC meeting on 2 April 2026”.

Officers were questioned on the errors within the statutory notices.

When asked by councillors whether the errors could be corrected to move the filters towards being permanent, a council officer said this would not be possible as the task would be “onerous”.

Deadline News advised that Councillors Dan Heap and Alex Staniforth would be the only Green group councillors to take part in the vote as they were the only Green representatives who had not already commented in public on the matter.

Cllr Heap was being trained on Tuesday morning to enable him to take part.

Kayleigh Kinross-O’Neill, the co-convenor of the Green group who usually sits on the sub-committee, was unable to take part after her election to Holyrood on Friday.

An amendment by Cllr Staniforth, which proposed approving the report but keeping filters on Braid Road, was approved by councillors 5-4.

Conservative councillor Joanna Mowat, who voted against the motion, advocates for councillors to approve the report in its entirety. 

Giving her opinion on the Green amendment, Cllr Mowat said that keeping one road open was “completely illogical”. 

Cllr Ben Parker, who represents Morningside and has long advocated for the traffic filters, called the outcome “as good as it could be in the circumstances”.

However, Cllr Parker added that “it is still completely unacceptable that the safety of vulnerable road users in Morningside will be compromised by a litany of Council blunders.

“Whilst today’s committee did not have the power to put in place legal measures to correct the Experimental Traffic Regulation Orders (ETROs) for three of the modal filters which make up the Quiet Route, the Council’s Transport and Environment committee does have this power. 

“I have therefore written to senior officers and the Convenor of the Transport and Environment committee urging them to schedule an urgent committee meeting to begin the process of putting in place new legal orders to regularise the modal filters which are currently in place. This is an urgent and necessary first step in putting right what has gone so badly wrong here and ensuring that the current road safety protections are not removed.

“This episode provides yet more evidence that the legal processes around traffic and road safety measures are not fit for purpose.”

Cllr Parker added: “It appears that red tape and bureaucracy are being prioritised over children’s safety, which is completely unacceptable.”

A spokesperson for cycle campaign edi.bike said:“Councillors clearly shared our disappointment and frustration that they weren’t given the opportunity to decide on the quiet route in full today, thanks to long-standing mistakes in a truly archaic paperwork process.”

“The measures on the ground that have been made permanent today – including the filter at Braid Rd which officers had recommended removing – all play a vital role in making roads along the quiet route safer for people walking, wheeling and cycling – especially near schools.”

“We now have to ask — with the ‘hands are tied’ legal standing here meaning some measures have to be removed, including by the Royal Blind School and Canaan Lane Primary — how the Transport committee will swiftly rectify reintroducing through-traffic to school streets and residential areas at these points.”

Traffic calming measures in the Braid Estate have been talked about a great deal. In June 2023, the Transport and Environment Committee (TEC) decided that the Braid Road, Comiston Road and Greenbank to Meadows Quiet Connection schemes should be placed into separate, scheme-specific, ETROs.

In March 2024, The City of Edinburgh Council’s Transport and Environment Committee (TEC) voted to dismantle traffic filters on the Braid Estate and install segregated cycle lanes – but the plans were not implemented.

Further controversy ensued when two councillors who took part in the design of the options considered and subsequently the vote, were censured by the Standards Commission in March 2026 for failing to declare an interest at the meeting. The Standards Commission said that due to living in the vicinity of the proposed route, the pair should have made their positions clear.

The Standards Commission deemed Cllr Munro and Cllr Ross to be in breach of the Councillors’ code of conduct by failing to do so.

In April, the TEC decided to proceed with forwarding the decision to the sub-committee.

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