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I'm disappointed and a bit confused that @kezdugdale (my list MSP and who also stood in my constituency) has adopted this position when it's not the position of the local Labour Party's manifesto at the last council election
A majority of people in Edinburgh do not drive to work. Edinburgh has the lowest per capita car ownership in Scotland, it has 3rd lowest access to a car in Scotland, it's the only LA where this is falling.
Despite all this, traffic volume in Edinburgh is increasing. 
For Glasgow, all 8 Scottish Parliamentary constituencies appear in the top 10 of areas with the lowest access to a car in Scotland, and all 5 have a majority of people having no access to a car.
Edinburgh has generally higher levels of car ownership than Glasgow, but in the Scottish context they are still low. As you move to the more suburban and (whispers) wealthier constituencies, by and large you see car ownership go up as well as multiple car ownership.
Look at Edinburgh Western there, now you get an idea of why the Lib Dems are cynically deciding that this - and residential parking zones - are not something they are going to champion, DESPITE, 2 of the most polluted roads in Edinburgh running straight through the constituency
did I say in Edinburgh? I meant in SCOTLAND.
And here's the census question on how people travel to work, again Edinburgh and Glasgow utterly buck the national trend, Edinburgh particularly so for Central and Northern/Leith.
Even Edinburgh Western, despite high levels of car ownership, a majority of working people DO NOT DRIVE TO WORK
By which I mean, drive their own car. If you add in the car passengers (a tiny proportion), we scrape just into a majority. Why is this? This is because car occupancy is so low. A majority of commuting cars have a single person in them.
There are differences between Edinburgh and Glasgow overall, Edinburgh has less driving, more bus use, more cycling and less rail/metro use. Dundee is much closer to the Scottish average, perhaps because of significant commuting out of Dundee to other areas and poorer provision
73% of people who live in Edinburgh, work in Edinburgh. For Glasgow it is 61%. 66% of people who /work/ in Edinburgh are resident there (i.e. 34% of workers come in from outside the LA), for Glasgow it is 51%.
So one of the less "blunt" aspects of a WPL, is it hits the actual car parking space, regardless of if someone has come in from Edinburgh or anywhere else. Most people in Edinburgh are working locally and public transport should be able to significantly bite into this
The majority of people coming into Edinburgh to work do so from East, Mid or West Lothian, which have found themselves becoming the sites of dormitory commuter towns and estates for (largely) driving into Edinburgh. They form a sizeable minority of workers in Edinburgh
And yes Edinburgh has low levels of car commuting, but it's got pathetically low levels of occupancy, fewer than 1 in 10 cars has more than 1 person in it for commuting.
Car commuting in Edinburgh is a solitary activity. This is perhaps one of the reasons why, despite relatively low car ownership in much of the city and relatively low car use as a mode share for commuting, it has a disproportionately negative effect (and is getting worse)
So there's a bit of a challenge for Glasgow and Edinburgh Labour; if you want to be "For the Many" and not "For the Few", you're going to have to get squarely behind people who don't drive to work with. Oddly enough, both the local parties generally are at council level.
Footnote. Found this excellent dynamic map of the access to a car census data overlaid on the ONS neighbourhood units (fusiontables.googleusercontent.com/embedviz?q=sel…) It's pretty striking that (outwith the New Town) how you can correlate access to a car with socio-economic factors.
(Red = high access to car, green = low access to car). Here's Glasgow from the same. and also Dundee
And Aberdeen. I don't know the neighbourhoods of these cities well enough, but I'd bet that higher car ownership correlates well to wealthier suburbs and neighbourhoods.
This pattern is one for the urban centres only. This is why it's vital that something like a WPL is on a per-council basis. It will suit some councils and not others. And any council implementing it needs to carefully consider its own demographics and congestion/pollution issues
It's not a one-size-fits-all solution, and nobody supporting it has tried to sell it as such, but there has been a determined and deliberate attempt by its opponents to misleadingly portray it as such. (Yeah I'm looking at you Labour and Tory MSPs)
Just going down a rabbit hole here, checked out my own postcode sector (that's the EHx y part), we're a densely populated neighbourhood of tenements and more modern flats. Typical of inner Edinburgh. 60% of houses have no access to a car, there's just 0.28 cars per capita
I looked at the wealthy part of west Edinburgh bungalowville where I grew up and my parents still live. Only 19% have no access to a car, more people have multiple cars (24%) than no car. There are 0.51 cars per capita (1.15 per household)
Zooming right in to my old streets, only 9% of households have no car. 40% have 2 or more cars. There are 1.38 cars per household and 0.56 cars per capita.
Keeping on going, there are 82 census areas in Edinburgh, with 2% or lower households with no car. There are 28 with no car. These 3,888 households have 6,506 cars between them. Unsurprisingly, this is the street in Edinburgh with the highest car ownership ("millionaire's row")
94% of people round here have no access to a car. Yet what do we see? Cars nose to tail.
h/t @EricLesley2 for pointing me here. Here's a visualisation of people who take the bus to work. You can make your own socio-economic correlations here (of interest, @EdinburghBUG )
And here's is the people that drive to work. I'll let you make your own correlations here. All I'll say is the suburbs have a lot to answer for (bear in mind 74% of Edinburgh folk work in Edinburgh itself)
Car sharing is pretty much non-existent in Edinburgh for commuting. Car commuters sure are solitary creatures.
And cycling. You can correlate this with some of the more affluent areas, but I'd also suggest that there's an inverse correlation as you get progressively more affluent. There's also an element of geography here (proximity to routes) and students/academics in city centre.
And walking is a straight up function of proximity to the city centre I would wager
The estates on the south of Musselburgh and Brunstane are the rail commuter communities
Looking at distances, here are the maps of people who travel 2-5km (orange), 5-10km (green) and 10-20km (pink) to work. No big surprises. If you live closer to centre, you travel less, but also the suburban commuters really aren't going that far by and large. Few over 10km.
It's not until you get to 60km+ that you get an appreciably visible increase in numbers of commuters. Got to assume that these are the people going to Glasgow, Dundee etc.
Another h/t to @EricLesley2 , we can visualise where people are going to on their drives. Let's pick on west Edinburgh again. Absolutely no surprise, the biggest car commute in west Edinburgh is to stay within west Edinburgh and go as far as the Gyle/Edinburgh park.
This support my anecdotal evidence and observations of 12 years working out there. It's absolutely bonkers how many people drive such a short way.
Looking at cycling into Edinburgh Park / South Gyle, more people are doing it form farther away than they are from near by. Could it be that if you don't build any local cycling infrastructure then people just won't cycle? 🤔
Walking is a little bit better, but is still totally dwarfed by the drivers.
Driving dwarfs all other modes into South Gyle / Edinburgh park, despite it being better served by public transport (bus/tram/train) than anywhere else outside central Edinburgh. A lot of drives in from mid, west and east Lothian and central Fife.
And yet a lot of drives in from the city itself. This highlights the need for better intra-regional public transport, and for peripheral bus services. If you live to the east of Edinburgh, having to go through the centre/change is probably a big put-off if working in west.
Anyway I appreciate I've thrown a big heap of charts, maps and tables at this thread, so it might be easier to consume and share by going to the unrolled thread (thanks @threadreaderapp ) threadreaderapp.com/thread/1095667…
Some more details! I'veworked out an approx. area for a single car parking space in the South Gyle / Edinburgh Park office parks. This includes necessary internal access roads. You need about 25m^2 for a single car parking space once you account for clearance and access.
And I've also gone to the trouble of outlining all the office block car parks at Edinburgh Park / South Gyle. Given the whole park is ~1M square metres, 25% of it is just car parking, which gets you just over 10,000 spaces. That's about 190 double decker buses, 80% full.
At £400 per space, that's a potential annual tax of £4M, with estimates of 5-10% enforcement and collection costs that's between £3.6 and £3.9M p.a. from this single conurbation which undoubtedly induces much of the congestion and pollution in western Edinburgh.
Here is all that car parking consolidated into a single block
Coincidentally, that green block is almost exactly the same area as the 4 principal blocks of the New Town. Ironically a lot of the organisations out at Edinburgh Park / South Gyle decamped from the city centre to South Gyle in the early 1990s.
