Qualla: Edinburgh City Bypass

Edinburgh City Bypass: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. It is the only junction on the bypass that still stops you. Eleven other interchanges along the A720 are grade-separated - flyovers, underpasses, slip roads peeling off and rejoining without anyone having to brake. But at Sheriffhall, on the southeastern arc of Edinburgh, traffic crawls to a halt at a set of red lights every day, twice a day, because a geological fault runs under the road there and once upon a time the area had active coal mines beneath it. Engineers in the 1980s decided they couldn't safely build a bridge across that ground. So Sheriffhall stayed a roundabout. Forty years and £120 million of planning later, the flyover meant to fix it is still on the drawing board.

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Edinburgh City Bypass: The Ring That Isn't a Ring

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0. The A720 is sometimes called a ring road, but it isn't quite. It curls around the southern half of Edinburgh in a long arc, from the Old Craighall junction with the A1 in the east to the Gogar roundabout on the A8 in the west. North of the city the Firth of Forth does the job a r...

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Image: Kim Traynor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Edinburgh City Bypass: Built in Pieces

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carlos Delgado, CC BY-SA 3.0. The bypass was assembled over nine years and four governments. The first section to open, in 1981, was the Colinton stretch between the A702 and Baberton, with a connection at Dreghorn following around 1985. In late 1986 the Sighthill section linked Baberton to the A8 at Gogarbur...

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Image: Carlos Delgado | CC BY-SA 3.0

Edinburgh City Bypass: What Each Junction Connects

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Callum Black, CC BY-SA 2.0. The eleven interchanges feed in and out of an entire transport network. Old Craighall in the east meets the A1, the trunk road that runs all the way south to Newcastle and London. Sheriffhall, the problem child, connects the A7 - which carries traffic south to Carlisle along an o...

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Image: Callum Black | CC BY-SA 2.0

Edinburgh City Bypass: The Sheriffhall Problem

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Mebanana at English Wikipedia., Public domain. Sheriffhall has been the bottleneck since the day the bypass opened. Putting a traffic-light roundabout on a major trunk road that connects to the A7, the A68 and the A6106 was always going to cause queues, and it always has. In 2015 Transport Scotland prepared an upgrade with fo...

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Image: The original uploader was Mebanana at English Wikipedia. | Public domain

Edinburgh City Bypass: The Railway Underneath

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Suicasmo, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 2013 a stretch of the bypass between Millerhill and Sheriffhall had to be temporarily diverted while engineers built a new underbridge. The reason was the Borders Railway, which reopened in September 2015 after decades of campaigning. When the bypass was built in the 1980s, th...

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Image: Suicasmo | CC BY-SA 4.0