‘A chink of light amid the gloom 
of roadworks’

The move would hopefully go some way towards alleviating the problems caused by work in York Place and also show that the concerns of residents and businesses are being taken seriously.

Families on Albany Street, who are seeing around 1000 extra vehicles an hour pass their doors, have dubbed their once peaceful road “Edinburgh’s new motorway”.

Thousands of others who have lived with similar disruption from the tram works will sympathise.

Of course, as we all now know, building a tram line is no easy feat, and severe disruption is inevitable. All we can hope for is that the disruption is kept to a minimum, the job is done as quickly as possible, and that it will all prove to be worth it in the end.

In the meantime, anything that can be done must be done to alleviate the pain, to make life easier for those living on streets clogged up by diverted traffic and businesses who have been left out in the cold by the roadworks.

This perhaps has not always been the case in the past as tram firm TIE lurched from one disaster to another.

But this city council administration has shown over the bus lane cameras saga that it is willing 
to listen to the public and make changes when something is not working.

Opening up Princes Street to 
traffic again will not solve all the problems, but it would show that 
the taxpayers who are bearing the brunt of the work are not being 
ignored.

Truly inspirational

the word inspirational is perhaps bandied around just a little too easily these days.

But one person who certainly matches that description is Justine Laymond from the crew of the yacht Edinburgh Inspiring Capital.

When the clipper docked in Southampton yesterday with the 39-year-old on board, she became the first ever double-lung transplant patient to sail across the Atlantic.

Her story alone is enough to justify all the work that went into the city’s participation in the round-the-world yacht race for the second time, but several of her fellow sailors have equally inspiring tales to tell.

Don’t forget that, thanks to sponsorship, the epic voyage did not cost a penny in public money.

And during its 40,000-mile trip it has done much to promote the 
pioneering work of medics in the Capital and the global shortage of donor organs.