Bus fares - 'Does the rise need to be quite so hefty?'

Some price rises seem to creep up on you because you only have to pay them perhaps once or twice a year.

But when your bus fare jumps up by 10p - more than twice the rate of inflation - you can't fail to notice yet another bite into your weekly budget.

Just as motorists feel the pain every time they fill up their tank with petrol, so the city's 350,000 daily bus passengers will smart just a little when they shell out for their next day ticket or Ridacard.

Of course, both sets of travellers are being affected by soaring fuel costs, which no-one in Edinburgh has any control over.

Chancellor George Osborne on the other hand can and should act - by scrapping the 5p a litre fuel tax increase due in tomorrow's budget.

But Lothian Buses' latest 9 million annual profit does beg the question of whether the rise needs to be quite so hefty.

Managing director Ian Craig will be mindful of what happened in 2008 when the company made its only operating loss to date after failing to push fares up quickly enough to cover rising costs.

And the city upping its annual dividend from the council-owned firm by 1m to 3m, at a cost of around a penny per passenger per day, won't have helped.

At the new rate of 3.20 for an adult day ticket, however, the Capital's buses do remain considerably cheaper than in Glasgow, where a similar ticket costs 3.75.

Intriguingly though, the latest rise eats away at the difference between Lothian Buses and ScotRail fares, bringing it down to as little as 10p for some local journeys.

It will be interesting to see whether the higher bus fares do encourage those passengers who can make the switch to opt for rail.

A clean slate

every school gets its fair share of bugs at this time of year but few, if any, can have suffered quite as much as the pupils and staff at St John's Primary in Portobello.

Some parents might have been concerned to see teams of cleaners descending on the school at the weekend to perform a deep clean.

But headteacher Barbara Service deserves praise for taking decisive action after a quarter of the school's 400 pupils fell ill in a week.

She may have erred on the side of caution, but isn't that what every parent would want for their child?

It is only to be hoped that the cost of this emergency measure is picked up by the council rather than falling on the unfortunate school itself.