Letters: If only city had followed Nice example set by French

I HAVE just returned from a holiday in Nice, where it was refreshing to see their tram planners had sourced a vehicle that can lower its pantograph and it travel powered by its batteries in places where overhead wires would be an eyesore.

We in Edinburgh along Princes Street have to put up with the eyesore of overhead wires and hideous support poles.

It is not new technology as the Nice trams manufactured by Alstrom have been in operation since November 2007. The contract with CAF for the Edinburgh Trams was signed in December 2007.

Yet another opportunity lost to tidy up the Princes Street skyline for tourists.

Robin Jack, Craigcrook, Road, Edinburgh

Police could help us sleep easier

YOUR headline “Take your car keys to bed” (News, June 30) says a great deal about what’s wrong with modern policing and the criminal justice system.

For a start, it is questionable whether it is good advice. If a burglar does break in to your house, it is better that they stay downstairs and you don’t meet them. If you do, you are all too likely to get hurt. And if you prevail over the burglar, the police and the fiscals are likely to treat you as a criminal rather than a victim.

If we take the advice at face value, should we also take the iPhone, the laptop and so on to bed too? Or do we leave them downstairs rather like carrots for Rudolf and sherry for Santa?

Also, it tends to confirm that our police now have a mentality rather like the insurance loss adjuster who surveys the scene after the damage has been done rather than an active constabulary intent on catching criminals.

Of course, the police only became like this because of the academic criminologist-led decay of our criminal justice system, which for the most part views the wicked crime of burglary as “non-violent property crime”.

Most people would rather read the headline “Police vow to nab Grange burglars” and would sleep more easily in our beds if we had a police force that went out and did it.

Otto Inglis, Inveralmond Grove, Edinburgh

Our councils were not built by God

I AM proud of Edinburgh City Council’s removing of religious prayers from its official business after the National Secular Society raised awareness of how out of date and unwelcoming the practice had been.

Donald Jack writes that this is “spiritually unhealthy” and quotes “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it” (Letters, June 29).

How dare he seek to prescribe what is spiritually healthy for us all.

Our councils were not built by God but by democracy and we have struggled to achieve universal sufferance for generations.

Why do the religious insist on a public manifestation of their private beliefs?

Does the clamour of mainstream acquiescence drown out their doubts?

Neil Barber, Saughtonhall Drive, Edinburgh

Old motto ought to be replaced

I THINK that Free Church minister Donald Jack raises an interesting question.

A religious motto stemming from 1647 and deriving from an ancient Jewish Psalm is inappropriate in modern, enlightened times and should be replaced.

I don’t even agree with its claim.

Steuart Campbell, Dovecot Loan, Edinburgh

Times fuelled by different needs

I WAS perplexed by the reaction from the Scottish Government to the decision that the Hunterston plant carbon capture was not going ahead.

The SNP government said that it was a commercial decision for the operators.

However, back in early 2007, Alex Salmond MP reacted with fury when BP didn’t go ahead with carbon capture plants in Peterhead and Longannet.

The then future First Minister attacked the UK Government for refusing his call to pump billions of pounds of tax payers money into that carbon capture scheme.

How times change.

Dave Cochrane, Spottiswoode Street. Edinburgh