Letters: Pander to tram firm and baby pandas will win race

As the months have rolled by this development has been reduced to nothing more than a shambles. Surely the time has come for serious action to be taken.

A new year has just begun so there could be no better time for the council to take the bull by the horns and take the necessary steps to deliver to the long-suffering people of Edinburgh a transport system to be proud of.

It's time the council stopped pandering to the wishes and demands of those who have been contracted to construct the tram project.

This may sound a rather simple solution to a situation that has become ludicrously and needlessly complicated but by the time the trams arrive, if indeed they do, the pandas will not only have come but will have quite comfortably settled into their new surroundings and may even have bred!

Angus McGregor, Albion Road, Edinburgh

Council houses are a real asset

YOUR focus on the cost of private consultants used by the city council and its agency TIE is welcome (News, January 10).

Hopefully the consultants and or surveyors who go round our council houses for an approximate total cost of 900,000 will not be the same people who went round before the attempt was made to sell them all off.

Our council houses are a city asset which along with other social housing are needed in Lothian.

It is some time since we considered two options for a rail connection from Edinburgh Airport – a costly heavy rail link or a cheaper light rail system which in the long term could extend beyond the three tram lines on the drawing board.

Surely we are not going to have a tram line which stops a few hundred yards from Edinburgh Airport as a medium-term option?

Gavin Strang, Western Harbour Place, Newhaven, Leith

Lining up a new disgrace for city

I HAD reason to visit Edinburgh last Friday.

While standing at the bus stop waiting for the bus to take me to my destination, I noticed the tram lines had already been laid along Princes Street.

While I studied this work, I was absolutely aghast at the shoddiness of it.

Edinburgh City Council did not pay all of that public money for that trash, did they?

Well, all I can say is, the National Monument on Calton Hill is no longer the disgrace of Edinburgh

DP Walker, Fife

Mail to the chief is passed to aide

LAST week I wrote to Edinburgh City Council's new chief executive, Sue Bruce, complaining about the snow clearing failures at the Niddrie Mill and St Francis primary schools campus.

Over the years I have written about local matters to the council's previous chief executive and, at times, to former Lord Provosts and have always received a personal reply.

However, Ms Bruce did not reply to my letter.

Instead her "business manager" referred my complaint to the very people I had been complaining about.

How did we manage before "business managers" were invented?

Edinburgh may have a new woman in charge, but bureaucrats are in control.

Paul Nolan, Edinburgh

Views expressed are individual's

YOUR letters page of January 6 published a letter (Concerns over important lifeline) which gave the writer's address as the Robert Fergusson Unit, Royal Edinburgh Hospital.

We would like to clarify that the letter expressed an individual's views and not the views of NHS Lothian.

Robert Aitken, acting general manager, Edinburgh Community Health Partnership, NHS Lothian