Winter travel

This morning was surely the first morning of trouble getting into Edinburgh but it made a nice change for the problem to be caused by the weather in the City itself and not by conditions in Midlothian. Was amused that whilst Lothian had very limited services running, the 101 from Biggar, 62's from Galashiels v Peebles and the 141 where all running and passed my house (albeit the 101 was about 20 mins late!). Still Lothian did send a few empty buses out to provide some service around 9! So I gets into work just after 10am and the boss says, "I think we'll close at 1pm" - at which point I was slightly erm, wishing I'd just phoned to say sorry I'm stuck....
Still I can't remember ever seeing snow in the City Centre like there was this morning.

Spare a thought for my son. He booked an Easyjet flight up from London. He turned up at the airport this morning to find that most of their flights including his had been cancelled. He had to make his way to St Pancras to get a train up instead. When he booked the flight it cost him £70. He had to stand all the way on the train for over 4 hours and paid £110 for the pleasure Please keep the noise down as he's sleeping after being up since 4am this morning

Seems that everyone is being disrupted in some way or another, after this year I don't the song 'dreaming of a white Christmas' will be sung quite so much...

With the lack of snow clearing, especially within housing estates, it would be nice if we could do the same as most people do when a service provider does not do their job well and sack them then get someone else in to do it properly.
Surely the cooncil have enough manpower and equipment to get the snow cleared - there is no point having the main roads clear if you cannot get from your house to travel on them.

Well we have had no grit in our "grit bins" for weeks and the gritters won't come near us. This is now becoming a joke as folk cannot go about their business. My neighbour has written numerous letters and phoned umpteen times to MDC to no avail. As a result, many of us are stranded.

I'm now sick of it. We pay our council tax but we get f##k all! Tomorrow I am going round to the offices of MDC and will threaten them with legal action if nothing is done. It is an absolute disgrace! It wasn't like this years ago. Even the main roads are awful.

I would like some support though. Anyone behind me?

Surely the problem here is that the council have for the past few days been battling to keep the main routes clear, no point in having easy access to a main road that is then blocked.. In addition to this when was the last time we had the same kind of conditions? We ourselves have become adverse to coping with weather like this and the council like every other council have also grown have less resources available. That said, streets not gritted since this time last week must be in one hell of a state and I can understand why people are far from pleased..

I've seen the gritters come along our street a couple of times since the bad weather started. However, today I heard that although they came so far along our street yesterday, they turned back before they reached my house. Apparently the reason was due to the way vans were being parked on the road. Some people who parked there vans in side streets before the bad weather are now parking on the main street so that they don't have to negotiate the hills if it turns icy.

The gritters are big vehicles and it cannot be easy trying to do their work in narrow streets with so many parked vehicles compared to the way it used to be.

Of course it is a Catch 22 situation - if they had cleared the snow and gritted streets in the estates earlier then people would not be parking their cars / vans there.
There seems to be a real lack of work being done and the situation is not helped by people who clear their drives and dump the snow on to the pavement!

Aye they should pit there snow in there re-icicleing bins

SamTyler wrote:

the situation is not helped by people who clear their drives and dump the snow on to the pavement!

My next door neighbour has very generously shared "his" snow with me by meticulously clearing his monoblock drive for their two cars and dumping the snow on my adjacent, open plan front garden When it finally melts, because of the camber, my front path will be swimming & flooded - the same happened when he power-cleaned his monoblock & all the sludge and grime ended up on my path - cheers, neighbour

What on earth is going on with the traffic on the A701? We ordered a chippy from Loanhead and after waiting an hour and half it still hadn't arrived They did phone us to say that the delivery driver was stuck in traffic due to 3 accidents and then again to say that the driver had decided to turn back We then ordered a takeaway from the Pennycook and it eventually arrived at 6.45pm.

Also, one of the kids was coming home in a taxi and was due home at 5pm. She eventually arrived at 6.10pm

The heavy snow about 5pm turned the A701 into an ice rink, the road conditions where horrendous and that was after it had been gritted several times during the day.

Most strange as my son and his friend were heading into Edinburgh for the festivities at the same time and they had no problems getting there