Grinding to a Halt

I love Edinburgh. It's a fantastic, vibrant, beautiful city and I'm proud to live here. But there is one drawback. Whenever something happens on the city by-pass, chaos ensues.

We've had two days of non-stop rain in Scotland's capital city. Now Scotland should be used to rain, even in August. In fact, particularly in August. You can stick your mortgage on the fact that when the Edinburgh Festival begins there will be heavy rain at some point during the three weeks. But the rainfall in the past forty-eight hours has obviously been too much for the city by-pass. There was flooding in parts of it this morning and at one point the road had to be closed. And, dear reader, you know what's coming next.

Traffic on the south side of the city ground to a halt. I work for an organisation which has flexi-time and I opted - foolishly as it turned out - to head for the slave galley (sorry, office) a bit later than usual. I left my house at 8.45 for the usually efficient Lothian Bus Service 3 from Mayfield. I arrived at the office just a few miles away at 11.40. Nearly three bloody hours to travel ten miles.

The knock-on effect from the partial closure of the by-pass was horrendous. There was a long, snaking queue of traffic all the way from the by-pass to Dalkeith where it just simply stopped. Nothing moved for the best part of half an hour and then eventually it inched its way along towards the south side of Edinburgh. When I got to the office, sarcastic cheers greeted my arrival. It was damn near lunch time. Two hours of my life had been given away to the nightmare of trying to travel from A to B in Scotland's capital city.

Can the city fathers do anything about it? Will they do anything about it?

Sadly, I fear not....