I like Lothian Buses, but big double-deckers in small residential streets can cause problems – Helen Martin

Before Edinburgh set up its tram system, most people relied on and admired Lothian Buses.

Helen Martin's street has had problems with its water pipes which she fears may be caused by large buses

I did, and still do. But there are elements of the system that are beginning to annoy me, and some acts of the council that conflict with bus routes.

There is one bus route that uses our road. It used to come every half hour, and every hour on a Sunday. Now it’s every 20 minutes which isn’t ideal for our narrow, residential street.

We used to have single-deck buses, which changed to double-deckers and now the new buses seem to be wider and taller, perhaps to do with reducing emissions.

One problem (long before Spaces for People) was the council laying down cobbled “sleeping policemen” or “speed breakers”. At each side of them, the pavement was extended and topped with a bollard.

That’s where buses can’t pass each other, so one has to halt outside a house to let the other pass, and that’s even tougher now that the buses are bigger.

Recently, water workers have had to come twice to cope with water pipes leaking to the left and right of our house, sometimes reducing supplies and/or flooding the road.

That’s when I was told the pipes are unfortunately not laid deep enough under the road, and therefore possibly not able to cope with buses passing on top so often. Perhaps this wasn’t a bus route in 1936 when the houses were built.

The question is, does the council, or Lothian Buses, analyse and investigate roads before narrowing them or routing public transport?

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