Which is all very bizarre, because the side of Princes Street that suffers from congestion is the side that cars were already banned from driving down.

But hey, since when has the council let facts get in the way of a stupid decision??

Because it's so very simple and easy to administer and requires almost no effort on the part of the council [as it will invariably be collected by the Inland Revenue], not to mention much more efficient [remember Edinburgh's just sent out nastygrams to a third of households who haven't paid last year's council tax yet...] the Council is against it.

Once again, the flat earthers win.

Such pithy but completely wrong comments are of course the raison d'etre of Donald Anderson, Edinburgh's erstwhile Council Leader, who is guaranteed to be habitually wrong about just about everything.

While not as crowded as London, Edinburgh's not bloody empty, property is already immensely over-priced, the education system is pretty shocking, and journey times are much higher [you're not going as far in Edinburgh, but you're going slower]. I know, details, details.

One of Edinburgh’s best known festival venues has been banned from playing jazz in the afternoon - because it interrupts Bible studies.

Divinity students are among those who complained about the level of noise coming from the Spiegeltent, in George Square, last year.

The only reason this happened is because the University of Edinburgh owns George Square... if they didn't, the poor wee lambs would have been told to get stuffed. Probably. Bah humbug.

As seems usual in the UK these days, store owners have been 'warned' when they should have been 'prosecuted'.

If the percentage with no bank account is from the Scottish Household Survey, then that's actually 9% of households with no account, so the real number of adults with no accounts will be somewhat higher...

It's too simplistic however to see this as a rejection of congestion charging per se, although many in the car lobby will and have already done so: it is much more of a rejection of the Council in general, and in particular its [in]ability to manage traffic issues.

Edinburgh has had long-term traffic problems [for 60+ years - see the 1949 Abercrombie Report for examples], and successive Councils have failed to address the problem. Traffic control/management problems are widespread in neighbourhoods across the city, and the Council's responses are weak and ineffectual - many Edinburgh schools are still not surrounded by 20 m.p.h. zones for example, and commuter traffic in residential neighbourhoods is a major issue.

Much of the congestion on the city's streets is caused by buses, not by cars, but it is hard to see how the Council will tackle this, given that the Council owns the dominant bus company and has a vested interest in preserving its dominance against its commerical rivals.

The central problem, which we have always known about, is that there is no high-capacity route that commuters can use to get in and out of the city, and with increased growth on the fringes of the city [aided and abetted by the Council, first through the development of the office park and then the mall at the Gyle, and now through the growth of the retail park at Kinnaird] the problems are only getting worse. If you are on one side of the city and wish to get to the other you have little alternative to driving through the city centre.

And then there's the city centre. The Council has long has an aim of getting cars out of the city centre, and has reduced the number of parking spaces and agressively enforced parking regulations. At the same time, the Council has been increasingly hostile to retailers in the city centre, most obviously through a refusal to tackle the precipitous decline of Princes Street over the last decade, while agressively promoting the development of alternative out of town retail locations.

And despite all that, the Council argued that it, and its arms-length transport company, had the solution to all these problems that they'd previously ignored, arguing that if their proposals weren't accepted traffic would get worse, communities would be negatively affected and so on and so on, ignoring the fact that this is already the situation today. The Council would much prefer the silver bullet of congestion charging, rather than having to actually do any work mitigating traffic levels in residential neighourhoods and restructuring the existing public transport network. For the Council, congestion charging is the easy way out.

But people have no faith in a Council that is widely [and accurately] seen as both anti-car and anti-city centre. People don't take their cars because they feel like it: they take them because they can't get around/across the city otherwise, and don't feel they should be penalised for this. A minor detail, but there it is.

This wasn't a referendum on congestion charging. This was a referendum on the Council, and it got the result it deserved.

Methinks that our friends in the Guardian may have gone and confused individual post codes with postal sectors, which are a much more useful thing to work with - both because there are far fewer of them, 9,900 vs 1.7 million, and because there's enough information aggregated at this geographic level them to make them analytically robust. For more information on UK postal geographies see the relevant National Statistics pages.

The interesting thing about Mosaic's classifications are the way they try and subdivide areas based on income, home-ownership, number of children, occupations and so on. Not sure which [if any] of the Mosaic groups the parties are allegedly targeting [Cultural leadership, Symbols of success, Fledgling nurseries, Upscaling new owners, Affluent blue collar, Coronation St, Rustbelt resilience, Corporate chieftains, Burdened optimists, High technologists, Semi-rural seclusion, Golden empty nesters, Provincial privilege, University challengers] I fit into, but then living in a Labour safe seat I doubt if any of the parties care much about my vote.

Now that's something that would be pretty obvious to anyone in the City Centre in the evening... it's full of lamb dressed as mutton, as the saying goes.

There is also a curious belief that black mini-skirts should be paired ONLY with nude-coloured tights, just to make sure that your legs look as chunky as possible.

But hey, you didn't expect anyone who bought their best party gear in Sainsbury's to be much of a fashion icon, did you??

The contractors, who have yet to be selected, are due to finish up in July, with any remaining work taking place after the Edinburgh Festival.

Oooh boy. No contractors selected, project starting within a month, 60 roads closed... finished by the festival?? No chance.

angry traders argue that the huge encampment set up by contractors has scared away customers and left them badly out of pocket

What the contractors have built is a large white dome that stretches all the way across the Royal Mile and halfway across the junction... and since you can't see over/around it, if you didn't know any better and were walking up the street you might think it marked the end of the Royal Mile and miss the Lawnmarket behind it.

And the Council/contractors haven't closed the surrounding roads either, so cars drive up to the dome before having to do a three point turn and go back the way they came.

Brilliant planning.

Those of us who have lived in Edinburgh for a while will remember that the council also had to rebuild the intersection of the Royal Mile and the Bridges, where the pretty cobblestones were laid on a bed of dirt, which promptly washed away under the weight of traffic and which had to be replaced by a concrete foundation. Whoops.