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Plug pulled
Energy-saving hybrid buses have been withdrawn from a busy Edinburgh route because the Capital’s hills were proving too much for them. Sources in the company said the hybrid buses were having “battery issues”.
Time to phone Elon Musk.
Michael Holmes
The eco fleet has not been “ditched”. The buses have simply been moved to other bus routes. The current technology was unable to deal with the hills on one particlar route. No money has been wasted.
Dougal A Allan
Reminds me of going to school on the No 1 bus in the 50s. Edinburgh Corporation Transport had taken delivery of state-of-the-art single decker buses. The buses, when full, couldn’t get over Abbeymount with the result that we had to get off the bus and walk over to the other side of Abbeymount and then board the bus again once it had come over the hill.
Henry Campbell Gillan
Rudolf Diesel wins again! Sooner or later we’ll be forced to stop politics by engineering. After more than a century nobody has yet invented a more efficient way to turn energy into power than Diesel’s engine..
Chris Ryan
If they’d taken that attitude when they discovered coal power we wouldn’t have diesel. If we’d taken that attitude when we’d discovered oil lighting we wouldn’t have electricity. Why should we stop science now?
Nigel Simpson
Tell that to Tesla. Diesel’s days are numbered. I own a decent diesel motor, but the spec and performance of Tesla blows diesel out of the water.
Jonathon Fowler
There isn’t an electric car that can pull my caravan, so until then diesels win outright.
Rozalia Cull Politically-driven technological evolution doesn’t work. That way of making technology evolve is always going to mean the engineering isn’t perfected in time, leading to problems which we ultimately pay for. Like increased bus fares to pay for increased running costs of “environmentally friendly” buses filled with unreliable technology which was underdeveloped in a hurry to meet political deadlines.
Chris Turner I’m glad to see the back of this part of the fleet. They were uncomfortable and cold. Hopefully the next generation of hybrids will be better.
John James
Testing times
Nicola Sturgeon has launched a staunch defence of Primary One testing in Scotland’s school amid growing opposition calls for them to be dropped.
Teachers should be able to spot a child with problems. Reduce class sizes and let the teachers teach, there should be no stress/worries about tests to children in primary school. Plenty time for that when they are older.
Zelda Lithgow
Are the children stressed/ worried, or is it a handful of Tory and Labour-supporting parents? If your child had difficulty reading wouldn’t you want to know so you, and the teacher, could give them extra support?
Alan Inverarity
The teachers are in the best place to spot a child in need of additional support. If they had slightly fewer children in their classes they could teach them better from day one.
Clare Cockburn
If any child struggles with reading how can a teacher identify this in a class of 30 – it’s crowd control when it gets to that level.
Tony Contini I don’t see the issue with assessing our kids. If you make it a big deal of it then so will they. I’d rather a child got the support and education necessary for their ability than wait and have them struggle.
Audrey Myles
Vigilante fears
A report has found that more than a hundred Scots have been confronted by “paedophile hunters” in the last year.
God help you if you are mistakenly targeted because a mob doesn’t care if you are innocent or not. By all means they should report suspicious persons to the police. They should not be roaming around in groups targeting people’s homes. They may have the wrong house number or person. Then what?
Jacqueline Elston
It’s the job of the police to investigate potential crimes. It is most certainly not the job of misinformed vigilantes to make assumptions and then act upon them. By doing so, they could be jeopardising international investigations.
Alastair Browne
I haven’t forgotten the mob who vandalised a doctor’s house because they didn’t understand the difference between paedophile and paediatrician.
Maggie Watanabe
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