Most folk enjoy a good old moan about the state of the roads, if enjoy is the right word. Potholes, speed limits, bad junctions and all that sort of stuff is what fills councillors’ inboxes, each message wanting to know whitareyegonnadoabootit.

And when a dutiful councillor goes in to battle for a particular improvement and by some miracle manages to turn a vague maybe into a firm commitment, the little victory will be hailed on social media and in the next leaflet as an achievement on a par with the Good Friday Agreement. It therefore doesn’t take much imagination to understand what the reaction would be if over 50 of these projects were cancelled in one fell swoop.

But that’s what faces Edinburgh’s transport convener, Labour’s Stephen Jenkinson, when his committee meets this coming Thursday, and on the agenda is a not-so-cunningly disguised item titled in gloriously dense bureaucrat-speak “City Mobility Plan – Capital Investment Programme Prioritisation Outputs”. It could just as easily be titled “City Road Improvement Postponements,” because in essence that’s wat it is, breaking the news gently to councillors, perhaps in the hope they won’t notice that no less than 61 projects will be on hold because there is not enough money to complete all 134 of them.

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