It's a refrain often heard (usually in the EEN pages). Edinburgh's motorists are 'beleaguered' or they are to be 'hit' with new restrictions, so on and so forth.
Examples?
Parking restrictions (well if you want your city to turn into one giant car park);
Potholes in the road (honestly? You think that's done deliberately by the Council? Is your tin foil hat comfortable?);
Tramworks (clearly you've never tried being a cyclist, or especially a pedestrian, around the tramworks);
20mph zones (c'mon, if you were to hit a 2 mile section of 20mph it would take 6 minutes to go through - at 30mph it would take 4 minutes - are 2 minutes really that precious?).
Alternatively they are seen as being 'pro-bike', or quite often being in the pocket of SPOKES, which would be laughable if it wasn't for the fact this is often stated as being the gospel truth.
You and I know how hard it is to get anything at all pro-bike out of the Council. Ranters will cite the QBC as an example - thousands launched at helping cyclists (to the dteriment of the motorist). Until you look at the detail of course and see that parking spaces have increased on the route, the speed limit has remained the same, and where there's potential for conflict they've left cyclists in the lurch with no lane at all because it's 'too narrow' to fit in without taking space from cars. Which just shows how little the council actually listen to cyclists, and anyway, 600 odd thousand is utter peanuts compared to costs associated with the roads for driving facilities.
How do ideas such as 'anti-car' and 'pro-bike' take hold so completely, when even just scratching the surface it is completely and utterly clearly wrong?