West Yorkshire's Great and Good need to write a better transport plan: one without a tram
The obsession with trams resulted in approaches to transport policy that do not, and will never be able to, meet the needs and wants of most residents of West Yorkshire.
In a gesture of festive goodwill from all at Westminster to the fine city of Leeds, the Department of Transport has cancelled or delayed or postponed or something (depends who you speak with) the exciting project to build a new tram system in Leeds and Bradford:
“A planned tram system for West Yorkshire has been delayed after the government carried out a review of the project. West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) had hoped that trams would be running on two lines in Leeds and Bradford in the early 2030s, however it is now likely to be the late 2030s. The government had promised £2.1bn for the mass transit system, but has now told WYCA to take a more thorough approach to the development of the scheme.”
Unsurprisingly a lot of people working for think tanks in London had a collective fit of apoplexy. The sort of young men who had a train set as kids, cycle and don’t run a car penned excoriating attacks on Britain’s inability to build anything. They’re joined by another group of men in London who really do believe that having a tram network is some sort of magic formula for getting regional economic growth. After all every little metropolis in France has a tram and look how incredibly successful that country’s regional cities are?
Meanwhile, up here in the place now further deprived by the lack of a tram nobody at all is crying. After all the scheme, which might have been in place by 2030, was to build a third fixed rail connection between Leeds and Bradford city centres and a further line running from St James Hospital in the centre of Leeds to the White Rose shopping centre on that city’s southern outskirts (a place very well served by an actual motorway). And that’s it. If you wanted to get to Wakefield, Batley or Otley then forget it. Even the extended pipe dream of West Yorkshire’s transport planners didn’t bring those places into a network and the chances of it reaching Cullingworth, well we can forget that idea.
I understand that the great and good of our cities want zoom zoom whizz whizz imagery as part of what amounts to a city marketing strategy. A bit like conference halls, sports stadiums, and concert venues, pictures of sleek modern trams sliding through the streets present an impression of a place that is cool, up-to-date and ready for your dollops of inward investment. But this doesn’t amount to an economic development plan and we can be sure, at least if past economic development programmes are a guide, that the main investors will be assorted property men who fancy using taxpayers cash to save them the bother of including a profit margin in their business plans.
Trams are essentially a municipal luxury good, the local authority equivalent of a wealthy middle-aged bloke buying a sports car or a fancy motorbike. Even the more successful tram networks do little more than wash their face: in Manchester the tram system has in a couple of years made an operating surplus (albeit one with a large lump of public subsidy in the form of discretionary fares and PTE grant) but there is no prospect at all of ever getting any return on the billions it cost to build the tram system in the first place. And, if, as those London-based tram fans argue, we fund the tram using public borrowing then somebody has to pay the capital and interest on that borrowing. The only people in the frame for this are council taxpayers, most of whom aren’t near a tram and are very unlikely to use the things more than once or twice (if at all) in any year.
I agree that local councils (not these new-fangled mayors, we should abolish them) should have more borrowing powers, their ability to raise taxes shouldn’t be capped and infrastructure investments shouldn’t require the second guessing of a man in a Whitehall office. But I also think that the priority for infrastructure investment needs to lie with developments that are funded by users or other beneficiaries rather than by the wider taxpayer. A council building energy generation and water supply can repay the borrowing from billpayers. The same may well go for roads, bridges where tolls or charges may allow repayment. But too much council investment choice amounts to little more than a boondoggle, a marketing strategy, funded by taxpayers rather than a considered approach to public investment.
I don’t think Leeds and Bradford need a tram system even if we could get one built at a lower cost-per-mile than such schemes currently cost. There are a multitude of other transport investments that would benefit the residents of our cities far more than would a tram. We have a poorly connected airport that needs expansion and the extension of operating hours. The existing heavy rail lines to Harrogate, York and Huddersfield need investment to increase capacity and speed travel (new trains would be nice too). We need to get better ticketing systems on buses to increase speeds and reduce congestion. Parts of the existing road system, especially in the Northern half of the conurbation (which is where most of the money is, by the way) need upgrading and the Leeds ring road still isn’t entirely duelled. The problem is that all these things are boring, officers can’t claim they are saving the planet and there are none of those zoom zoom whizz whizz images for the region’s great and good to brag about.
Maybe the need to look again at the plans for a tram system will lead West Yorkshire’s leadership to consider other options. Not just better bus infrastructure and more support for active travel but perhaps taking a lead on driverless taxis - Waymo and Tesla are eager to try out their systems in European environments with narrower streets and associated congestion. Perhaps the great and good could also look at real zoom zoom whizz whizz stuff like flying taxis as well as innovative approaches to home delivery or work-from-home initiatives. Compared with the cost of building the tram system, doing these investments will make the billions go a lot further and, almost certainly, can be done a whole lot more quickly. For the two or three billion the mayor wants for the very limited current tram proposals we could go a long way to doing all of the things in the list above.
The obsession with mass transit systems like trams, and indeed with rail in general, has resulted in approaches to transport policy that do not, and will never be able to, meet the needs and wants of most residents of West Yorkshire. Sadly the loud voices of city boosters, boys in London with train sets in their attics, and the ‘build anything, anywhere baby’ crowd will mean that our mayor and those around her will simply double down on the idea of a tram even if, as seems likely, any scheme won’t be operating for at least another ten years. And we’ll still cry about Leeds being the only place this side of Alpha Centaurii that doesn’t have a tram, forgetting that in the 1950s Leeds and Bradford scrapped their trams because they were expensive, unpopular and buses met public needs better. Seems though that we won’t learn.