YEP Letters: November 30

May needs all support she can get

A Hague, Leeds 9

I AGREE with letters saying let Theresa May get on with her job.

The trouble is the British seem to love kicking people when they are down.

I didn’t vote Conservative myself but do realise she has a tough job with Brexit and needs all the support she can get as she fights 27 other nations for a divorce which the majority of us want.

Did we sign to pay a certain fee if leaving? I doubt it. Regarding export and import; they will lose 50 per cent more than us.

Anger over road chaos in Stanningley

Coun Andrew Carter CBE, Leader of the Conservative Group, Calverley & Farsley Ward, Leeds City Council

Local residents and businesses are rightly furious at the further disruption being caused to the road network around Stanningley Bottom as Leeds City Council’s highways department take further steps to try and make the road network operate properly following the disastrous construction of the so-called cycle superhighway on the A647 and down through Stanningley.

This part of Stanningley has always been a mixed commercial, industrial and residential area. The safe and free movement of goods and people therefore is essential.

The Labour administration’s obsession with the cycle superhighway and this particular area is nothing short of shambolic. As their experiment in what they call this ‘shared space’, a term not to be found in the Highway Code, they are now redesigning it.

Once again, as with the planning shambles the department headed up by Labour Coun Richard Lewis, refuses to hold its hand up and accept when they have simply got it wrong.

When local ward members, myself included, were briefed on these revisions I and my colleagues in Calverley & Farsley ward, which covers most of the area concerned, warned the highways department that it wouldn’t go down well with local residents or business and would be another waste of public money. Why can’t they just admit they have got it wrong?

EU own goal on culture bid

Barry Mortimer, by email

I AGREE with James Bovington’s assertion (YEP letters, November 28) that the EU has scored an own goal in its treatment of the City of Culture bid, though I would argue this isn’t an isolated incident as this petty minded anti-democratic monstrosity tries to bleed our country dry.

Look at our uneasy history with the EU and its predecessors. The French, under De Gaulle twice refused to let us join the Common Market in the 60s.

De Gaulle changed his mind after the Common Agricultural Policy was agreed, thereby ensuring we were locked into funding subsidies for his farmers.

As for the “lies of the leavers”, what about the lies of the Heath government which took us into the Common Market in 1973, or the distorted media campaign designed to support the “stay”campaign during the 1975 referendum? Would anyone have voted to stay if they had realised what was going on?

Mr Bovington bizarrely suggests that the grandparents of his students “robbed them of their European future”. Is he referring to the same generation that fought to preserve democracy in ther Second World War?

One of the reasons people like me voted to leave the EU was to get back control from European politicians and to be masters of our own destiny. One only has to read the words of Jean Monnet, one of the original founders of the European Project, who said in 1952: “Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.” Sound familiar?

The future is rail reopening

CV Barton, Burley in Wharfedale

I VERY much enjoyed reading the letters following Paula Dillon’s support for trams for Leeds.

One thing people are unaware of is that a steel-wheeled vehicle (a tram or a train) running on a steel rail only uses one fifth of the energy required by a rubber tyred vehicle (bus, lorry, van, car) running on a tarmac road.

Rubber tyred vehicles, even if battery powered, produce pollution from tyre, brake and road surface wear; this I understand is a nasty cocktail and is known as the Oslo effect. So why do people keep promoting trolley buses?

Motor buses and trolley buses soon stop operating when we get snow. Most books on Bradford city tramways have photographs of trams maintaining a service to Queensbury in heavy snow with no other vehicles on the road. This route was probably one of the last in Bradford to close. Monorail supporters are obviously not aware of Sydney, Australia, where a monorail was built but did not attract the public. After a change of politicians trams were put back on the streets.

In Leeds a solution put forward was in essensce a computer controlled guided bus running in a concrete trough on columns or stilts.

This created public uproar because passengers would be able to look into bedrooms, although no thought was given to snow and ice in the trough.

Monorail access for passengers is not easy with steps, lifts and escalators required, expensive to install and maintain. Trams only require a high kerb even for prams as wheelchair users.

The first station to serve Pudsey was Stanningley about half a mile east of the present Pudsey station (also convenient for Farsley residents). Next came Lowtown and Greenside. Pudsey had trams from Leeds (Leeds Transport on postcards by Jim Soper ISBN978-0-9510280-7-0 for photographs of trams and trains in Pudsey.)

I think present day travel times will be slower in 2017 than in 1955 and clearly illustrate that the future is rail reopening and not demolition for road construction.

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