YEP Letters: November 25

Check out today's YEP letters
28 March 2017.......  Kirkstall Forge rail station. Picture Tony Johnson.28 March 2017.......  Kirkstall Forge rail station. Picture Tony Johnson.
28 March 2017....... Kirkstall Forge rail station. Picture Tony Johnson.

Consider reopening local rail stations

DS Boyes, Leeds 13

ONCE again Leeds City Council talks about a mass public transport system, but aren’t they just spitting in the wind, as it were, all over again?

The latest pie in the sky proposal is the Holbeck and Stourton route. The fatal flaw in every plan so far has been that they never serve the whole Leeds area as the old Leeds City Tramways did, but instead only ever mention one or maybe two routes, leaving everywhere else especially west Leeds out in the wilderness.

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Also, these schemes are always surface transport, but surface area is one commodity Leeds is rapidly running out of. There is one surface transport medium currently under used, ie the existing rail network. Many tracks are still in situ, with only the stations gone. Only one new station has been built since, Kirkstall Forge, which is apparently well used and taking commuters off the gridlocked A65 road.

The around £100 million thrown away by Labour councillors on the Supertram and NGT Trolleybus would have been more than enough to reopen every station in the Leeds area, yet this is never even considered.

Post-Leeds trolleybus plans to go to cabinet

Leeds City Council’s decision-making cabinet will be presented with detailed initial plans for the city’s post-trolleybus mass transit transport plans next month. The Yorkshire Evening Post understands that a new blueprint for a major public transport scheme to replace the scrapped NGT project will be unveiled to the executive board before it is taken forward for “refining”. The panel heard that one of the main aims of the renewed plans is to focus on “joining up communities across the city”. It follows extensive previous criticism of the council’s approach to promoting the doomed NGT plan which was abandoned by the Government last year. We asked YEP readers for their views and here’s what some of them said on social media..

Jamey C Barron

About time – embarrassing how Leeds is being left behind considering the businesses and status of the city outside London.

Angela McPartlan

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Leeds has big aspirations and it needs a transport system to match.

Teresa Cook

Fingers crossed that somebody’s thought it through this time.

Aiden Fryer

If this one doesn’t go though I demand that the money be paid back to the city people probably another reason to get a huge pot of money to spend on another cycle highway.

Robbie Anthony Walker

Not holding my breath with this one. There had been blueprint after blue print on the tram subject for it to be shelved all the time. If they where truly interested in trams why abolish the original tram network when it could have been upgraded and maintained?

Kevin Eastwood

Millions more spent on consultations, scrapped in the end.

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We already have electric buses that are not held back by overhead cables, what is the point?

A Labour-run council that is hell bent on wasting public funds, never mind we can always increase property tax again!

Alan Mazurke

Needs to be planned and organised by people who have a track record in installing tramways around the world.

Ross Bailey

Let’s hope they can get this right, but I don’t have much faith in our esteemed Labour run Leeds City Council.

Cliff Owen

Another huge waste of money if it comes to nothing again.

Warren Brown

Trams or an underground required.

Peter Smith

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Looks like the current £170 million is going to be spent on the park and ride and all the ifrastructure needed for that.First Bus have announced that they are to have a new fleet of hybrid buses,so no doubt the fares will go up again.

What Leeds needs is a reliable, affordable, clean, efficient transport system. What we don’t need is the re-hashing of previous failed plans.

Time for action on transport

D Angood, by email

So at last the council have developed some brains, if the development chief is to be believed.

The brains should now be used to develop an integrated transport system to serve the travelling public of the area.

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The president of Leeds Chamber of Commerce Paula Dillon has jumped in with both feet by proposing that a single route should be constructed from Stourton into the city.

Has she not listened as to why the NGT failed? The words “mass transit” should give some indication that it involves a system to move the “masses” and the masses are not limited to the south of the city.

Any system has to begin in the centre, preferably a circular route around the central business district.

Ideally it should be underground with integrated connections to the existing transport system, especially the rail network.

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During the planning stages it should be easy to site connections that would facilitate access of future arterial routes into the system.

The planners are there, the technology is there, the equipment is there, what is needed is some backbone from the politicians to fight for the funding.

We do not, as Neil Hudson once said, need any more faffing about with sticking plasters, let’s set to and mend the whole.

Spend on rapid rail system

Jim Smith, Whitkirk

I would like to comment on Mike Priestley’s letter (YEP November 22) in which he mentions trimming half an hour off the journey to London with HS2. When will people realise that we don’t have capacity on our railways, either north to south ,or east to west. We can’t keep building cars and lorries and putting them on our roads.

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Freight and people need a clean rapid transport system, not just in London but all over. Big money will have to be spent, but what are we spending on our motorways, just to play catch-up? It took me four hours to get to Chester the other week. Wise up and spend on a electrified rapid rail system.