Residents in the West Midlands who have just gained a new job could benefit from free bus, tram and rail travel to work.
Transport for West Midlands (TfWM) has teamed up with local transport operators to offer two four-week tickets free, then a third four-week ticket at a 50 per cent discount from the standard price on selected bus, tram and network travel passes through the Workwise scheme.
The scheme is aimed at giving newly employed people a helping hand into work and you can read more here.
Each "bus on rails" tram is £4 m, compared with an electric bus straight on the roads (without the railway tracks) being £350,000 each. Construction was £75 m/Km for Westside extension; £133 m/Km for Eastside extension. Compare that with Borders Railway in southern Scotland rebuilt and opened 6 yrs ago this month for £7 m/Km over 50 Kms. WMCA/TfWM are into selfish, greedy, self aggrandisement while the poor suffer and even go hungry. Despicable, immoral behaviour by our politicians and officers. PLEASE PROTEST to Ian.Ward@birmingham.gov.uk; MayorsOffice@wmca.org.uk; andy.street@wmca.org.uk
Dear friends - and our Transport representative, Trevor Eames PLEASE RESPOND with your own thoughts/ideas/opinions!
First Class for the Big Four. Second Class for all the other intercity stations missed out but, they must still have a second class service.
BUSES PUSHED OUT onto narrow roads with parked cars and diversions
I have now checked out Broad Street. It really is utterly impossible for buses to use that road ever again. Pavements are widened and, at tram stops, the road is narrowed further. There are two bus shelters opposite Centenary Square but no others until you get to the 'Hagley Rd/Francis Rd bus stop on our, W side of Five Ways. The intention is to take the tram onto Bearwood, along Hagley Road. However, this simply means multi-modal mix up with more changes and delays. And, at the most colossal expense in cost and in weight of greenhouse gases at a time of climate and ecological emergencies that WMCA has declared. The money should be going for electric buses and Fare Free Public Transport for the young and middle aged, to end that discrimination against them.
HS2 goes so fast it flies through the air, like a plane and gives the wealthy sods the choice of either plane or train. BOYCOTT IT! It will reduce overcrowding for those travelling between the Big Four cities but it means:-
First Class for the Big Four. Second Class for all other intercity stations.
I know I am in a very small minority in pointing this out. However, do I have a point?
Dear Peter and Geo
Chris Packham could not have spoken a truer word. It makes all our problems worse, intensifies the climate emergency and shouts the lie that it will reduce overcrowding, increasing capacity when it rockets past every intercity station, duplicating plane travel. That is the lie.
https://www.facebook.com/
It cannot help in lessening the destruction of nature when it is such a heavy-footed and greenhouse gases intensive way of making all our problems worse and speeding us to THE END. HIGH SPEED TO FOUR TERMINUSES. Humans are on track to terminate themselves faster!!
MY JOKE OF THE DAY/WEEK/MONTH/YEAR/DECADE ... ('cos I'm not a great comedian, as you know)
"Building HS2 frees up a massive amount of space on the existing railway by placing long distance services on their own pair of tracks. Once HS2 is operating, services can run much closer together, meaning there can be more rush hour trains, helping to relieve overcrowding.
"Once the full network is operational we expect HS2 trains to carry over 300,000 passengers a day."
from https://www.hs2.org.uk/why/capacity/
What do you do about the many intercity stations, HS2 is too fast to stop at?
Have you thought of that?
Still destroying our principal, mainline railway for 1 million to use - no more left after this. Instead, building High Scandal 2 to bypass every intercity station apart from two airports and 4 terminus stations. WHAT A JOKE!
(Some trains may stop at Crewe and Toton)
I MUST BE WRONG, AREN'T I?
Is my research correct, here?
Am I right in thinking that High Scandal 2, outside of London, only stops at two airports and the three terminus stations - Brum, Manchester and Leeds? Or, will it stop near to East Midlands Airport, too, as E Mids Hub station? Does it stop at Crewe?
What is the point of spending over £100 billion of greenhouse gases to escalate climate catastrophe, in order to give plane flyers the choice of High Scandal 2 train or plane?
How can passengers be moved to the High Scandal 2 line when it goes so fast it cannot stop at the existing intercity station they might want to get off at?! You will still need the intercity trains, won't you? So what is the point of High Scandal 2?
Meanwhile, the UK's last principal mainline, half used, 120 Kms Black Country Railway gets broken up as part of the Disintegrated Rail Plan into heavy rail, light rail, very light rail and, ultra-light rail on the section in the 1 million population of the Black Country! This means more changes, more delays as you wait around for the next connection and, more complications.
" The government's long-awaited Integrated Rail Plan may be published as part of chancellor Rishi Sunak's autumn Spending Review." from https://www.newcivilengineer.
Tim Weller 0791 380 4363
THE MOST EXPENSIVE LIE, EVER!
The railway industry has fully co-operated with the destruction of between one-third and one-half of the total railway lines that there were built in the UK.
It is a LIE to say that HS2 is needed so that "capacity (is) freed up on the rail network"
Very many thanks, Sophie. Very good to read. However, ...
Another transport/financial scandal is the destruction of the 56 Kms Black Country Railway section of the Derby to Devon via Dudley principal mainline railway. 9 Kms is being given over to the Light Rail, West Midlands Metro (over half a billion pounds) and to a Very Light Rail test track (over £30 m)! 47 Kms will remain unused for passenger trains and a short section used for freight. Another short section might get the Ultra Light Rail shuttle tram. This is on top of six railway lines already destroyed in Dudley borough, alone over the last fifty years! MORE INFO: timweller1@gmail.com test track (over £30 m)!
Dear Brian - and copied to the Chronicle editors.
Thanks for your email.
My wife, Linda is the younger sister of Chrissie Verduyn, who passes on her copy of the excellent, the very professionally produced, month after month, 'Clun Chronicle'. We live in Halesowen on the edge of the Black Country and next to our NW Worcestershire green belt.
Chrissie presented the Clun Climate Action Plan from the CCEG in June and your good self, on behalf of the Town Council, endorsed it and gave every encouragement for progress to be made in three areas that Alison Weeks wrote about in the July issue.
My concern is that human-induced climate change is still not making a difference in every area of our lives. Climate science is now 160 years old but we still carry on regardless with business as usual, of economic growth at the expense of the planet's fast changing life support systems.
The NFU produced their brochure about net zero CO2 emissions that I picked up at the Minsterley Show. It was produced two years ago. I read that 10% of our nation's greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture. Now, the first-rate, Adam Henson on BBC's 'Country File' is getting down to making further changes on his farm in Gloucestershire.
Matt Jones, in the July Chronicle, wrote that his Acton Farming Company goes in for a four-year rotation of crops, minimum tillage and, practices that reduce "the reliance on man-made and mined fertilisers - often produced halfway around the world". That is excellent as, it seems, is everything else he is doing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and impacts. Your farmers are probably way ahead of Adam Henson!
As for me, I'm more in favour of Matt's arable farming because I think we need to eat much less meat and more plants for a more sustainable lifestyle that would give lower impacts from our fossil fuels/greenhouse gases intensive lives.
Now we have heard from Matt, can our livestock farmers boast of their farming practices that are "treading more lightly on the planet" (Jonathon Porritt)?
With best wishes
Tim
Is Boris Johnson a secret, covert socialist? Or, just a windbag? Insincere? Never means what he says? A 17th-century Leveller?!
What about the rich levelling down? That never happens. It should. The wealthy have more money than they know what to do with. So it is wasted and spent on burning up finite fossil fuels and giving the runaway greenhouse effect. The rich are most responsible for climate disaster and the poor suffer the most from it.
from Wikipedia:
The Levellers were a political movement during the English Civil War (1642–1651) committed to popular sovereignty, extended suffrage, equality before the law and religious tolerance. The hallmark of Leveller thought was its populism, as shown by its emphasis on equal natural rights, and their practice of reaching the public through pamphlets, petitions and vocal appeals to the crowd.[1]
The Levellers came to prominence at the end of the First English Civil War (1642–46) and were most influential before the start of the Second Civil War (1648–49)
@B L What is your source for your CO2 output statistic?
B L Tim Weller sorry, I think my point was badly illustrated. London was by far the largest urban agglomeration in the United Kingdom in 2020, with an estimated population of 9.3 million people, more than three times as large as Manchester, the UK’s second biggest urban agglomeration. The English cities of Birmingham and Leeds had the third and fourth largest populations respectively, while the biggest city in Scotland, Glasgow was the fifth largest. Therefore it stands to reason that most of the passengers on the current West Coast mainline will have no interest in stopping at Stoke or Wigan or wherever.... The current express services on the West Coast mainline sacrifice many of the stops in favour of speed. If you simply remove all of those London to Manchester passengers from the west Coast Mainline to their own dedicated route you can then just substitute all those express services to local stoppers, meaning more regular services to all those in-between stations. Like I said, it is about capacity, not speed. Doesn't it make logical sense to connect the 4 metropolis cities together? Thank you so much for this explanation that is clearer than what was offered up by Gareth Dennis or David Frankal. What you are saying is that the four biggest cities deserve to have a super-duper high-speed line because they have the largest populations and, therefore, must have the most passengers on the existing high-speed line. The smaller 'in between' town and cities served by the present high-speed line will still have the existing trains and may even get more services. However, it will have to be a second-class high-speed service for them because the best, fastest and newest trains will be on HS2 services and be First Class High Speed. The problem is that the fewer passengers wanting to stop at the smaller towns and cities will feel they have been downgraded and may end up with fewer services each day because the majority of passengers from the Big Cities on the intercity trains will all be on First Class HS2. That minority of second-class high speeders may feel left out and having been given second best. And, their trains will still end up in Brum, Manchester, Leeds and London, anyway! It reinforces the UK's class-ridden society that is not egalitarian by any stretch of the imagination. It is all about competing with the plane companies that already connect the four Big Cities. It is all about attracting business away from planes onto rail. Therefore, it does have to be about speed, every step of the way. And, the Big Four Metropolitan Cities are already very well connected and have been for over 150 years. It is just that they want preferential treatment by not having irritating stops to delay them to their much more important destinations than the Wigans and Stokes of this world. In other words, it is about speed and reinforcing our unfortunate, class-ridden mentality, and making for unnecessary duplication at a most colossal cost from even more greenhouse gases, to speed us all on our way to climate catastrophe and THE END. |
High Scandal 2 is only good as an alternative for plane travellers!
Is my research correct, here?
