Very nice to read your article in 'Rail Professional', April 2020 issue

email dated 24 March 2020:

Dear Transport Convener, Cllr Lesley and friends - fun photos to click on, below.  As your reward for reading to the bottom - don't cheat!!

Re: the Edinburgh tram line - 'Trams to Newhaven' and coals to Newcastle

You ended your piece by writing, "the status quo is quite simply not an option.  To Newhaven - and beyond!"  To infinity and beyond, of course.

Do you know why your predecessors destroyed the tram status quo, to go for diesel buses some years ago?  We did the same in the Black Country and Brum but I am ignorant of the reasons, if you are able to help, please. 

We then had the status quo of diesel buses for many years that you want to partly change, it seems as no longer being an option.  Why all the chopping and changing between two different status quos over the decades?  Why not simply transform the two basic modes - bus and train?

Did we see the growth in diesel buses as Edinburgh grew and prospered?  Grew and prospered with humdrum buses and not flash trams.  Therefore, for many decades the diesel buses were the real deal, the satisfactory status quo, the success that you are upsetting, yet again, for the return of the tram status quo, once more.

Perhaps you meant that you wanted a high-status symbol to befit a world, grandstanding city like Edinburgh?  Something more prestigious and glitzy and glamorous.  Or, a solution looking for a problem?

However, is the bigger and grander the project the more expensive it becomes and, therefore, the more greenhouse gases are spewed out to screw up the world's climates for the worse?  In other words, the more we spend on finite resources like fossil fuels the more unsustainable our society becomes to turn it into planet venus, as some scientists fear?

Why should the "bus on rails"* tram on tracks on the road be better than smart electric buses straight on to the road without railway lines having to be laid first?

Or, could you join the current European mainland trend of even fare-free public transport in some places like Tallinn in Estonia, Luxembourg and Dunkirk?

You want the trams "to complement and support our excellent bus services" but could the danger be that the trams will replace some bus routes?  And, at the most colossal expense, as here:

 Edinburgh Conservative Group OPPOSES their tram...

With every good wish for fareless electric buses to bribe the car commuter to use the humble, mundane, workhorse bus.

* quote courtesy of UK Tram Ltd, the national tram promotion group at the heart of our Transport HQ in Brum.