6 April 2022
Dear Ms Laura Shoaf - Chief Executive, W Mids Combined Authority
It is grossly immoral, with a climate crisis, cost of living crisis, the energy crisis and a housing crisis, quite apart from quickly rising inflation, to be spending on the Wednesbury Brierley Hill tram Extension (WBHE or, Dudley Tram) well over half a billion pounds by 2024 or 2025, when you finally complete the 10.7 Kms WBHE.
It means many hundreds of millions of pounds are spent to destroy Dudley's very last and seventh railway when the seventh is already built with every bridge, viaduct and tunnel in place between Worcester and Derby - over 120 Kms.
What a slap in the face for many tens of thousands of our people who want help with paying their fuel bills to heat their homes and, especially, simply to eat. Yet, you deprive them of that money.
You are doing the poor down to destroy, with a massive, double-track, concrete railway viaduct, the only public open space at Merry Hill that is already short of nature. 400 metres of trees and shrubs get felled and even carbon-absorbing grass and soil gets smothered in concrete, brick and tarmac to worsen the climate emergency.
There is still time to stop Metro beyond Dudley, finish the railway with trains and reinstate the monorail to Merry Hill but, this time, connect it to the railway line. Or, simply use electric buses instead of the monorail and run Metro “bus on rails” trams all the way on the current freight line to Stourbridge.
You and your colleagues are behaving immorally with your foolish obsession with the most expensive transport mode to construct after HS2, simply to impress the foreign visitor with a swish, smart, grossly extravagant, prestigious, "bus on rails" tram to badly slow the eleven fast bus routes into Brum city centre via Five Ways underpass and Broad Street. And, with WBHE, to destroy Brum's bypass mainline railway - the 120 Kms Black Country Railway.
Each of your unnecessary, vain, 'look how rich we are', electric “bus on rails” trams cost over £5 m. Compare that with half a million pounds for a new electric bus directly on the road surface without needing the steel (climate worsening) railway tracks.
Please buck your ideas up, Laura.
Tim Weller
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