TRANSPORT IS ONE KEY TO UNLOCK CLIMATE

Dear Colin - your email address is hidden from the other VIPs' addresses that I am also trying to influence for the better!

I was walking and cycling near Greenock last month and came across the Greenock Cut, an excellent tourist attraction and an amazing feat of engineering built from 1825 to 1827 by Robert Thom to address their town's equivalent of our climate and resources crises.  But it was so successful it boosted growth of every kind - good and bad and deepened ours just as climate science was taking off - well, actually in its infancy!

Gourock Rotary Club, west of Greenock, has sponsored at least one cycle-walkway in the past, it seems.  I saw one of their very own beautiful metal signposts for the Clyde Coastal Path very near to the Greenock Cut Visitors Centre.  I wish I had photographed it!  Is there any chance of you writing one email in support of the upgrading of our own 22 Kms Black Country Cycle-Walk Mudway, Colin?  Please, sir.  It is the UK's most important because it could do most in taking cars off the road if this vital and major, urban-rural-urban, commuter and leisure route was competently finished - at long last - and no longer incompetently finished in mud and puddles!

ADDRESSES - included above but the most important for actual action are these:

customerservices@wmca.org.uk

and

Adam.Tranter@wmca.org.uk - West Midlands Cycling and Walking Commissioner

I am entirely at fault that dear John, of last year, saw no link between human destructive behaviour, as here below and, climate breakdown/instability.  My dreadful diatribe failed to mention the link between unnecessary emissions from the wholesale destruction of transport infrastructure, and climate.

Not one politician, broadcaster or faith leader has commented on these scandals, idiocies, negligence:

1. Decades of never-enough homes were built for the badly housed, the migrants and for those at the bottom of the pile.
2. Almost always, however, they have built 3/4 bedroom homes for the better off - semis and detached - energy-hungry, high climate impacting houses built.  YET, NOT A SQUEAK OF PROTEST IS HEARD FROM A SINGLE PERSON!
3. Since Dudley's No 1 Canal was straightened by one of the owners of Merry Hill SC at Brierley Hill, the housing land it made has lain empty, wasted, unused - now into its third decade of negligence.
4. Instead, these people have seen 40 years of serious endeavour to get part of those 23,000 sq m of housing land to be given over to Metro trams.
5. They have seen first a mainline mothballed railway destroyed for the world's second most expensive transport mode to construct after High Scam 2 started in 2009.  Now, no longer even a tram direct connection between Snow Hill and Wolverhampton railway stations.  Snow Hill is bypassed and the big Wolverhampton station was cut in half from two to one station.
6. With their own eyes, they could hardly have missed how an even more important principal mainline railway has also been destroyed, even after every canal, road and motorway crossing was built to enable its re-opening!
7. The biggest town in the UK by population, Dudley borough without a railway station, has now lost its opportunity for rebuilding its station - it does have Stourbridge Jct, of course.  For 100 years, they had Dudley Railway Station.  Now, only Station Hotel survives.
8. The idiots in charge have turned this mainline station into an Innovation Centre.  The bright sparks only wanted a tram stop, instead of their railway station back!
9. The well-meaning but incompetent decision-makers have caused congested and polluted roads with their wholesale destruction of about 100 Kms of perfectly good railway lines in our region.
10. They could have been used as cycle-walkways (or even for trams) but are now gone for good.

THEY DECLARE CLIMATE EMERGENCIES BUT SEE NO LINK BETWEEN THESE IDIOCIES AND CLIMATE/RESOURCE SHORTAGES!

Very best wishes

Tim    (Weller)