Dear friends
This email from Mark calling on FoE members to attend the committee meeting on Thursday at 6 pm is brilliant. Please attend and have your say, as I hope I will be allowed to.
However, I am very concerned that all of you who fully understand the dangers we are all in from climate breakdown, resource shortages and pursuing lifestyles in defiance of respecting and living in harmony with nature and her life support systems, are failing to oppose the idiocy of expanding multi-modal public transport. Coming up, below are my reasons for opposing light rail trams (LR), very light rail trams (VLR) but fully supporting ultra light rail trams (ULR or Stourbridge Shuttle) on the world's shortest (1.8 Kms) branch line - that I helped to get, incidentally, with my letter writing, followed by emails, in the 1980/90s - and by supporting John Parry.
- In my opinion, there is not a shadow of a doubt that both main mayoral candidates (one of whom will win) are far too weak to stop the roll out of eight more tram lines over 150 miles with 380 tram stops over the next twenty years and costing £15 BILLION (Jan 2020 figure when it was announced by Andy Street's team).
- Since 1981, when it all started, hundreds of millions of pounds in both price and weight of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have been squandered on replacing perfectly good buses and trains with trams. A paltry 23 Kms in 42 years of effort!
- Those buses and trains should have been electrified but, instead this mad, mad world we live in went for rebuilding the tram network (obliterated only 20 years previously) on what was left of the destroyed railway network, to also destroy even more of that!
- Hence, the UK's very last mothballed but virtually ready built, principal mainline railway "of national strategic significance"has gone for ever because nearly everyone wanted the 11 Kms Dudley Tram to rush Sandwell and Dudley residents on the former mainline railway to Merry Hill to shop.
- All they had to do was to give us electric buses between Dudley town centre and Merry Heaven. From its opening, there has always been diesel buses between the two bus stations. All they had to do was to make them electric and not to bother with the highly expensive, in climate/resources and price, railway tracks for the flash "bus on rails" to run on!
- Just because something is public transport - like constructing then going on High Scam 2 and flying - does not make it sensible or right in the light of our totally unsustainable lifestyles. How we all adore speed instead of sense, choosing style over substance and vanity of vanities!
- Under the Victorians, tramways were turned into railways. In our so,so sophisticated, modern, highly intelligent age, we turn our railways into tramways. We're just too clever by half!
As was wanted by one train operating company (toc) when all the contracts were up for grabs last decade, Jewellery line trains from the two Brum stations must reverse out of Stourbridge Junction station to use the Black Country freight line to meet the trams at Cinder Bank roundabout where the tramway must end. An electric bus can take passengers from Brierley Hill transport interchange on the railway into Merry Hill. For 100 years the Victorians and Edwardians ran passengers and goods trains on the same lines.
MAP to help you see what I mean:
I will send this suggestion to the committee members and to the two Cabinet members who attend as observers. But do any of you have any doubts over this idea, please? Or, does anyone like it? And these nine action points from the W Mids Climate Coalition that was none of my doing but I so like. What do you think?:
See you on Thursday
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