Thursday 19 October 2023

Helen Edwards says WMCA and I only disagree on policy

I disagree with their policy which is this:

  • In the 1950s, the authorities' policy was to spend millions of pounds to destroy the tram network in the W Midlands.
  • In the 1960s onwards, to destroy the railway network with roads, buildings and, to rebuild the tram network, on what was left of the railway lines that had escaped complete obliteration.
  • In the 1970s, urban railway lines continued to be turned, by your colleagues, into using them for vehicles, trading estates, homes and every other kind of building.
  • In the 1980s, all you top, very well-paid officers, with council leaders and national government, decided to no longer rebuild your new tramway out to the airport but on the mainline railway between Snow Hill railway station, to fall short of both the bus station and railway station in Wolverhampton.  This alone is idiocy and incompetence of the first order!
  • But, it was then repeated with an even more outrageous stupidity by turning what you all knew was a "railway of national strategic significance" into another tramway - the WBHE, aka the Dudley Tram.  The Dudley Tram on 6.7 Kms of Dudley's only principal mainline railway with 4 Kms destroying, at Merry Hill, more of nature, public open space, housing land and my vertical guerrilla garden instead of roads being used.  Roads were used where there has been for decades a perfectly good bus service, now duplicated or replaced by trams.
  • This is your policy of giving top priority, costing hundreds of millions of pounds, to rebuilding the tram network on the surviving railway network, rather than electrifying the trains and buses, let alone putting commuter and regional and intercity trains back!!

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