to Brum Climate Justice Coalition

Dear friends - and it would be wonderful to have one person, with a name, replying - please!  My apologies for missing tomorrow evening.  I have to be, in person, at the Greener Together Forum organised by the WMCA.  But, next time, I hope.

Thanks to you all for the brilliant work you are doing for climate and social justice and for a more sustainable city and region.

The only request I have is that in the light of fast growing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, you think again about supporting the 2020 £15 billion programme of tram extensions to 2040.  Trams do appear green because of their 'clean' green credentials from being powered by electricity instead of diesel.  It is in their construction over these last 42 years that has shown how very ungreen and how very expensive the construction process is.  Some points:

1. Such is our fatal addiction to finite fossil fuels, as a rough rule of thumb, even with more renewables coming on stream, we still have to regard £1 in price = 1 lb in weight of GHG emissions.
2. Vast quantities of steel and concrete are used in constructing tramways.  Both are highly energy intensive and that means high GHG emissions.  Bad news for climate!
3. Metro Eastside extension is now £144 m/Km, compared with £7 m/Km for the 2015, part rebuilding to reinstate, after decades of closure, the 50 Kms Borders Railway through the Southern Uplands of Scotland.
4. Scotland's latest tram extension, this year, is £44 m/Km.  A very big difference between £144 m and £44 m, even when there must be public realm improvements included in the £144 m/Km!
5. It was an enormous, tragic mistake getting rid of all the excellent trams and trolley buses in the 1950/60s.  In the UK, just about everywhere except Blackpool Trams.
6. TRAMS GET TOP PRIORITY OVER TRAINS BEING REINSTATED, that so rarely happens!  Hence, the poor railway provision for years in northern England.  Hundreds of millions in price and weight of GHG emissions went on Metrolink and the Supertram in Sheffield, as we did nothing to modernise "the very Victorian railway network" (Sir David Higgins, Chief Exec of Network Rail in an interview on the 'Today' programme in 2013.)
7. It was an enormous tragic mistake to then, literally, break up one third of the railway network that Beeching very properly closed as we all deserted the trains and bought cars.  I'm sure Beeching never intended them to be wiped off the face of the earth for roads, every kind of building imaginable and, from the 80s, turned into tramways at the most colossal expense compared with reinstating the freight and passenger trains that had been so successful for 100 years.

SUMMARY with map from Railfuture

Metro failure over 42 years continues!

 Railfuture's full map.pdf

Metro trams, another vanity project like High Scam 2, have meant the destruction of two UK mainline railways that would have been of far more use if freight and passenger trains had returned instead of the trams at eight to ten times the expense per Km.  Metro top priority since 1981 has meant that 18 Kms of mainline were used for Metro One, many more regional railway lines have been left unused or, for freight only or given over to roads, buildings and to the 18 Kms for trams.  100 Kms remain wasted but available for use.  6.7 Kms run on and therefore destroy the Black Country Railway 

 "of national strategic significance".pdf

that is the UK's only principal mainline still awaiting its freight/passenger trains in the middle 56 Kms between Stourbridge Jct and Burton on Trent on the 120 Kms Black Country Railway.

NOTES:

Metro expansion is second only in expense to HS2 out of all transport modes. 

In 42 years for the most enormous expense, only a miserly 25 Kms of tramway has ever been built.

And all grossly over-promised.  200 Kms were promised by the year 2000.  By then the total was 20 Kms on a former mainline railway - another tragedy!