DELIGHTFUL DUDLEY!

Dear Neil

It was good to meet you last week.  I would like to underline one or two points.

THE BLACK COUNTRY CYCLE-WALK MUDWAY

In the mid 1990s, I began cycling to work on more days than taking the car, even though I was an essential car user for my Birmingham City Council social work.  I was soon cycling every day except when snow or ice was around and, from Halesowen into Hockley near the city centre.  On official council business, I was allowed to claim 15p/mile but not for cycle commuting.  That continued until I retired at 65.5 yrs in 2013.  However, I am still cycle commuting to meetings like yours last Thursday.  And, I would like to cycle commute to meetings on the transformed mudway before I'm dead and buried, that is getting closer!

For years, I have been wanting to use the two dismantled railway lines over 22 Kms between Brierley Hill and NW Wolverhampton but it is impossible in our borough because of huge puddles and thick mud.  Please, can I remind you to insist that council workmen must put suitable stone down and cut back the vegetation, as a temporary but annual measure, until the full length has a wide, permanent, all-weather surface?

If the cycle-walkway was professionally finished, it would be a wonderful cycle commuter/business route for cyclists like me and great for all non fossil fuel users - walkers and horse riders, too.  Remember oil and gas reserves are quickly depleting and we have to move away from finite fossil fuels - for not just climate reasons.

Since the 1990s, the national government has been encouraging former car commuters like me to use public transport and to cycle.  Yet, your colleagues failed to put down even a pavement on only one side of the Dudley Southern Bypass in the 1990s.  This was negligent in the light of HMG guidance at the time.  And, scandalous, as is the mud bath that is much of our Dudley section of the Black Country Cycle-Walk Mudway.

THE BLACK COUNTRY RAILWAY

What you and your colleagues have done in the Black Country and Brum is rather like putting London Underground tube trains on the London to Paris, HS1, Eurostar line.  It is the epitomy of negligence, idiocy and incompetence.

To make amends, all you can do now is to keep the trams on the principal mainline railway of national strategic significance on the railway down to Stourbridge Jct.  It will be the world's first train-tram-train railway between Stourbridge Jct and Burton on Trent.

Please, do not allow your TfWM and MMA colleagues to destroy, at Merry Hill, yet more of nature in one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, that will also take housing land and public open space at Merry Hill.  I would love to take you, Neil on my tourist trail of the transport treats, nature sites and my vertical guerrilla garden.  Any day except Tuesdays when I'm on grandad duty.

DUDLEY TOWN CENTRE

Top priority must be, NOT office blocks but blocks of one or two bedrooms flats/apartments that are highly energy efficient, low cost, with no parking spaces, low cost and solar powered, for the most badly housed and migrants.

The ONS, this month is saying that the population of UK will increase from 67 m to 70 m over the next two years.  This will further deepen the housing crisis.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationprojections/bulletins/nationalpopulationprojections/2021basedinterim

PUBLIC TRANSPORT

Those of us who swan around in our cars are such a large majority, it is car drivers who make all the decisions affecting everyone else.  As a result, it is car drivers who tend to think that everyone has cars and make decisions to further advantage themselves.  Hence, we get annual free car parking but never a murmur about Fare-Free Public Transport (FFPT).

Now, it is all talk of bus franchising.  Yet, when we last had it, it made not a scrap of difference to all of us deserting buses and using our cars all the more.

THE PROBLEM WITH BUS FRANCHISING

I think, money spent on franchising would be better spent on cutting fares towards FFPT.

When we last had franchising it didn't work. It did not stop rising car use and rising congestion and pollution.

Even now, fares and subsidies on loss-making routes are negotiated between TfWM and the bus companies. 

Don't let the councillors do yet more self-important empire building.

Their past record with trams was abysmal  - they simply got shot of the lot!

Their track record with the present trams is of delays and much confusion over trains and trams. They don't know the difference.  They built 23 Kms of tramway in 42 years, of which 20 Kms should have been trains on train lines.  What a mix up!

Could the councils become shareholders, plough their dividends into loss making but socially necessary routes and, towards FFPT?

More important than control or ownership is money for the bus operators to do what TfWM wants.

The transport planners have a single-minded devotion to tram networks and Sprint - the bus that thinks its a tram. Instead, go for schemes that reward motorists who leave their precious cars at home,eg: FFPT and other public transport incentives to reward car commuters rather than enraging them.