to Fran Postlethwaite of Better Buses National

Dear Fran

Bus/business lane to more effectively reward instead of enraging our precious car commuters

I was hoping to attend on Monday but my wife, who must be obeyed, wanted to no longer delay our departure to daughter and grandchildren for our weekly help with child care yesterday.

This is a brilliant petition.  However, I remain of the opinion that only by being more radical in our suggestions will we then get, not everything but, something.  I feel that public ownership and control will help but is not strong enough because it did not work last time.  In the W Midlands, there is control over the socially necessary routes with maximum fare of £2 and £4.50 for unlimited daily travel.  My suggestion:

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 ("buses on rails", says UK tram promotion group).  Both are highly energy intensive and that means high GHG emissions.  Bad news for climate!
3. Use that money to upgrade bus provision, as is in our petition.  BUT MUCH MORE IS NEEDED:
4. Bring in charging on radial routes into urban centres for all vehicles that are not essential for work/business but are used, in particular, for commuting, shopping when those drivers should be using bus, train, tram.
5. Essential users must register to avoid the charge.
6. Financial inducements MUST be used to reward car commuters and shoppers who leave their cars at home and use bus, train, tram.  Therefore, FFPT - Fare-Free Public Transport for all and not just my age group is essential.
7. To accompany the above, big campaign by the authorities to make it as socially undesirable to take the car into town/city centres as it is to smoke in public places.  But the rewards must be emphasised.

What do you think, Fran?

Best wishes

I have succeeded and failed by going into the citadels of power

Dear Fran  (Fran Wilde of XR)

First by writing letters, then emails and texts.  But, above all, by visiting the decision makers in their surgeries and offices and their important Board meetings.  By going into the citadels of power when their meetings have been opened to the public and engaging with them in conversation and asking for this, that and the other.

A wonderful Labour councillor and Chair of a Brum CC committee saw me and quickly got Graham Lennard to turn the Harborne Line into a decent and usable cycle-walkway.

After 30 years of asking, off and on, the same was done in Woodgate Valley CP and I now have a six mile traffic-free cycle route into the centre of Power at HQ of everything - 16 Summer Lane!

I've succeeded in turning Merry Hill SC into merry heaven

by my guerrilla garden antics and my own landscape enhancement scheme;

by asking for housing there and getting the homes in the grounds of Merry Hill, on Pedmore Road;

by asking for the corroded metal sheet piling to be covered by nature and getting 16 trees, officially planted round the corner from where I have my vertical guerrilla garden;

for 40 years keeping the 400 metre canal embankment free of the massive 400 m concrete and steel tramway viaduct for the Dudley Tram.  It would have destroyed my guerrilla garden.

I failed to keep the monorail at Merry Hill.  Perhaps, because it was never connected across the final 400 m to the principal mainline railway "of national strategic significance" that should have been re-opened in the 1990s.

Less than ten years ago, HQ of the lot decided to no longer turn the important mainline railway into a tramway through Kings Heath, Moseley and Stirchley.  Instead, by the end of the century, they may have succeeded in getting their now wanted diesel, half hour commuter service twice every working day - with three railway stations, too.  SUCCESS!

I have succeeded in keeping the 106 Kms of wasted or only half-used railway lines at the forefront of their minds.

What do you think of these two fun quizzes - funny peculiar, funny humour or what, Fran?  Tongue in cheek with a serious purpose?  My attempt at poking fun at the mighty powers that be?  Improvements, please.