Memorandum by David Holt, Esq (RT 04)
LIGHT RAIL—AN INDEPENDENT PERSPECTIVE
I understand that you are chairing a sub-committee
to investigate light rapid transit, and that an invitation has
been made for submissions.
I am particularly grateful for this opportunity
to offer my input because in 1984 and 1985 I conceived the extension
of Manchester Metrolink into Salford Quays and Trafford Park.
No other notion of these schemes pre-dates my original submissions.
One of the resulting projects (Salford Quays/Eccles)
is nearing completion and the other (Trafford Park/Dumplington)
has Parliamentary approval and awaits funding. I therefore claim
that for a considerable number of years I have had a useful understanding
of light rail.
The dawning of the new Millennium will, in only
a few weeks' time, stimulate some profound re-thinking about the
future. Transport in particular will be a focal point for debate,
so it is essential that decision-makers have a full understanding
of light rail as the finest symbol of the effective integrated
urban public transport system.
Light rail's strongest asset—its shiny
steel track placed under people's noses in public places—is
unique to it. All alternative modes suffer from not having this
feature, so are comparatively less fit for their purpose. This
is the root cause of the bus's lack of appeal and its inability
to make any real impact. It does not have light rail's shiny rails,
which are attractive and subliminally reassuring like silverware,
jewellery or coins, and at the same time give people and businesses
confidence in a community which has the self-assurance and common
sense to invest in itself rather than being content with random
buses.
Light rail does not have to go everywhere. It
has an essential job to do as the carefully-designed core and
flagship of integrated public transport systems emulating those
serving cities like San Francisco and Amsterdam.
The capital cost of light rail is high, but
transport-system quality is too vital to be dismissed cheaply.
It is important to fully evaluate all of light rail's benefits,
which can, totally, be more valuable than the bare transport function.
A visibly fixed transit system gives inflexible
guarantees of labour force mobility, enabling an employer's recruitment
net to be flung more widely and at the same time encouraging job-seekers
to expand their horizons.
Light rail's infrastructure, uniquely, functions
as an orientation aid in town and city centres. The words "follow
the tram tracks", "turn left when you've crossed the
tramway" and so on are commonly used to direct strangers
within central Manchester. The value of this feature to businesses
and individuals is significant.
Light rail systems become symbolic of the cities
and regions they serve, and are associated with developed countries
having stable political systems.
Tram tracks installed in-street provide a smooth
and roadworks-free path for other vehicles. Manchester's Mosley
Street is an example, where trams share an alignment with buses
and taxis. Yet the bus and taxi operators contributed nothing
to the cost of track installation and surfacing, the removal of
gullies or the diversion of plant. All the costs of these improvements
were borne by the "expensive" tramway.
It should not be forgotten that heavily-loaded
tram-replacing buses wrecked the Victorian sewer systems under
our city streets in the 1950s and 1960s, causing disruptive and
costly replacement works twenty or so years later. Steel tram
rails in bus wheel paths prevent that sort of subterranean damage.
So perhaps tramways aren't so expensive after all when you take
a wider view.
There is, though, scope for reducing costs by
increasing professional and political knowledge and understanding
about light rail. In particular, a body such as the Transport
and Road Research Laboratory should set up common engineering
and environmental standards and methods of construction and operation
for new light rail schemes, drawing heavily on past worldwide
experience. This would give Public Inquiry inspectors and others
a template to which to refer. Ignorance and a degree of professional
arrogance have contributed to some abuses of public trust in the
recent past, particularly in terms of safety and environmental
standards. Shortage of knowledge has been compounded by questionable,
occasionally almost whimsical, judgements made by the Railway
Inspector, whose precise light rail role and powers have never
been properly defined or understood.
Commercial vested interests, pride, arrogance
and misguidedness have often overridden the competence of the
small number of well-motivated professional light rail people
and politicians. Light rail champions and experts tend by nature
to be unaggressive, and this can weaken their influence in key
quarters when they are ranked against less gentlemanly or mild-mannered
protagonists.
Manchester Metrolink provides a good (or very
bad) example. During the 1980s, the public-sector promoters of
Metrolink undertook a series of study tours to gather information
and knowledge about overseas light rail systems. The rational
course of action thereafter would have been for the light rail
promoter (GMPTE) to fully specify the new system and to force
contractors to deliver a product closely engineered and scaled
to GMPTE's objectives. But that is not what happened.
The design and specification of Metrolink were
thrown over to an inexperienced private sector enjoying the support
of the same misguided politicians and public servants who privatised
our buses. Metrolink's contractors had not been studying light
rail like the public sector promoters during the conceptual and
promotional stages of the system. They had been busy with nuclear
power stations, tunnels, roads, heavy railways and so on. At the
contractual stage, tramway expertise was shoved aside. Even the
word "tram" was ludicrously avoided, and still is to
some extent. So it isn't surprising that mistakes were made, which
are still being paid for today.
It is particularly sad that one of the greatest
mistakes caused by misguidedness and warping of objectives during,
and since, the implementation of Metrolink—the system's
capacity shortfall—has well and truly taken root and looks
likely to persist through successive extensions.
GMPTE once declared that the Phase One system
(Bury-Altrincham) would need 37 vehicles, and the project was
"sold" to a trusting public on that basis. But Metrolink
opened with only 26 vehicles, and suffers from nasty overcrowding
at peak times. Consequently, Metrolink cannot yet be said to be
wholly successful. But greater success could be attained simply
and in a relatively short time, by ordering those missing 11 vehicles,
and then by ensuring that, in future, capacity always stays in
front of demand. Off-peak fares should at the same time be lowered,
and travel stimuli introduced, until the extra capacity outside
the peaks is filled.
Instead, the reverse is being allowed to happen.
Insufficient vehicles have been ordered coincident with the Eccles
extension, and no allowance has been made for growth in existing
patronage due to new transfer opportunities. This is a recipe
for increased overcrowding and unreliability. If you can't get
on one overflowing tram after another, for example at an interchange
point, those trams might just as well have been cancelled as far
as your journey to or from work is concerned.
If further extensions are implemented with perpetuated
shortfalls in capacity, the effects will be compounded. The more
comprehensive the network becomes (like the London Underground),
the greater will be the amount of traffic generated by new transfer
opportunities. Overcrowding and consequent fare evasion and statistical
distortion will increase exponentially, making the system less
and less successful at peak times as it expands.
If light rail is the ultimate public transport
"carrot", capable of luring commuters out of their cars,
then it surely needs to be a fat, juicy carrot and not the underdeveloped,
scrawny but thinly proliferating specimen represented by today's
Manchester Metrolink.
Light rail suffers in the UK from other handicaps.
There is no professional body representing the
light rail "industry". Buses, railways, proprietary
systems (monorails and other "Thunderbirds" modes, and
"guided light transit" systems) all have their own well-funded
promotional bodies, watchdogs or marketing initiatives. Light
rail has none of that, simply because it is so multi-disciplinary,
loosely-defined and diversified. But that does not make it any
less effective as a transport solution. What it does mean is that,
if we are to benefit from light rail we must compensate for the
known lack of light rail championship.
The tram has suffered from dreadfully unfair
publicity in the UK. British cities threw away comprehensive and
efficient tramway systems that were the last word in urban transit.
Many reasons have been put forward for their wholesale abandonment.
The real root causes of their loss—downright laziness on
the part of transport providers, and greed on the part of bus,
rubber and oil industries—are seldom recognised.
Transport managers and local politicians just
couldn't be bothered with trams. They were too "difficult
to do". Decision-makers had to worry not only about the vehicles
themselves, but also the tracks, the power supply systems and
the depots, not to mention Parliamentary powers, property acquisition,
civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering, roadworks, traffic
signalling, services diversions, planning consents and so on.
With buses, you just took delivery of the vehicles, trained the
drivers and hit the road. For the lazy, tired transport providers
of the 1950s and 1960s, this was the soft option. But it wasn't
right. For one thing, it substantially increased our dependence
on foreign oil supplies, severely distorting international diplomacy.
The public, who actually liked trams, wouldn't
swallow municipal laziness and industrial greed as transport policy
driving-forces. That is why the newspapers were filled with such
a lot of humbug about trams being old-fashioned, inflexible and
in the way of motorists. An interesting relic of old anti-tram
attitudes has lingered on editorially in the "Sheffield Star"
newspaper. Mud sticks, and other traces of the stigma hung on
trams forty and more years ago can be detected today, not least
within the light rail "industry" itself.
This stigmatisation of trams contributed to
the dreadful scarcity of light rail awareness and knowledge prevailing
within British professional and political quarters throughout
the 1960s and 70s. It wasn't cool to be seen to know about trams.
Some politicians, academics, commentators and members of pressure
groups and the professions scorned and ignored trams, so that
the lessons of history failed to be properly applied. A unique
"expertise gap" exists between the demise of the first-generation
tramway systems and the slow emergence of new systems, and there
has been far too much re-invention of the wheel at considerable
cost in terms of contract time, money and quality. It is for this
one reason alone fortunate that the emergence of new light rail
systems in the UK has been so slow—otherwise it would have
disastrously outstripped the painfully slow growth of professional
and political knowledge about this powerful and permanent solution
to our urban mobility problems.
SUMMARY
light rail is uniquely effective as a transport
solution because of its shiny steel rails prominently embedded
in publicly accessible places;
light rail suffers in the UK from a lack of
promotional championship;
when carefully planned and expertly implemented,
light rail is far more cost-effective than it is made out to be;
light rail is not yet fully understood in the
UK; there has been lingering stigmatisation of, and consequent
ignorance about, light rail technology;
Manchester Metrolink suffers from severe overcrowding
which will worsen exponentially unless remedied by fleet expansion
on existing routes;
light rail works best as the core and flagship
of an integrated urban public transport system, and is symbolic
of attractive cities in developed countries;
light rail can help reduce politically expensive
dependency on oil supplies.
September 1999
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