Aisha Iqbal: Lack of proper transport harms Leeds

I THINK I'm suffering from a serious bout of connectivity envy.
Trolleybus is a symbol of transport failure in Leeds.Trolleybus is a symbol of transport failure in Leeds.
Trolleybus is a symbol of transport failure in Leeds.

It started properly about a year ago, when I visited Manchester briefly and had the opportunity to use the city’s tram system.

It was simple, highly accessible and perfectly integrated into the rest of the city’s road and pedestrian network.

Fast forward a few months, and I was visiting Birmingham.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

I didn’t get a chance to use the Midlands city’s metro light rail service on this occasion, but was nevertheless impressed by the shiny carriages and the seemingly flawless way they were operating.

London, of course, has its Underground and the highly efficient Oyster system which we can currently only dream of in Yorkshire.

And, as I write this, I am visiting another Western European city, roughly the size of Leeds population wise, give or take 50,000 people.

We arrived this morning and I’ve already been out on the trams three times.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It runs like clockwork. And the prices are reasonable – in a city that otherwise has a comparatively high cost of living – with adult day tickets for 24 hours working out at less than £7 and children’s just £2.20.

You can also buy block tickets and, like the Oyster, there is a simple ‘tap-in tap-out system’ (though no credit card payment as yet).

My brushes with these various types of streetcars at home and abroad have inevitably made me reflect even more on the situation in Leeds where, as a regular but increasingly reluctant and irate bus user, the simplest of journeys can become a nightmare.

I could, of course, have a rose-tinted view – the grass is always greener and all that – but my experience so far says no.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Reflecting further on my travels over the years, I realised that whenever I have been on big city breaks, the city in question has more often than not had an integrated public transport system with a mass transit scheme of some kind or other at its core.

From Madrid’s underground to the tram network in Dresden, Germany – a city that was almost entirely destroyed in the Second World War but has still managed to build itself a successful mass public transport system – other countries just seem to have figured it out.

To offer some further perspective, I visited Dresden 20 years ago this year.

Nearer home, Manchester has had an operational tram network for more than 25 years, of course.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It’s also clearly not just about big cities getting the bigger, unfairer (on the rest of us) deals. Highly successful tramways run in cities around the size of Leeds – Dresden, Lisbon and Amsterdam being examples. I’m neither an expert on geology or highways networks or on specific modes of transport.

But surely if a war-ravaged city like Dresden can do it, we have it within us to build a reliable, efficient, affordable and truly democratic hop-on-and-offable transport system?

I know lots of hard work is currently going on in Leeds in relation to transport, but the stops and starts of these conversations over the last few decades leave even the most optimistic of observers with a niggle of doubt.

The lingering question at the heart of it is: what happened in the intervening decades that slowed down our progress so much and left us lagging behind so many cities in the UK and abroad?

It’s time to find out, once and for all, what is broken and then fix it.

Aisha Iqbal is a political correspondent for The Yorkshire Post