Fast trains to London and very slow buses across the cities

From: Dan Laythorpe, Kendal Bank, Little Woodhouse, Leeds.

I WAS very impressed at the amount and range of local dignitaries, transport bosses and MPs who were signatories to the open letter to Tory Transport Secretary Philip Hammond in support of the HS2 high speed rail link between London, Birmingham, East Midlands, South Yorkshire and Leeds (Yorkshire Post, March 30).

However, I cannot help wonder why do we not have this sort of solidarity in favour of the type of mass transit light rail system that a city of the size and status of Leeds not only desperately needs but also glaringly merits. Indeed, the whole West Yorkshire region should by now have been linked by such a network.

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Instead what do we have? Mr Hammond being shown the (now only single) route of the decidedly third-rate and inadequate proposed NGT trolleybus scheme on his recent visit to Leeds. The system has not even been sanctioned by him and if we are to go by Hammond’s recently indicated criteria, it is not likely to be.

It is an unspeakable scandal that commuters into Leeds, arguably the largest and most important financial centre in the UK outside of London and certainly the largest city in the whole of Europe without a Metro or mass transit rail system, should suffer increasingly choked road arteries, grossly unreliable and inefficient bus services and inhumanely crammed and inadequate trains. Was the Secretary of State shown that? I doubt it.

Leeds is a city of some 800,000 citizens and Bradford about half that size – both very large cities by any criteria, with Bradford crying out for a cross-rail city centre link and a sizeable new central rail station.

Yet, in countries like France and Spain, cities a fraction the size of Leeds and Bradford continue to open new light rail systems and extend existing ones.

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Urban transport in these states, as in Germany, Austria, Poland and Italy puts the UK to shame.

It seems to me therefore an absurd contradiction that as the merits of HS2 to Leeds are being trumpeted so that affluent southern suits can be sped from London to here in under one-and-a-half hours it can take longer to travel from one side of Leeds to the other – that is, overwhelmingly, by slow diesel bus.

Get writing and rooting for light rail rapid mass transit in West Yorkshire, all you local luminaries. You know the trolleybus cannot be the answer!

From: John Ford, The Lee, Buckinghamshire.

IN your Editorial (Yorkshire Post, March 31), you mention in relation to the high speed rail project that “the issue has become a struggle between the North’s business wisdom and those countryside campaigners in the Home Counties who believe such a scheme will be environmentally and economically damaging”.

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I am the chairman of a parish council in Buckinghamshire (albeit an exiled northerner) so by your analysis fall into the latter camp. Certainly when the plans were revealed, and the impact on our village realised, there was naturally a high degree of concern about the local environmental impact and the loss of amenity.

However, the more we looked at the business plan the more our thoughts as taxpayers began to focus on whether the costs versus the suggested national benefits were at all realistic.

My plea to the business leaders and MPs in Yorkshire is please, as taxpayers, elected representatives and investors, make sure that these projected jobs and benefits in your region are real and sustainable.

We will all be paying for this project for many years to come whether through taxes, lost alternative investment or environmental destruction. Please do not take the business case at face value.

From: Iain Morris, Caroline Street, Saltaire.

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IF it is seen that Birmingham and various northern cities can only survive with a bit of time knocked off the London train, what are the prospects for Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee or Aberdeen who will always be substantially further away?