How Leeds Bradford Airport symbolises North-South divide – Yorkshire Post Letters

I AM very much in agreement with your correspondent John Gott (The Yorkshire Post, April 13) regarding the proposed new terminal building at Leeds Bradford Airport.

Events have moved on since he wrote his letter and Robert Jenrick has indeed kicked the can down the road by asking for more time to make his decision.

No doubt in due course he will opt for a public inquiry, and in the unlikely event of this deciding in favour of the new terminal building, no doubt there will be no money available.

Here in Leeds, we don’t do transport, and hence we are the largest city in Europe without an integrated transport system. If the proposed rail link to the airport was in the south of England, they would build a tunnel to below the airport and install a system of lifts.

Instead we are going to build a new station on the existing line and a road to connect to the airport to bus people there.

If that’s the best we can have, it would be better to knock down the parapet of the bridge over Horsforth station and build a bus park on a platform above the line and station and bus passengers from there.

Personally I wouldn’t use the train if I went skiing. The flights mostly go early in the morning and trains don’t run from Skipton that early.

From: John Wells, Leeds.

BILL McKinnon (The Yorkshire Post, April 16) is quite right about the poor track record of Leeds Council on transport, although I can understand the council’s difficulties obtaining funds from Whitehall, whoever was in power.

I am old enough to remember the electric trams, particularly the ones from Roundhay Park to Leeds which cost about 1p from Oakwood.

The trams ran on a track separate from the roads from the park to Oakwood Clock and from Gipton Wood to Harehills. From there, they ran in the middle of the road into Leeds.

Surely, a lesson for today’s planners that is that any form of transport – trains, trams or buses – must run on separate tracks for their full distance away from the general road traffic.

Not like the guided bus on Scott Hall Road, which runs for about a mile off road on Scott Hall Road and then half a mile off road on King Lane.

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