West Yorkshire Mass Transit: Two lines do not make a tram system - Yorkshire Post Letters

Thank you for your coverage of the proposed tram route (YP, September 28); I support the widespread assessment that a fast, reliable and affordable public transport system is a fundamental building block for the success of West Yorkshire, or indeed any other region, and I welcome the start of such a system here.

But we should not get too carried away with our celebrations; real productivity improvements and the wealth that will flow from them require that all parts of the region soon obtain some

comparable fast connections to the city centres, but only the A64 guided bus route looks promising as the next tramway alignment.

Two lines, sadly, do not make a system. Improvements to the surface rail line along the Aire valley, not to mention those to Bradford and Manchester have been discussed ad nauseam, but little real progress seems to be delivered.

The tram and trolleybus proposals on the A660 corridor through Headingley demonstrated that neither can be accommodated without widespread damage to Conservation assets, whether trees or buildings, yet homes continue to be built in Bramhope, Adel and Otley where there is neither a cycle lane, nor a rail line.

At the opposite side of the city, traffic queues back to the M62 to inch into the city every morning and out again each evening.

Ironically, the solution is hinted at on the front page yesterday (October 3); it is to go underground. There is no shying away from the fact that this would be expensive to build, but, as our competitors like Cologne, Lyon and Siemens HQ, Munich, demonstrate, such a system would last a century or more, and payback would start immediately after each station opened.

Furthermore, getting cars off the roads would bring huge environmental, noise pollution and public health benefits to what remains one of the more polluted cities in Europe.