Freeing up a choking city

Lovely Stoke is choking, as are many other cities.

All is relatively calm at the moment because the schools are off and parents appear to have suddenly realised that their kids are capable of walking and playing in the great outdoors. However, come September, this revelation will be forgotten and the roads will be chock-a-block again.

Those who live in any decently-sized city (and who drive, of course) will know the feeling of sitting in a traffic jam as part of a journey that, it turns out, you could quite easily have walked more quickly. I have often said (and it is true) that there are times when it is quicker for me to take a train from Stoke to Birmingham than it is to get from home to the station.

Obviously, such a massive waste of time is personally annoying. But bear in mind that it's not just you in that traffic jam. There are, every day, many thousands of people crawling along in traffic jams all around the city. Many of them are trying to get to or from work in their own time and many are in-between appointments whilst being employed. All in all, this amounts to a massive loss in personal and productive time which can be equated to a financial loss to companies (and individuals) across the city. Clearly, then, the productivity of our businesses and the free time of our residents would be greatly increased if we could address this problem.

The answer is obvious, of course - public transport.

However, I have written here before about my experiences of the existing public transport infrastructure. Buses are far too expensive and the service is inconsistent and unreliable. The trains are pretty good when they run, but getting to and from the station is a nightmare unless you drive, which rather defeats the point. I am moderately close to two smaller stations, but for each I need to drive and the service from at least one of them is largely non-existent.

Ironically, we once had a great local rail network around the city (and as far as Newcastle) known as the 'Loop Line'. The remnants remain visible for all to see in the form of 'green ways' and cycle paths. These show the routes of the old local rail network that connected most parts of the city and provided connections between these and the major stations to take us far and wide. Had this still been in place, a five minute stroll to Tunstall Station would have taken me anywhere I wanted to go locally, or to Stoke Station to take me further afield.

One way or another, we need to reinstall a truly integrated public transport system to the area that can enable us to genuinely say to the public at large that they don't need to use their cars. This could be a light railway system or a tram system. I know one person who thinks that a monorail could be just the ticket. I also think that buses are a key element too, although whether they could be viably run in the private sector, I'm unsure.

The key to this is to identify transport hubs and to put in place coordinated linkages to, from and between them. At the moment, obvious hubs are Hanley town centre, Newcastle town centre and Stoke Station. There may also need to be additional hubs and the North and South ends of the city. Then, all the transport schemes are designed to link outlying areas to hubs, and to link hubs together. As I say, a combination of buses and trams/trains could be used. The largest volumes of passengers will be between hubs, so I suggest that rail networks would be necessary here, but buses would be the most cost effective way of connecting some outlying areas to hubs.

With an infrastructure in place, we then need to encourage the public to use the system. Cost must be cheap (very cheap!) and alternatives must be expensive. This may mean introducing congestion charging across the city.

The benefits of such a system would, I believe, be many-fold. Clearly, there would be a financial benefit to businesses for time saved. There would also be a significant improvement in the quality of life of many of our residents. Our city's emmisions of carbon (and many other nasty exhaust fumes) would also drop radically. Such a scheme would also contribute to an increased confidence for the city, and would probably encourage local investment.

I'm not sure how easy it is to put a price tag on some of these benefits, hence my concern about the use of private companies. Also, to be effective, an integrated system needs to be centrally directed and would mean running buses, trains and trams on routes that may not be commercially viable purely in terms of passenger fayres. Do we want, in these circumstances, to pay a private company to provide a set service so that some of that money can be passed onto shareholders?

Either way, I think that the future for large cities is integrated public transport. Many cities are going that way and maybe we should too.