News
December 2011, should have seen local authorities learning the fate of their requests for project funding against other projects in the Department for Transport's "Development Pool", one of the transport project groupings with origins in the 2010 Spending Review.
Instead the Chancellor's Autumn Statement in late November announced that all 45 schemes in the pool would be funded subject to a government "assurance process". Road projects were well represented in the 45, with new bypasses such as Kingkerswell, Lincoln Eastern and Morpeth Northern, as well as two giant projects from way back: the Norwich Northern Distributor Road and the Bexhill to Hastings Link Road. There were also significant public transport proposals, for instance Leeds Trolleybus, Coventry-Nuneaton Rail Upgrade (new stations, platform extensions) and a number of bus rapid transport projects.
With the economic outlook changing from day to day, the authorities promoting these schemes will surely remain nervous until work is underway.
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News Focus
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Winter 2011: in his Autumn Statement, the Chancellor gave a significant boost to roadbuilding at national and local level as a reaction to the unforeseen depth of the recession. In so doing he changed direction significantly from the position of relative caution adopted to transport projects a year earlier in the Spending Review.
With innovative "managed motorway" schemes once again brought forward, LS8 looks at some of the larger road schemes, focuses on the current planning framework for roads and discusses the finance. |
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Analysis
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Expansion may have slowed with budget pressures, but policing on bikes continued to make advances
at force, district, station and PCSO level in 2011. How compelling is the
case for police on bikes? |
Features
It's over 15 years since
the first Reclaim the Streets party (and that's our parasol in
a bucket of sand stopping the records melting in Pershore Road,
Birmingham).
The movement baffled the media, broadening to take in striking dockers, went global, then turned on capitalism itself. Its end as a victim of its own success was probably inevitable, but we ask a few questions anyway. With lots of flyers you won't find anywhere else. |
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LS8 Sidelines
28-Nov-11
announcements
Most people roll their eyes at the mention of long-distance coach services with the likes of Megabus and tell you how much better the train is. Yes, the coach journey is probably longer. It's also the one that will give you prolonged periods of relative quiet where you might get some sleep.
Train journeys are increasingly blighted by announcements. At least 2 for each station, in the case of Scotrail: "the next station-stop is..." and "this station is ...". After big stations, an entire list of all stations on the entire journey can be read out. In the case of a train going from Aberdeen to Penzance, this can take a long time. Then there's buffet announcements, announcements about safety notices and probably others.
These aren't gentle voices through high-fidelity speakers, as one hears in the recorded announcements on German public transport. UK train announcements are loud, sound as if they come through pound-shop mp3-player speakers and are often preceded by a piercing ding-dong.
11-September-11 preston tram
Stories about the spiralling costs and uncertainty around the Edinburgh tram line have broken through into the national media on a number of occasions over the last month. One might hope that the proposed tram network in Preston could provide some positive news, but the private company behind the proposals, Preston Trampower, is not replying to emails or answering the phone. There are some pertinent questions about the scheme, some in the light of Edinburgh, that are disappointingly not addressed in their web literature. Apparently disused and underused railways in Preston could account for two thirds of the intended tramway network, but what fraction of the proposed first line would be on disused and underused lines? It seems crucial to get a first line up with the minimum fuss and disruption. Did the demonstrator line, a small part of the first line, actually get built in early 2011 as proposed? What length trams are proposed? Some of Edinburgh's problems seem to have come from its choice of an extremely long tram. Hopefully Preston Trampower will make themselves contactable again soon so that these and other questions can be posed.
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