Public transport again...

I missed a programme on Channel 4 that I wanted to watch last night, because I was being nagged for an hour - the story of my life, the only hours worth of TV that I want to watch this week and I have to sit and be berated instead.

Anyway,

It was part of the "Dispatches" series and featured Bob Kiley the former London Transport Commissioner and outspoken New Yorker who has apparently rattled a few cages with his opinions on the UK's public transport systems.

From what I saw of the few seconds previews and having read the synopsis of the programme on the Channel 4 website I can roughly guess that he wasn't too complimentary and that his basic premise is that Central Government should bite the bullet, tax motorists off the road and invest in much, much better methods of transporting large numbers of the public to and from their desired destinations.

Its all obvious stuff and its not like we haven't heard it before or even disagree with it.

There is a problem though.

Most, if not all, Central Government transport planning, and indeed local government transport planning is based on the planners own experiences, that is that they all work in city centre locations and all have problems commuting into and out of these locations.

Which is fair enough, commuting in and out of city centres is a pain in the arse, but its not where most people work. In the last twenty or thirty years there has been an exodus of non-office based businesses out of city centres to out-of-town Industrial Estates where space is not at a premium and their deliveries can gain access at all times of the day without hinderence, many of these Estates are also located on or close to the motorway networks for obvious reasons.

As an example, when I started work in 1975 three of the electrical wholesalers that I had to visit were located right in the city centre because it was seen to be desirable to have an LS1 address, it sort of made you appear to be more important - such a warehousing business would not dream of locating in a city centre nowadays, it would be pure madness.

Jump forward to today and in this fair city we have for the past ten years spent in excess of £40 million trying to persuade Central Government that Leeds needed a supertram system throughout the city to alleviate the congestion on three major commuting routes - Central Government made all the right noises for nine years then rejected the plan last year, but thats another story.

And yet the acclaimed supertram plan, which involved a mix of public money and private investments, had a major flaw in its plan - it had been designed by civil servants who fell into the trap that all civil servant planners fall into - they thought that everyone in Leeds worked in the city centre.

So the three main routes that they planned ran from the Northeast, Northwest and South of the city and all linked up together int he city centre, so that for instance I could catch a tram very close to my house (and would have done) if, and only if, I wanted to get into the city centre very quickly - it would have been fantastic if I wanted to get into the city centre very quickly.

But totally useless if I wanted to go around the city to, say, the Seacroft Industrial Estate area.

Which a lot of people would want to do if thats where their jobs were based.

Its all obvious stuff.
But totally ignored by planners.

And despite not seeing the programme, I would wager a small bet that Bob Kiley fell into the same trap last night.

Unless they properly answer the issue of transporting people to all parts of the city in which they live and work then you will never persuade anyone to abandon their car in favour of a public transport alternative that doesn't take them to where they need to be taken.