Thursday, 14 March 2013

Piccadilly To Droylsden By Tram

I bet the people of Droylsden are pleased that after all the disruption the tram service is finally up and running. It is a pity, in fact a crying shame that these fine vehicles were manufactured in Austria rather Britain. We desperately need to re-establish our manufacturing base and this type of publicly funded scheme would have been a perfect opportunity to create jobs by designing and building the trams locally. We have a proud history of manufacturing rail vehicles in this area and with a little more vision we could have easily built them ourselves rather than buying them off the peg from a foreign manufacturer.


Wrong track said...

A fundamentally useless, anachronistic form of transport. If it was cheap to build and travel on, didn't cause delay and obstruction to the vast majority of the moving public, and had a vast carrying capacity I'd fully support it. As it manifestly fails on all these counts I'm totally against it.
The latest, ongoing extensions, for all the massive expense, trouble and delay caused will add a miserly number of trams to a network that even when finished will consist of only 96 trams. With a theoretical maximum capacity of about 200 each they'll never carry more than a tiny fraction of the vast and exponentially growing Greater Manchester public.
If even a tiny fraction of car users (78% of the moving public, not including pedestrians, cyclists, motorcycles etc) for instance, switched to the tram the whole network would be totally overwhelmed. It can only exist at all because the massively more flexible car does four fifths of the donkey work.

Anonymous said...

Nobody on this white elephant. I travelled from Piccadily to Droylsden today at 2.45 11 people on the tram 3 got off and not one person got on!

Tameside Citizen said...

It depends on your interpretation of what causes delays. I seem to spend a large portion of my life stuck behind buses. I find them annoying in the extreme as they cause me delays but I realise that they are a necessary evil as not everybody has access to private motor cars.

Anyone who regularly drives will agree that road congestion is at an all time high and as the population rapidly expands this situation will only get worse. The Metrolink is necessary as part of an integrated transport network. Cars, buses, trains and trams (in that order) are our lifeblood. Without them life would grind to a halt.

If I was lucky enough to have a Metrolink stop within walking distance from my house do you think I would still drive into central Manchester? Not a chance! I am within walking distance of bus stops where I could catch a bus into Manchester but just the thought of it is totally unappealing. It is horses for courses and like it or loath it, the Metrolink is here to stay and as the network becomes fully integrated the people will get see the benefits of the tram over the bus on journeys into Manchester as well as to places further a field which are also on the Metrolink network.

I do not have the stats to hand but I would be surprised if more people from Bury and Altringham (the first Metrolink lines into Manchester) use the bus than the tram to commute into Manchester. Given the choice I have already said which I would use all day and every day.

SerpentSlayer said...

As a Droylsdener I have yet to see the necessity of the tram's presence here. The bus stop (which can take me to Ashton or Town) is five minutes away, the tram stop 20. The bus already costs an overpriced £3.90 for a day ticket, the tram costs noticeably more, and once at either destination I have less choice of place to go onto, if I so wish.
At a time of decreasing spending ability, the tram finds itself almost superfluous and is about as convenient as a helipad in a cave.
For those who do not have to swerve past them or try and cross the street while they slink silently from behind cars or try, they probably seem like a super thong to put in the middle of an already busy and dangerous road.

Anonymous said...

A quarter of a million extra school places are needed by next year, the National Audit Office warns.

The biggest baby boom since the 1950s combined with high levels of immigration have been blamed for the huge shortfall.

Not forgetting of course the immigrants appear to enjoy having kids if you look around Tameside.

English kids are therefore going to suffer from an inadequate education
followed by an inferior health
care quality.
Plus of course the welfare costs rocket along with the immigrants.
Nice one Labour,and Blair recently stated immigration has done no harm.
So how many immigrants are there in Tameside and how many children do they have ??

BBC = Total State Propaganda said...

Feckin unbelievable, the BBC news just featured this as their lead item on the lunchtime news. Guess what, the baby boom and school shortage places are due to white children. They broadcast live from a primary school in Reading where every single child was white. The viewer was lead to believe that it is our own children who are expanding in number so rapidly that it is they who are causing this school place crisis. The reality is the exact opposite, it is the vast immigrant communities producing children in never before seen numbers who are responsible. We, the indigenous of this land are producing too few children to replace ourselves. 1.7 children for every two adults. The immigrant ratio is 7.8 per two adults. The propaganda spewed by the BBC is unbelievable, even to seasoned observers such as I. And on a related note, the third news/propaganda item was relating two the tragic murder of the schoolgirl on the bus in Birmingham last week. They reported that a ‘man’ had now been charged with murder. They named him but failed to show his photograph despite all other media organisations doing so, did this have anything to do with fact that person charged was a negro? What do you think?

Wrong track said...

The tram causes significant EXTRA delay and obstruction for other road users which is also totally out of proprotion to its usefulness in terms of overall carrying capacity and as a percentage of transporting the moving public.
If the tram was removed tomorrow signifcant numbers of its users would get the bus or train instead. There would be little noticeable difference. There are approximately 1700 buses in Greater Manchester (as opposed to 96 trams), if the bus network was removed, due to its massively greater workload, there would be complete gridlock on other forms of transport. The bus is also much more affordable than the tram for many people in these straitened times.
The metrolink is manifestly NOT necessary as we managed without it before and in referecne to the exploding population only cheap, high capacity and preferably flexible forms of transport will be of use, the metrolink fulfills none of these criteria. It's also expensive and provides little or no economic benefit. Altrincham has had the tram 20 years and recently came top in the entire North West region for the highest proportion of closed shops in the high street. They are often busy at peak times but very often quiet off peak.
The latest extensions are costing a phenomenal £900 million, money that should have been spent on the many not the few, repairing and improving our road network and giving us a top quality bus network.

Long Drop said...

The people who created this ongoing and exponentially accelerating immigration/colonisation nightmare should suffer the fate of all traitors.

Anonymous said...

The people who hijack others post to rant on about...surpris surprise, immigration are morons