More Waste - £76m for a busway that’ll only have 8 buses an hour on it

On the day that Liverpool announced the suspension of its entire network of bus lanes, at the other end of the East Lancs Road, work stated on a dedicated, bus only,  13-mile route, costing £76m between Leigh and central Manchester.

Work has started on the £76million, thirteen mile bus-only route. It won’t open until 2015. It is known as the Leigh Guided Busway, and features a four-mile section on guided concrete ‘tracks’ along a disused railway that only specially-adapted buses will be able to use. The rest of the route follows the A580 East Lancs Road and includes measures such as dedicated bus lanes and bus priority junctions to help buses avoid delays. It is promised that it will cut journey times from Leigh to central Manchester to less than 50 minutes. The route will only have 14-stops – seven in each direction - and follows the former railway route between East Bond Street in Leigh and Newearth Road in Ellenbrook.

There are currently three lanes for cars along the East Lancs Road, but once the bus lanes are built there will only be two car lanes in most sections. The only vehicles able to use the guided section will be special buses, allowing them to avoid traffic congestion. Services will run along bus lanes on the East Lancs Road through to Manchester city centre.

In an attempt to justify this scheme, Councillor Andrew Fender, chairman of the TfGM (Transport for Greater Manchester) Committee, is quoted as saying: “The Leigh Busway is the flagship scheme of a much wider bus priority package – one of the largest investments in Greater Manchester’s bus network for decades, with over 25 miles of the network being either created or improved. The Cambridgeshire Guided Busway has been successful way beyond expectations and I look forward to seeing the same success enjoyed here.”

Not Wanted

Now I work with a number of people from Leigh who are adamant that nobody wants this scheme, the local press letters pages, similarly reflect this view, indeed I’ve struggled to find anybody that thinks it’s a good idea, so why are they going ahead with it?  Interesting that the Councillor refers to the Cambridge busway, what he failed to mention though, was it was 4 years late being completed and finally cost more than two and a half times the original budget cost. So another Government transport infrastructure scheme that totally overspent, take note Leighthers (and HS2 for that matter).

Unanswered Questions ?

This scheme seems to pose more questions than it’s provided answers to. Here’s just a few I thought of, and they’re fairly simplistic : 

• I am surely not the first to ask the simple mathematical question whereby, if you cut parts of the East Lancs Road from three lanes to two, then unless the buses on the busway take one third of the travellers, won’t the road be even more congested than it is now?
• Another question without an answer is quite simply, as the buses will run between concrete "rails" what happens if a bus breaks down on the guided busway? Its not as if the next bus coming along can simply overtake it. This will only then lead to severely delayed services whilst recovery is underway!
• They proclaim that the busway can reduce the journey time from Leigh to Manchester to around 50 Minutes. Fair enough, but for the vast majority of the day it takes significantly less than 50 minutes to drive the route. Won’t reducing the East Lancs Road to two lanes actually slow motorists down thus increasing their journey to 50 minutes or more ? Or are they being economical with the truth and only referring to bus passengers ? I suspect the latter ! 

See, these are just simple questions, they’re not rocket science !

What do the local people want ?

Most local people are of the opinion they should just scrap the idea & return the route to its original use as a railway or light railway with the Metrolink running on it. Surely a Metrolink extension from Eccles is the answer ? It may cost more buts its usage would be astronomical with a very rapid payback period. Converting the old railway to Metrolink instead of making it a busway is giving the people what they want. But of course, councillors know better !

People in Leigh currently enjoy the green spaces but the busway is going right through it. What a shame to have them spoilt when urban green space is so difficult to find in this country today.

Many people think the East Lancs Road should be improved for cars, especially near Salford endand Leigh should be connected to the tram or rail networks. Most locals already think this busway will prove to be a great white elephant (HS2 anyone?)

Every one I have spoken to from Leigh thinks the same. The busway is an utter waste of money, no use for commuters getting to work in Manchester and it certainly won't bring people into Leigh. If Leigh can’t have the Metrolink then Leigh needs a train station or at least a link to one. Leigh is supposed to be the largest town in the UK without a railway station. There is a costed scheme which you can easily find on the internet, for a spur from the Manchester to Liverpool line to a new Leigh station which will only cost £50m and is supported by all the local political parties, surely this is a better value solution for everyone?  

Traffic Chaos

For the next two years, while the work is carried out, traffic chaos will ensue. Not just on the East Lancs Road but on other routes that people will switch to to avoid the Lancs such as the M62 and M602 both of which are chokka in rush hour anyway. Just how green is this chaos?? All these vehicles will be stood still, belching out carbon, it can’t be good for the atmosphere, and there is no clean green alternative, and they’re not building one either.

It is a total waste of money, all it will do is make this heavily congested road worse. To reduce the capacity of the road by a third when the works are finished is crazy and if anyone with any brains at TfGM or the local authorities could actually work a calculator, they’d see that they couldn't possibly provide enough buses to compensate for the reduced capacity of the road.

Maybe the brains behind this waste of money should be forced to actually sit in the chaos both ways daily. What we really need is proper efficient public transport, such as Metrolink, we need better roads, we don’t need more empty buses.

Idiots

I often wonder whether the idiots who dream up these road chaos schemes ever use public transport or is it the case of do as we tell you and not as we do? Why once again must the motorist be punished? We need more road space for cars not less, very few people use buses they are still perceived as expensive, dirty and not a safe environment to travel in. No matter what you did, this perception will not change so deal with it.

At the end of the day, with the exception of HS2, I've not heard of a more ridiculous waste of money in all of my life. The publicity leaflet they’ve produced admits that there is only going to be eight buses an hour. So they plan to inconvenience thousands of people on the East Lancs Road every day for just eight buses an hour! Total madness! If they're struggling to spend £76m go build the railway spur, or go hunting for a bit more and extend the Metrolink. 

Nobody in Leigh wants it, the people of Salford and the surrounding areas don’t want it. The cost does not justify the upheaval, all it will deliver is a bigger traffic jam. Its TfGM’s version of HS2. TfGM claim that using the busway could cut the journey time from Leigh to Manchester to just 50 minutes. To me, it all seems a lot of money to spend and a lot of inconvenience for other road users just to get a bus that averages 16mph and only stops seven times !!