We deserve better options to solve our transport woes
THE more I think about the Lancashire County Council-funded report into how to improve transport links between Rossendale and Greater Manchester, the more I think the Valley is in severe risk of being short-changed yet again.
The consultants’ study seems to dismiss any chance of getting a regular railway service running into Rossendale again, and favours instead the creation of a ‘smart’ motorway – which allows for speed limits to change depending on volumes of traffic and for the hard shoulder to be used when the road is busy.
It also suggested focusing on making the express bus services into Manchester – The Witch Way and the Red Express (nee Lancashire Way) – faster by reducing the number of times they stop once within the M60.
As I wrote last week, the first favoured option feels highly unlikely to be adopted by those who run Britain’s motorways on the grounds that many other areas will be lobbying for such things for roads considered to be more important than the M66, while the second option just feels like a cheap sticking plaster that doesn’t really solve the problem at all.
Interestingly, both Rossendale Council leader Alyson Barnes and Rossendale MP Jake Berry have expressed disappointment that the railway option has seemingly been rejected.
Various reasons were cited for this, including the fact it was estimated that it would require a subsidy to be viable.
According to the report, to break even, an hourly train service would require 674k journeys to be made a year, whereas current demand would be for 492k journeys for the service to break even.
When you boil that down, it works out at an extra 700 journeys per working day.
If you assume 12 services a day in each direction, that’s an extra 29 people on each train.
Suddenly, that doesn’t seem such a huge gap – and that excludes any numbers travelling at the weekend.
The challenge now for our local political leaders is to ensure that this report doesn’t become the death knell for transport improvements beyond the removal of stops for The Witch Way between Prestwich and Manchester city centre.
Lancashire County Council published the report so people could have a say on what they thought.
Rossendale now needs to make a loud statement: We deserve better.
For a start, transport links between Rossendale and the south are about far more than just getting into Manchester city centre.
There’s getting between Rossendale and Bury for a start, and various other places between here and the centre of Manchester.
But to have any sort of chance of prising open the purse strings of those who need to approve real investment in transport infrastructure, Rossendale needs Lancashire County Council – the transport authority for Lancashire – banging the drum very loudly.
The idea of extending the Metrolink out to Rossendale seems to have been killed by the fact Transport for Greater Manchester says it doesn’t have the capacity to do it, and that it would cause a lot of disruption in Bury town centre.
The fact our friends south of the Lancashire border are showing so little interest in supporting Rossendale speaks volumes.
These authorities are happy for us to head to work there, and to spend our money there are weekends, but don’t fancy making it easier for us to get there or back.
Rossendale’s leaders need to fight back – but they need the heavy armaments of LCC on their side first.