Only trams attract drivers out of cars

Adam Reynolds makes some excellent points in his recent letter, many of which we in the Bath and Bristol Area Trams Association agree with.

However, there is a glaring omission in his list of solutions.

The only intervention which has been shown to attract drivers out of cars, due to the lower fare cost, higher service frequency, ride comfort, reliability, and prestige, all summed up in the two words “high quality”, is steel wheeled trams. That is why they are ubiquitous in European towns as large as Bristol and as small as Bath, and why European cities with trams are far less polluted and congested and also have higher productivity due to the workers being able to get to work quickly at low cost and on time.

If Adam Reynolds wants to promote cycling the best thing is to install a tram or light rail, connecting Radstock, Bath, the University campus at Newton St Looe, Keynsham, and Bristol.

Our calculations show that such a tram actually reduces congestion on the road through Salford, because the road space used up by previous car drivers that statistically we know will switch to a long tram is greater than the road space taken up by the actual tram - see the Bath Trams website for this calculation based on actual evidence.

Surprisingly the route through Saltford is not difficult for trams to transit as may at first be thought.

Simply cutting parking in Bath, without providing an acceptable alternative as Adam Reynolds advises, will strangle yet further the commercial life of the city and people are not

going to cycle in from Radstock.

If buses are offered instead of cars, then this will create bus jams as happens in other cities where this has been tried because buses simply do not have the carrying capacity of a tram - which is 5 times more than a bus line, and 12 times that of a highway.

By all means, yes to a Work Place Parking levy pioneered in Nottingham but what Adam Reynolds neglects to say is that this was used to fund the tram system.

Even the WECA mayor has recently praised the Manchester tram whose revenues are used to subsidise rural buses We know that cycling organisations in Bath are opposed to trams on the basis that they are dangerous to cyclists, but this is not the case.

The danger to cyclists and the thing that puts them off cycling more than anything is cars, and one only has to look at the pictures on the Bath Trams website of cyclists in tram towns happily cycling over tram rails in Europe to realise this.

Avoiding a tram rail is no harder than not cycling into a kerb.

David Andrews

Bath and Bristol Area Trams Association