Let’s get moving with a future based on trams

WE keep being told of developments in Derby being refused, or scaled down, due to worries about the traffic generated.

Derby’s economic success is under threat unless serious attention is paid to transport. We also have a pollution problem, the council’s solution to which is to remove bus and cycle lanes and spread the problem around further!

This is totally the opposite of what is required. We need to reduce road traffic and put in alternatives. Derby’s transport is dominated by car use and planning assumes it. Buses only account for about 5% of travel to work journeys. Indeed, the bus map of Derby has a big hole in it around Rolls-Royce, our largest employer, with around 11,000 people on site. The bus is unsuitable for the high peak flows required. The bus companies find this uneconomic to provide and opt out altogether!

We need a public mass transport system that is able to cope with such flows, and to provide a fast and reliable service, largely independent of traffic and environmentally friendly, and that is the tram. We only have to go 15 miles to Nottingham to prove that it works!

There are proposals by Midlands Connect, as a part of the HS2 scheme at Toton, to extend the Nottingham system to Derby and also to have an internal network within Derby, serving R-R, Mickleover and the university. Details are lacking and I suggest a route: Pride Park, station, city centre, Great Northern alignment to Kingsway, then a loop serving Mackworth, Mickleover and the Royal Derby.

From the station, another line would go alongside the railway to Peartree, then on to R-R, Infinity Park, Chellaston, Boulton Moor, Alvaston and Raynesway to Pride Park.

A line via Willow Row and the West End would serve the university sites and Allestree. We should not wait for HS2, but get on with it, Derby really needs it! Other lines should follow, to areas such as Spondon, Oakwood, Heatherton and Sinfin/Stenson Fields.

There seems to be lack of realisation that Derby and its immediate surroundings has a population of around 300,000 and growing, rather than being a country town. It is not only transport that suffers, the city centre also does. The low ambition for the Assembly Rooms demonstrates this.

David Gibson, Lockwood Road,

Allestree,