• Hydra London High Line at Greenwich O2 (HydeParkNow)
• Newcastle reopening Northumberland Line (RailEngineer)
• Mulhouse beat High Street blues with transport, pedestrians (PriceTags)
• Living close to public amenities could improve your life (TheAtlantic)
• Connecticut says No to Transit-Oriented Development (StreetsBlog)
• Are pogo sticks the new scooters? (SmartCitiesDive)
• Tokyo’s 35km circle Yamanote Line operation (NHKWorld)
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“Ashingtron Metro” …
Diesel, or Metro-electric trains?
The article does not appear to say.
Someone in New Haven / Connecticut seems to be bonkers …..
The Mulhouse experience is fairly easily replicable in medium and large cities. They are big enough to create a good shopping-as-leisure experience provided the environment and the range of shops and other attractions is good enough. Pedestrianisation is a start but not sufficient and quality of the environment is very important. The places that will find it increasingly difficult are the large towns and very small cities which have traditionally been more than just local shopping but can no longer compete with their larger rivals.
@ Quinlet, sadly not reproducible in England, where local government is prohibited by central government from spending the necessary money.
@Greg Diesel
Fuller history here http://www.senrug.co.uk/Re-open-AshingtonBlythTyneLine.php
“A confusing report in The Evening Chronicle said The Secretary of State for Transport wishes to give the Ashington Line to Nexus and is waiting for a proposal from them to take over the track and start running services. Both Northumberland County Council and Nexus confirmed they do not see the route as forming part of the Metro network. ”
Presumably crayoning at the DfT about combining Ashington re-opening with Metro upgrade (new rolling stock, £360 million), but as existing metro is 1,500 DC it seems unfeasible. No doubt bi-mode metro stock was considered….
What ought to be compelling is 25 kV on the re-opening line, but that cost would destroy the business case. ( I suspect even making passive provision would be too expensive )
@PeterW: I don’t see why there is necessarily a connection between handing over the line to Nexus and it being part of the metro – more likely DfT have in mind something like the Valley Lines in Wales where the lines are handed over to the regional authority in the hope that they can do the necessary work more cheaply than Network Rail could and to achieve vertical integration, which the current Secretary of State is keen on.
@IANJ I agree, that may well be the thinking .
But Northumberland Council have been paying to move the project forward (through the GRIP 3 process). My fear is that moving responsibility now would delay things further.
FWIW There is considerable political/administrative change going on in the area:
Northumberland [together with North Tyne & Newcastle ] is now part of the new “North of Tyne Combined Authority” (NTCA) – whihc only elected it’s first mayor in May 2019,
The components of NTCA were previously part of the “North East Combined Authority” (NECA). NECA now comprises the remaining members:County Durham, Gateshead, South Tyneside and Sunderland].
Most Nexus funding come from DfT or fares. Funding for concessions & other subsidised travel services comes from a levy on NTCA and NECA . I don’t see Nexus (currently) as a vehicle for driving heavy rail projects
NTCA is now a member of Transport for the North Board (NECA was and is a member), so there’s been restructuring there too.
@RogerB
S.106 agreements and BIDs are two ways in which money for city centre improvements can be raised.
@Quinlet – s106 has been, or is about to be (depending on the authority), replaced by CIL (Community Infrastructure Levy). This levied at a flat rate (determined by the LPA) on the square meterage of developments. Experience so far with CIL is that smallscale transport items will benefit less from CIL than s106, but the sums generated by CIL can be substantial and so the larger projects such as the Ashington line might become financeable. To give you some idea of the sums involved, here in Waverley, the average CIL take per new house will be around £40k – with the possibility of 15000 extra houses, you can see the sums add up quickly. Enough, we say, round here, to pay for reopening Guildford-Cranleigh…
£6 billion should be enough to reopen Guildford to Cranleigh with gold plated trains and a butler for every carriage I would have thought. On the other hand at Network Rail prices …
On a recalculation it turns out i was a factor of 10 out! It’s only 600 million so no butlers or gold plating then …
@Purley Dweller – even so, the sums are little short of astonishing, although (a) Waverley’s take per sq/m is one of the highest anywhere; (b) unsurprisingly, the developers are challenging the figure; (c) the sums are dependent on the number of houses actually built; and (d) the income is spread over 13+ years. The sums available fothe Ashington line are likely to be much smaller – fewer houses, lower take. Sceptics argue that whatever the headline number might be, the actual levels achieved will be half or less than the estimate.
Benton Junction (a flat crossing of the ECML) to Ashington and beyond is in use already as a reasonable quality freight route, engineered for heavy coal trains. I don’t really see vertical integration working like the Valley Lines.
I suspect the reason DfT wanted Nexus involved was to keep it off the ECML, by running only as a shuttle service to Northumberland Park Metro. Priority on the ECML seems to be to try and fit in more and more Edinburgh services, including TPE and open access.
I don’t think “Newcastle Reopening Northumberland Line” is a very accurate sub heading…
@PaulS If Ashington-Blyth re-opens it will be heavy rail – because there are no current plans to fund electrification (it would kill the business case)
Clearly a government that is committed to a carbon neutral & reduced emissions policy should implement that policy by insisting on (and funding) at least active provision for 25kV , but that’s not where we are – yet.
FWIW Nexus did a reasonable summary of the all the longer term aspirations in the NE
https://www.nexus.org.uk/sites/default/files/Metro%20Futures%20brochure.pdf
They noted that new trains should be dual-voltage (25 kV as well as 1.5 kV DC); again there are costs for something that might not be used to 10 – 15 years
@GrahamH as a new 3 bed detached house around Blyth can be had for under £200,000 you’re right that the CIL might not raise quite as much…
@Graham H
CIL has not entirely replaced s.106, which remains for transport costs directly related to the proposed development. So that remains an option for dealing with some town centre improvements CIL can, indeed, raise larger sums of money and has been used to pay for some of the transport improvements for the 2012 Games and has contributed to Crossrail. It must, though, apply equally across the authority’s area and this has led to grumbles from boroughs in north and south London who’s developments are having to contribute towards Crossrail when they don’t see that they get any benefit.
@Quinlet – that’s not the legal advice being applied down here in Waverley, or, indeed in Surrey generally,where the s106 accounts have been closed and those going shopping for development -related improvements, including such directly-related transport projects as access roads, have been pointed at CIL and told very firmly that s106 is “dead”. The argument about equality of spend is also one that hasn’t been deployed even in cases where it would have justified what were otherwise geographically quite outrageous uses.
One complication in all this may be the fact that in parishes and towns with Neighbourhood Plans, 22.5% of the CIL take in their area is theirs. However, it is worth noting NALC (the body representing local councils) has not advised their members of any need for geographical equality. In our parish, which covers an area about the same as a typical inner London borough, with several settlements of roughly equal size, it would make a serious difference to the way we spent our CIL income – no one has challenged our shopping list, however.
I would be very interested in any legal advice/statutory provision you could point at. for taking our discussions with our local planning authority forward.
In my local parish council in rural Kent, we have just agreed a s.106 agreement (through the good offices of our local borough council) in connection with a new housing development of some 40 dwellings. This provides for two new islands and a pedestrian crossing on the local A road, as well as some leisure facilities. We don’t have any CIL here. Either Kent hasn’t caught up with the law (though I suspect the developers would have told them pdq if they didn’t have a legal basis for an agreement for them to pay up) or maybe Surrey doesn’t want the hassle of s.106 agreements. I will have to look up chapter and verse.
@quinlet – it’s entirely possible that your LPA hasn’t yet adopted the CIL regulations. It’s up to them when they do so. Here in Waverley, they were delayed until this march although neighbouring LPAs had already adopted theirs anything up to a year ago. As CIL charges are generally very much higher than s106, this provoked a tsunami of “outline planning permission applications” from the evergreedy developers, and a severe shortage of shovelready s106 projects – a lose/lose situation from local ratepayers’ point of view.