YES WE TRAM

Leeds has been offered and denied a tram before. It's time to end the delays and get it built, writes Edmond Daramy-Williams

Yet another miserable chapter has now been added to Leeds’ attempts to get a tram. A report from the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) was leaked and appears to show how tragically short the memory of central Government is. If accepted, it will constitute a serious delay for the prospects of a ‘West Yorkshire Mass Transit’ system (WYMT) that the newest plans detail.

Disappointing as it was for West Yorkshire to be denied a solution this side of 2030, NISTA’s secret report suggests that were the Government to follow its recommendations, they might not build a tram at all. Whilst NISTA accepted that “it may well be the case that trams are the best modal choice”, it was by no means convinced that they were. Calling for a ‘mode-agnostic’ perspective, it noted that Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) would have a significantly lower cost than a tram, whilst delivering a much better Benefit-to-Cost Ratio (BCR).

With this, one déjà vu seemed nested within another, with worrying parallels from the past. Just like with NISTA, a BCR comparison between a tram (the Supertram) and its alternatives had in fact previously been conducted, back in 2007, finding in favour of the BRT. However, when the time came to build, the BRT system was not granted planning consent (which even the Supertram achieved!) – the assumptions which showed the BRT so apparently favourable did not pass the test of reality according to the Planning Inspectorate.

The High Quality Bus Study

In 2004, the local authorities responsible for transport in Leeds were advised to explore alternatives to the Supertram scheme (a proposal for a tram network in Leeds with three lines) which had faced great cost overruns. One year later, the ‘Study of High Quality Buses in Leeds’ sought to find “whether a high quality bus initiative can deliver a viable alternative to light rail” and compared a BRT system against the original Supertram along a portion of the latter’s original route, under varying sets of assumptions.

It will be unhappily familiar to read that the BRT was compared to the Supertram and obtained a much better BCR, of 3.6 to 2.4. This, however, hinged on a critical set of assumptions, to the combined effect that a BRT system would be functionally indistinguishable from that of a tram. Firstly, that a BRT “[was] assessed economically as a new travel choice, in the same way that a tram is”, being seen by its users as sufficiently distinct to be meaningfully differentiated from a conventional bus. Or, simply put, it was seen by paying customers as more tram than bus. Secondly, given that each BRT bus was acknowledged to have around half of the capacity as a tram, it was assumed that it would be straightforward to run twice as many buses as the tram alternative, so that total system capacities were equivalent.

With these assumptions, the BRT achieved 93% of the benefits of a tram, but with significantly lower costs. However, the study acknowledged that there was uncertainty in assuming that the BRT was ‘more tram than bus’ in users’ eyes, since there had been no evidence or experience of a comparable BRT scheme in Britain. If perceived by users as essentially another kind of bus, it may still have been cheaper than a tram, but it would only have achieved around half of the benefits. Its BCR, therefore, would not have been much greater. Only the tram would have been able to deliver its scale of benefits. They actually quantified these benefits – half a billion pounds in additional ‘present value benefits’. Eventually, the test of the underlying assumptions would be made in 2016, and it revealed clear results.

The NGT Public Inquiry and the Planning Inspectorate’s Report

The High Quality Bus Study produced the successor scheme to the Supertram – the New Generation Transport (NGT) trolleybus proposal. It proposed a route along a truncated portion of the original Supertram network, following a north-south route from Holt Park via Headingley to Stourton. When the time came to act and build, however, the critical assumption of tram-parity discussed above failed. As part of a public inquiry, the Planning Inspectorate roundly rejected it, recommending the consent be refused for the entire scheme, and the Department for Transport agreed, finally killing off the scheme completely.

There were many criticisms. Its route over the same corridor would be less segregated and need a greater land take than the Supertram’s equivalent. Its interior, configured for a high intensity use with relatively few seats compared to the amount of standing room, might be a “deterrent to use and safety risk”. Journey times were calculated to be too optimistic, and worst, at the end of it, it was not found to be considered meaningfully different from regular buses.

From a customer perspective, a Stated Preference (SP) study referred to in the Inquiry found not only that trolleybuses were not found to be particularly preferred to regular buses, but that the specific type of bus to be used by NGT, a single-decker segmented articulated bus (a ‘bendy’ bus), was less preferred to modern double decker buses. Even some of the supporters of the NGT scheme said that a tram would have been preferable.

Arguably more critical, however, was that the proposed capacity revealed that the assumption of parity with the tram on this front did not hold. Even if the BRT were received by customers as a similar proposition to a tram, the system as a whole still would not have been able to have the same impact as a tram, because it would only have had half the capacity at most. BRT buses, with approximately half the capacity of a tram, would need to run buses twice as frequently to provide the same overall capacity. The NGT scheme, however, proposed to run ten buses per hour, or a bus every six minutes. Whilst a positive intervention, it would only have been equivalent in capacity to five trams an hour, or a tram every twelve minutes - hardly earth-shaking when Manchester tram services provide a combined frequency of ten trams per hour, but with much more capacity than what a BRT system could offer.

And whilst real BRT perhaps has never been tried, BRT ‘Lite’ might well be said to have been, over the very Leeds-Bradford route in question. The ‘Hyperlink’ scheme, whereby BRT-style articulated buses were deployed for the 72 bus route between Leeds and Bradford, operated buses at lower frequencies than proposed by NGT, with eight buses per hour. Eventually, its buses were retired and the route is now run by double-decker buses again, at half the frequency, hardly impacting connectivity in the region at all. It remains to be seen how a bus-based system could be devised in an already well built-up West Yorkshire which would probably need to deliver fifteen to twenty buses per hour to match a realistic tram timetable.

NGT’s BRT system could not deliver adequate benefits, considering its costs. There was “little evidence to show how the objective of maximising the Leeds economy would have been achieved” and therefore “there [was] not a compelling case in the public interest for making it, as any public benefit from public transport improvements and economic development would fail to outweigh the harm.” The Secretary of State for Transport demurred, refusing the NGT in its entirety.

WYMT vs. Supertram – a much bigger scope for trams

In retrospect it can be argued that had WYMT, rather than the Supertram, been used as the basis of comparison in the High Quality Bus Study, with the far broader WYMT in mind rather than the solely Leeds-focused Supertram, then tram-based system could have performed better against any BRT.

And it’s possible to improve plans for the tram still further.

Greater capacity can be achieved simply by using longer trams. Manchester does this by coupling its trams together, and other cities in Europe are starting to run ever longer continuous formations. The BCR comparison assumed trams were twice as spacious as BRT buses, but with longer trams, of around 50 metres in length, this could be increased to three-to-one, and the BCR recalculations very likely to be in the tram’s favour. With this sort of ratio, a tram running every fifteen minutes would need twelve BRT buses to provide the same passenger capacity; increasing this to every 6 minutes, thirty BRT buses per hour would be needed - an unfathomable proposition. Manchester’s Metrolink has also shown it is possible to run these longer formations on roads shared with other traffic, with the routes to Ashton and Eccles.

Higher speed can also be achieved using rail infrastructure, or land around rail infrastructure, to provide a more intensive service along an existing or disused corridor at relatively low marginal cost, whilst also being able to run at street-level within city centres. This has been put into practice not only in Manchester along former railway lines, but with Sheffield’s Supertram of its own, sharing track with heavy rail trains to run to and from Rotherham.

The WYMT scheme presents possibilities of using tram-trains to serve Leeds Bradford Airport via Horsforth, a sorely desired route, and also to the ‘Five Towns.’ Indeed some of the proposed routes to Bradford would use rail infrastructure corridors, an option outright impossible for a BRT, and maximising ‘tram-train’ possibilities could deliver unprecedented connectivity along this corridor, with a frequent, reliable, and fast service. High enough speeds along the Leeds-Bradford corridor could have strategic economic effects, in potentially allowing any western Bradford tram routes to be connected to this core corridor and significantly expand the one-hour Leeds economic catchment area, or ‘isochrone’.

Only Trams Will Do

This all seems awfully familiar: if this leaked NISTA report says what we think it does, then history is repeating itself in a comically tragic way. Leeds has been offered and then denied a tram before. It seems Whitehall is engaging in the same cost-benefit debacle as before, and once again, Leeds is going to end up with nothing.

Moreover, the scope is much bigger this time. It is not just the tram for Leeds at stake, but a ‘mass transit’ system for the entire of West Yorkshire. If BRT could not cater to a smaller portion of a three-leg tram network, it is laughable to suggest it might meet the needs of a county-wide mass rapid transit system. On the other hand, a more capacious, and potentially much faster, tram is perfectly suited to meet the transport challenge in this area, including future scalability.

With West Yorkshire’s new integrated ‘Weaver’ network incoming, bringing public transport all together under one name, it has to be said that all modes of transport ultimately must be cohesive. This includes both heavy rail, which needs significant work unlocking capacity at the Leeds City Station bottleneck, and indeed the traditional bus system which will always have a significant role. It is critically important that we break out of thinking in silos and create an effective multi-modal mix to deliver the greatest economic benefit.

Within this mix, the specific role of the tram can be identified as a sweet spot of medium distance, high intensity and higher quality corridors, where some segregated running is possible. This can be achieved through either central reservations as with sections of the Supertram, or ‘tram-train’ style solutions as seen in Sheffield. A greater magnitude of benefit is achieved than a bus-based solution could practicably achieve, yet the very high costs of a fully ‘grade-separated’ heavy rail or light rail solution can be avoided. Benefitting West Yorkshire rather than just Leeds in isolation demands something which can deliver benefits on a great enough scale.

With respect to taking a ‘mode-agnostic’ perspective, those who advocate for the tram by default, possibly with the view that “the term WYMT is synonymous with tram”, may do so because they tacitly grasp its inherent features, even when not explicitly articulated or advanced from first principles. Seen as a ‘street-train’, because the tram literally runs on rails, it solves the problems of steering a very long coupled set of vehicles through often tight city streets, and also of steering them at higher speeds. This enables the stability, ride quality, and interior spaciousness that leads people to subjectively judge them as being of better quality than buses, and perhaps to conclude after all that “anything less than” a tram would be “second-class”.

A generation has passed since the Supertram Act of 1993 and a generation of growth has happened, both in population and in the built environment. But there has been no growth in transport infrastructure to match this. We cannot allow this to happen again. A generation of delays has already seen costs spiralling; Leeds and West Yorkshire should not have to wait any longer.

Edmond Daramy-Williams is the Chair of LFG Leeds.