Hammersmith and Fulham Group - London Cycling Campaign

West London Tram [intro]

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The Tram

Transport for London produced a proposal for an improved bus service, trolleybus or tram to improve the public transport along, and environment for, the Uxbridge rd between Uxbridge and Shepherds Bush. The October 2000 Uxbridge Road Transit - Summary Report.pdf file

TfL seem to have already decided on a tram as the best option. This appears to be on cost/benefit ratios. However the plan has not been worked out in detail, traffic modelling has yet to be done on the latest designs, which are not finalised, and the costs in terms of traffic disruption could be very high.

The proposal should also have been dependent upon factors such as the approval of the Crossrail scheme, providing a fast rail link between Heathrow, Ealing Broadway, Paddington, Bond Street, Tottenham Ct Rd and points east [there is a spur line coming in from Richmond].

The Tram needs the three boroughs [LBHF, LB of Ealing, LB of Hillingdon] along the route to support the scheme. Until a borough agrees this status there is no public consultations in that borough. Ealing has agreed, LBHF has not as yet.

By not coming up with plans acceptable to LBHF, TfL are denying the people of that borough any effective consultation. This means that there is no public consultation in LBHF. [One can discount marketting exercises inflicted upon the people of LBHF].

The Tram seems to be a marketing exercise rather than an exercise in design.

The station on the Hammersmith and City line at Shepherds Bush appears to be an obstacle. The bridge is too low and the span too narrow. The railway inspectorate want a greater clearance to make sure any high vehicles do not get electrocuted by the conductor wires. This station is very cramped and old.

The latest plans seem to involve pedestrians on the south side of the road going through one of the railway arches now part of the market. What happens to cyclists is unsure.

What is really required is replace the bridge with a wide span, and rebuild the cramped station, to make it an important interchange. Not a bodged up job that will lower the quality of the area.

The preferred option at Shepherds Bush Green is to have no through traffic on the north side of the green. This means two-way working on the south side of the Green, and a very congested junction with Shepherds Bush rd.

This junction presently has three lanes of traffic coming out of town. With a bit of change of ownership and demolition it could take two lanes each way, taking all the traffic into and out of central London. There might also have to be right hand turns to contend with at this junction, if vehicles going north on Shepherds Bush rd wanted to go towards Central London, and vehicles coming out of London want to go to Wood Lane or the Uxbridge rd. Would pedestrians and cyclists have any space at this junction?

Perhaps they will need to reconsider these plans?

The tram is scheduled to run every three minutes in each direction at peak times. It will have control and precedence over traffic signals. This will further impede traffic crossing the Uxbridge rd.

Does the traffic modelling consider the disbenefit of traffic delays in the Hammersmith, Notting Hill, Kensington and Earls court areas? NO. There is to be no traffic modelling for the evening peak, where these areas could suffer.

The present scheme concentrates the traffic onto the south side of the Green and leaves a lot of roadspace more or less redundant. One way to ameliorate the situation would be to have single track running for the tram between the terminus at Shepherds Bush Green and the next stop at the problem bridge. With a running time of less than one minute, and with one tram having to leave the terminus for every tram arriving, this would not be difficult to synchronise. That would leave more road space for through traffic on the north side of the Green, if that was wanted.

One would have hoped that Tim Jones, the leader of this project, would have taken the concerns of cyclists on board. However there is no mechanism for this, he considering that cyclists are a borough road problem. Let us hope that they are given due consideration in the roadspace allotted for traffic modelling, in the designs of stops, in lane widths and will not have to approach tram tracks at a low angle.

The design process also seems to ignore future possibilities, like the WhiteCity centre not going ahead, developing technologies, and possible radical changes to transport in the face of bio-terrorism.

One problem about LBHF is that the tram may not provide transport benefits to many of its residents, and it may considerably disbenefit some.

We are not against the tram as such, but in this pitiful railroading of poorly thought through ideas, cyclists are likely to be squeezed out of the picture, and consideration for them to be very low on the agenda.

Details of the tram proposal, including maps