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Ken is off his trolley with this tram plan
• THE consultation for the Cross River Tram is a fiasco. There are no supporting studies to show what the ramifications are for residents in Camden Town for either of the routing options proposed.
Both of the choices involve major work to the High Street and the possibility of having to re-route a high volume of through traffic permanently along adjacent residential streets.
Both options also result in Hawley Infant School being cut off within a triangle of tram lines – the electromagnetic radiation from the overhead power cables will surely not be good for our children.
One of the two options for the King’s Cross route involves additional tram movements at the lower end of the High Street causing further disruption. Thus the two arms of the tram cannot be considered independently.
This is also not explained in the consultation documents. The tram offers the prospect of local economic regeneration. However this actually equates to higher retail and office rentals which I do not believe are either needed or wanted in Camden Town – high rents in the High Street and Parkway are already preventing local independent shops from remaining or relocating here.
The tram also offers better connections. Again the town centre is actually quite well served with existing public transport routes and some of these would surely go if the tram arrives leaving us in a worse position than before with more journeys requiring changes of transport to get to our destination.
I fear that we would be better off without the tram, however much I support the idea of providing better public transport. It seems the price to pay for this additional public route is too high – massive local congestion on our narrow roads and additional noise and vibration for those living nearby.
I urge everyone to reply to this sham of a consultation with a resounding ‘No’ – not without detailed information to show how the affects of diverted traffic will be mitigated, so that we can make a decision based on facts. I also cannot see why we are not being consulted on a route finishing at Mornington Crescent which would considerably lessen congestion and disruption but still provide Camden Town with a Tram link.
The deadline for response is Janury 30 and Transport for London’s website allows comments to be made online at http://www.tfl.gov.uk/
trams/initiatives/crt/consultation.asp
LUISA CHANDLER
Arlington Road, NW1
• THE ten-mile tram system being consulted on in Camden will produce far more carbon dioxide (CO2) than buses already doing the job. Manufacturing the 35,000 tons of steel rail needed will generate the same amount of CO2 as 70 million car journeys in the current congestion zone. If you hire out mobile traffic lights, regard piles of earth in the street as installation art and like global warming, then London Mayor Ken Livingstone’s proposed tram from Camden to South London is a must.
But if you don’t want to sit in traffic jams for years, suffer pollution and global warming and pay extra taxes for the privilege, then don’t back the tram currently being touted in a consultation by Mr Livingstone.
Posing as environmentally friendly it is pointless and will vastly aggravate pollution and waste energy. Because of their massive weight, trams gulp far more energy than buses. An 80-seat tram weighs 40 tons, an 80-seat bus 13 tons. A tram, dragging its vast weight about, uses twice as much energy per mile and so causes far more pollution than a bus. Worse, the tramline from Brixton and Peckham to Camden will require 35,000 tons of top quality steel rails.
Steel needs unbelievable amounts of energy. Its mining, transport and white heat manufacture produce a staggering amount of global warming, generating 1.75 tons of CO2 for every ton of steel.
Then there are steel rods and thousands of tons of concrete to bed the rails into our roads.
Concrete is also renowned for energy consumption.
Still in favour of Livingstone’s tram despite it producing mind blowing amounts of carbon for its rails and concrete?
Once built the trams make twice as much carbon per mile as buses doing the same job, and it gets worse.
The Mayor’s trams will run in busy streets, grabbing space previously used by people, buses and cars. So their journeys will all be slower, more polluted and more miserable. Oh, and tram drivers get paid more than bus drivers despite not having to steer or take money; so more extra costs.
The Camden tram is a no brainer. There is no sane argument for spending huge amounts of your money on it.
Mr Livingstone should use a fraction of the cost on proper improvements to the Northern Line, not cameras that can’t stop graffiti artists daubing an entire station.
Why does every northbound Tube grind to a stop in the tunnel outside Camden Town? It even happens on Sundays when there hasn’t been another Tube for ten minutes. Return the signalling to how it used to be before the Livingstone regime when most trains swept, rather than crawled, into Camden.
Make all Northern Line Tube doors open at all stations, by widening the end of the platforms at three stations. Use the technology everyone else uses to make sure station lifts run separately, not travel up and down together even though no one has blocked the doors and onnect the Circle line to the Northern at Euston Station by a passageway. They are a tantalising 250 yards apart.
Above ground on the tram equivalent 168 bus route, widen the road junctions narrowed in the 90s, to speed up the 168 and everything else. Use and expand the derelict northern Kingsway tram tunnel to get cars off the bus route and under a busy junction.
Get the Americans that Livingstone has brought to London and made millionaires to run the Tube properly.
Sadly what is more likely is that he will get the TFL press office to use your money to refute these arguments which are irrefutable and press on with the planet destroying tram.
SIMON NEAVE and BILL OHM
Gloucester Avenue
NW1
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