Terry Grimley: Longbridge and how we've missed the tram again
It was momentarily surprising last month to hear Radio 4's early evening news programme, PM, including a feature on the regeneration of Longbridge.
I say "surprising" because Longbridge is in Birmingham, and I say "momentarily" because, of course, on a second's reflection I realised that this was the first week of January and the news agenda can hardly have been competitive.
The item was interesting, though, because it seemed to me to reflect the culture gap between London and the rest of us. Noting that the plans amounted to building a virtual new town on the edge of Birmingham, the BBC brought in a spokesman from CABE (the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment) to discuss them.
It was as though this project was taking place in London, where there would be an expectation that it would achieve a high quality of design. But to get a sense of the kind of design standards likely to be set by Birmingham City Council and Advantage West Midlands, just have a glance at the recently-completed Longbridge Technology Park, accurately summed up by a friend in just four words: "It looks like Curry's".
However, the main point made by the man from CABE was that in Britain we tend to think about transport as an afterthought. In Freiburg, on the other hand, a tram line had been put in first when a similar development had taken place.
This implied that a tram line might be built to Longbridge, but we know this will not happen due to Government policy on public transport outside London, which may be summarised as "let them ride buses".
Local MP Richard Burden said he was pleased that a transport interchange was included in the plans and hoped it would not just be a tarted-up station and a few bus stops. Of course it will just be a tarted-up station and a few bus stops. What else could it be?
Actually, we'll be lucky to get the tarted-up station.
A few years ago there was talk of reopening the branch from the Cross-City Line which used to run through the Rover works and extending it to serve new housing at Frankley. Now, even though £500 million is being invested in Longbridge, this rail scheme seems to have been quietly dropped.
But the concept of putting in tram lines to stimulate regeneration has an extra resonance this week following the publication of an independent study which suggests that the two Midland Metro extensions currently awaiting Government funding could deliver £178 million a year to the local economy, effectively paying for themselves in three years.
It doesn't come as any surprise to me that investment in light rail gives a real kick to regeneration. Unfortunately the Government doesn't take account of such regenerative factors in assessing schemes, which is frankly outrageous. The cynic in me suggests that this is because if it did, it would find them harder to turn down.
But the evidence of the CEBR study should concentrate the minds of Birmingham's political and business leaders who have been, shall we say, less than conspicuously determined in championing the Midland Metro - certainly less determined than their counterparts in Manchester over Metrolink, with differing results which can be seen on the ground in the two cities.
The trouble is that too many of those who could wield influence are uninterested in public transport because they don't use it. They fall too easily for the myth that a few buses could do the job nearly as well, failing to grasp that the real comparison for the metro shouldn't be with buses, but with the Docklands Light Railway.
The metro should be seen as the high-quality thread which binds together all the increasingly impressive regeneration projects right across the region into a coherent whole.
Incidentally, another virtual new town was built on the edge of Birmingham in the 1960s. It's called Castle Vale, and a few years ago there were plans to build a tram line, via Eastside and Heartlands, to serve it.
Now that the Birmingham Post offices are about to move to Fort Dunlop, which would have been a stop on this line, it looks an even better idea than it did at the time.
