Last Thursday, the 18th June, Leeds City Council and Metro unveiled their plans for New Generation Transport (NGT), a scheme that would see trolleybuses running in leeds for the first time since 1928. The plan is to have three routes; the East Route, the South Route, and the North Route, with the trolleybuses running along dedicated bus lanes wherever possible
The North Route would run along the line of the A660. Because there’s no plan to knock down any of the buildings opposite the university, this would create a bottleneck at the junction of the A660 and Clarendon Road. To cope with this bottleneck, traffic would be stacked on Woodhouse Moor. This would be done either by widening the existing road between Rampart Road and Clarendon Road, or by building a new road across Monument moor. The second option exists because the Highways Department are aware of local sensitivity about losing the avenue of trees.
The stated aim of the scheme is to create an improved public transport system using dedicated bus lanes wherever possible. But if that’s the aim, then it could be achieved by creating dedicated bus lanes within the existing highway.
This scheme would affect Woodhouse Moor in an almost identical manner to the scheme proposed by Highways at the end of last year. At that time, we were told that the road widening was necessary to facilitate a pedestrian crossing on Clarendon Road.
A new website has been set up to keep people informed about this latest threat to our area – New Generation Transport
You sound like you’re against NGT; something the City cannot afford to miss out on. Leeds is Europe’s biggest city without a mass transit network; and boy it’s obvious. Go just a stones throw beyond the wealth of the City and you’re into extremely deprived areas.
In other cities, deprived areas would be found further out, and in areas with bad transport. Of course the entire inner city of Leeds is like this- and if it means losing a strip of grass to sort this out, so be it!