London Assembly’s Transport Committee has issued a report in response to the consultation on the West London Tram that voices serious reservations about the project. After extensive collection of evidence, the Committee has failed to give backing to the controversial £650 million project.

This report follows recent news from the London Assembly that the proposed West London Tram scheme is low down in its priority list because of financial problems.

The committee agreed that if the scale of TfL’s projections on population growth were accurate it would seem essential to enhance public transport in the area to ensure sustainable growth.

However they were keen to assess the alternatives to the tram, such as trolley buses, and enlisted the expertise of Professor Chris Wright of Middlesex University, to provide an independent assessment of the technical benefits of both the tram and its alternatives.

Professor Wright concluded the Tram would deliver a robust, reliable, and popular service that would increase the capacity for passenger movement along the Uxbridge Road. However, he said that it was unclear that the tram was the only option available to deliver such a service.

In his evidence to the Committee he suggested that a guided bus may be able to deliver a scheme at about 25% of the cost of tram. Tbus, a private Trolleybus firm that run Trolleybus schemes across Europe most notably in Salzburg, approached the Committee with an estimate that they could deliver a Trolleybus scheme at 12.5% of the cost a tram. He said there was a danger that advances in the technology used for guided buses could mean that the tram was effectively old technology by the time it came to implementation.

The Committee also expressed reservations about the traffic modelling used to justify the tram and form the business case in its favour. A projection of 44 million passengers a year was presented as a conservative estimate on demand even though it equates to almost a doubling of current demand along the route between now and 2015.

Transport modelling is inevitably a precarious science but TfL claim that the models developed to predict movement around the WLT proposals are some of the most advanced used to date. TfL can also point to the accuracy of their modelling for the congestion charge which predicted the minimal impact the scheme would have on roads adjoining the scheme’s border. However, the uncertainty over the modelling and over estimates of usage on previous light rail projects in the UK puts a serious question mark over the business case for the tram in the view of the Committee.

Cllr Malcolm, Lib Dem Transport spokesperson, said: “It appears that after a thorough investigation Transport for London (TfL) should now admit the tram scheme is a dead duck. Liberal Democrats have said for a long time that TfL have tried their hardest to force a tram on Ealing.”

Mike Tyzack from Ealing Friends of the Earth said that overall the report was a boost for the tram, “Despite the negative spin some members have put on it, the Committee hasn’t found much wrong with TfL’s proposals. They’ve recognised that something must be done and that buses alone won’t cope. They’ve understood that the tram will not cause massive traffic displacement and that the minority of side streets that would get more traffic can be protected.”

A minority report in favour of the tram was also published by London Assembly members Murad Qureshi, John Biggs and Darren Johnson. They accused their colleagues on the committee of reaching conclusions based on a lack of evidential support and pointed to the work of Professor Phil Goodwin of Imperial College, London which suggested that local concerns about traffic displacement in major public transport projects were usually misfounded and that road users tended to adapt to change circumstances causing traffic to 'evaporate'. They disputed the scale of opposition to the scheme saying that surveys had shown that the majority of the affected population were in favour.

November 15, 2004