Training politicans

If there’s one thing that brings home how pleasant North Wales is, it’s a drive to and from Coventry. Now, before the massed denizens of the Midlands rise up to cry ‘Foul!’ and start burning effigies of Carneades, let me explain. I have nothing against Coventry. In fact, as far as I can see, it’s a city like any other, with doubtless its fair share of beauty, crime, problems and decent shopping.

No - it’s getting there that imbues me with a deep and earnest loathing. In the UK the transport system is largely based on horse and cart tracks, or Roman roads. At one time, of course, it had a wonderful railway system, until the Conservative government of the early and mid-sixties, with typically myopic foresight and a careful eye to lining their own pockets allowed the owner of Marples Ridgway, the road building company that built the Chiswick flyover and a member of the British Roads Federation, the organisation started in 1931 in response to a government plan to put all long haul freight onto rail at the ridiculously low and uneconomic rates that rail was forced to charge by law, to create a raft of reasons why roads, petrol-guzzling cars, massive lorries, fumes and pollution generally were better for the country than investment in trains, trams and other far less-polluting forms of transport. Ernest Marples, the Minster for transport (there’s a misnomer if ever there was one) virtually dismantled the railways and condemned us all to years of unbelievable traffic jams, congestion, parking tickets and sick kids.

His legacy is alive and well today, as anyone who risks life and limb by driving between Llandudno and Coventry can testify. There are - in reality - only two routes; either the A5 or the A55, both of which converge onto the A5 near Oswestry, from where a series of single carriageway death-traps, clearly designed by builders whose ancestors created the stadium for the Ben Hur chariot race, funnel traffic travelling at sizeable fractions of the speed of light eventually onto the M54. Thereafter, the experienced driver knows to ignore the misleading road signs which attempt to suggest that exit 2 is the one to take if you want the toll road, the only sanity-preserving option, and take instead exit 1, to embark on a road some three miles in length cluttered with no fewer than seven speed cameras before the sanctuary of the toll road is reached.

The thing is we shouldn’t have to do this. We ought to have a reliable, regular, cost-effective public transport system that could whisk us about the country in a calm and restful environment and cause as little damage to the biosphere as possible. And it’s so easy.

Even our own towns could do it, if the government of the day were to invest a fraction of the money they spend on road maintenance on alternative public transport systems. In Llandudno, we could easily have a new, modern tram system, that would pay for itself within a comparatively short time. But the monorail - long spurned by those who have no idea what they’re talking about - is one of the world’s most successful mass transit systems, moving millions a year in totally reliable and accident-free trains. The monorail has all the advantages of the trams and none of their disadvantages: smoothness, reliability, extremely low pollution, easy switching, low running costs and - best of all - separation from other road users with a minute footprint for the supporting towers. Remember - when they tell us there's no money, it's worth reminding them that they spent nearly a trillion quid of ours in propping up companies ruined by greed and incompetence.

Come the next election, forget big social issues, which none of the parties has a hope in hell of solving anyway, forget wars, forget national debt. A vote for the party that promises trams and monorails around the country and in any town that wants them within five years might not be such a bad idea.