At a cost of over £22m per mile (£220m for the total 9 miles) the city could have purchased a whole new fleet of luxury buses which would undoubtedly have carried many times more than the estimated 11m passengers predicted for the tram network.

The Government’s much maligned ten year transport plan has earmarked £1.5bn public-private partnership money for schemes in Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Edinburgh but the high installation costs and poor track record of schemes like the Croydon tramlink (see earlier stories in Knowledgebase) make the case for additional future investment hard to justify.

Despite over 136m tickets being sold last year on light rail systems the figures are well short of government expectations if targets are to be met over the next ten years.

The Economic Partnership is trying to bring about a reduction in congestion by investigating green workforce travel plans, which seek to change people’s attitudes about how they get to work. This might entail reducing car dependence by a variety of means e.g. car sharing, discounted deals on buses or trains, providing cycling facilities and or loans or perhaps simply making sure that workers know which bus routes go right past their doors