100 signatures reached
To: Cllr Derrick Ashley
Save the Abbey Line
Hertfordshire County Council (HCC) are threatening to close the Abbey Line.
In their ‘Transport Vision 2050’ consultation paper, recently published, they propose to tear up the existing electric railway line between Watford and St Albans and turn it into a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) route – effectively making it into a road.
BRT involves running self-powered buses down concrete guideways.
Just over one year ago, in summer 2015, over 80% of respondents to another HCC consultation expressed their opposition to such a scheme, and their support for retaining and enhancing the Abbey Line as a rail service. It appears that these views have been roundly ignored in what the Abbey Flyer Users’ Group (ABFLY) have described as an “insult to the democratic process”.
This petition calls on HCC to scrap these environmentally-damaging BRT plans and to urgently revisit alternative proposals to either enhance the line as a ‘heavy’ rail route or bring in elements of light rail operation – all of which can potentially be achieved at a fraction of the cost of BRT.
For more details of how you can help us to defeat this, please sign this petition and visit www.abfly.org.uk/notobus
Why is this important?
Closing existing rail lines and converting them to BRT is a bad idea for five key reasons:
• environmental impact
• passenger comfort and perception
• loss of network benefits
• reliability
• cost
It is widely acknowledged that given a choice, people see rail / light rail as a superior mode to bus, and would be more encouraged to switch to rail should the service be enhanced. Removing the line from the rail system means that people would see it as ‘just another bus route’, rather than as a feeder to the rest of the rail network.
Bus usage has been on a steady downward trend outside London since 1986 whilst rail usage is at record high levels.
On the environmental impact, a simple appreciation of physics confirms that the rolling resistance of a rubber-tyred vehicle on a concrete track is significantly higher than steel wheels on steel rail.
Furthermore the imposition of BRT would imply dismantling of the existing Overhead Line Equipment (OHLE) which allows trains / light rail to operate with zero emissions at the point of use. On the contrary, it is assumed that buses operating under BRT would have to be self-powered, each having to carry around their own power unit, with consequent penalty for weight and hence fuel consumption. If they were to be diesel-powered, this raises serious questions about the impact on local air quality.
The consequences of pouring thousands of tonnes of concrete to create the guideways in itself is a CO2-intensive activity, additionally noting that doing so through Bricket Wood would be within a designated Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).
On reliability and cost, a ‘pioneering’ scheme on the old Cambridge to St Ives railway line suffered severe delays, cost overruns and quality failings – which are still being addressed.
To make the service more attractive and boost ridership, ABFLY have long been calling for an increase in the service frequency on the single track line, which provides a train every 45mins in each direction.
They believe this can be achieved by installing a ‘passing loop’ and bringing in a second train to operate a higher frequency shuttle. The costs of building a passing loop are thought to be somewhere between £4m and £7m based on historical estimates.
Whilst the Hertfordshire Rail Strategy, published last July, dismisses the passing loop as, “unlikely to be considered by funders as a priority, as it would require provision of two train sets and train crew in place of the current one, making it difficult to achieve a favourable business case”, no such business case has ever been presented for public scrutiny, and in any case it is thought to be severely undermined by a high level of usage going unrecorded because of ticketless travel on the branch. This issue has recently been acknowledged by the Department for Transport’s very own figures.
According to the Transport Vision document, the cost of the BRT scheme is quoted at £90m, over ten times the price of a passing loop, but no business case is presented for BRT either.
