Stations, and real priorities

A couple of weeks ago the Widnes Weekly News approached me about a blog I’d written prior to last year’s council elections about Halton Green Party’s interest in looking at the possibility of reinstating and opening new railway stations in Halton.

Rather than being interviewed I sent a statement about the fact that if a candidate had been elected in last Mays elections, with some caveats, that we might have pursued this course of action. This statement is below,

“The extra railway stations issue in Halton is not a new idea. It's been around for some time but there doesn't appear to have been the political will to follow this up to any significant degree.

We had such a strategy as part of our 2010 local election campaign promises but of course because of the squeeze on small parties and owing to the special nature of the general election and of that election being held on the same day we did not obtain seats locally. If we had it would have been one of the things we would have been trying to follow up.

Obviously it's easy to talk about what a particular grouping would attempt to do (and what it realistically could do) if it won seats and so a caveat would be necessary in that we couldn't promise anything but we would certainly be pursuing the matter as much as we could and perhaps in the process encouraging more public debate.

Climate change continues to be the biggest threat we face and it’s important we all try to reduce our carbon footprint for the sake of future generations. In my opinion the second mersey crossing will not in the longer term reduce carbon emissions, the building of extra roads and bridges doesn't reduce motor vehicle usage in fact research shows the opposite to be the case. The sort of project that would have the potential to decrease road usage would be the reinstatement and opening of stations at Beechwood, Ditton, Widnes South. Upton Rocks and Barrows Green.

The Green Party is opposed to the severity of the Coalition cuts that are on the cards at the moment. It argues that we must be concentrating on investment in such things as improving a more sustainable and less polluting transport infrastructure. So any proposals for developing locally sustainable transport would be a great plus in terms of helping the local economy and making some inroads into reducing carbon emissions.

You can view such plans for reinstated and new stations in Halton's 2009 "Core Strategy - preferred options" p172 'Preferred policy option CS28 encouraging sustainable transport'. See also related Green Party policy 'jobs and living wage' section at www.greenparty.org.uk/policies"


The article was published in the paper last week. It didn’t include in the write up that it was part of council policy (albeit given low priority) to look into the possibilities of opening stations, there was also no mention of  the caveats included in the statement to the paper, and it didn't include the section on Green Party national policy.

In today’s ‘Widnes Weekly News’ there appeared a letter headed “Stations Idea is Off the Rails” from a T.M. in Runcorn. It ridiculed the proposed sites one by one including the Barrows Green Lane proposal where T.M. stated that it,’… would bring traffic to the area when residents were trying to keep traffic away from their houses and you would want to increase it.’ My response to this would be that the stations we would be promoting would be locally focussed and the expectation would be that residents would walk.

Obviously factors such as potential demand and suitability in terms of infrastructure build would need to be properly considered. The essential ingredient would be that such stations would be really local request stops. As usage would be seen as primarily local, car parking would be limited. This would have various benefits, healthier lifestyle, less traffic and congestion etc.

Certainly from my position Halton’s Labour Party development schemes of building bridges which ultimately increases the volume of traffic, creating a Widnes town centre that’s one mega sized cark park, and promoting Halton as the HGV hub of the north west is not what our real priorities in relation to climate change, sustainability and health should be.

Its important that we consider what our real priorities ought to be. Improving public transport has a role to play here. There are obvious advantages as mentioned above. Climate change hasn’t gone away and we need to be doing everything we can to combat it.