25 January 2019
Trams could once again travel the streets of Norwich following a motion which is to be put to the city council on Tuesday.
Councillor David Raby will recommend, at a meeting of the full council, that Norwich brings back trams which are currently very popular in other British cities such as Manchester and Nottingham.
Councillor Raby said:
“Having used trams in this and other countries, I’d love to see such a clean, efficient and affordable system available for the people of Norwich. Norwich had trams from 1900 to 1935. Some evidence remains of them in the names and shapes of our streets.
“We need to invest in cleaner transport systems, particularly in the centres of cities where air quality is getting worse.”
Notes:
Councillor Raby will propose the following motion at a meeting of Norwich City Council on 29th January 2019:
“Norwich’s 2040 Vision sees the City as a “connected” City “having a clean, affordable, integrated transport system”. The Transforming Cities vision includes more efficient and more sustainable system of public transport for the Greater Norwich area. Plans for new homes and jobs in the city also require additional means of transportation for residents. Trams and light rail transport (LRT) systems are efficient, clean, comfortable and reliable, and growing numbers of cities in the UK and beyond have or are considering tram or LRT systems. In Germany, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere several cities the size of Norwich or even smaller have such systems. Conversely, in the UK, the government’s approach to the funding and delivery of public transport infrastructure makes it very hard for a City the size of Norwich to have a viable Tram of LRT system. For this reason, the Transforming Cities initiative was anchored on delivering improvements to bus infrastructure to deliver the vision of a connected Norwich. However, we believe that a Tram or LRT system could be a key part of an integrated transport system which delivers this vision for Norwich and that national government should actively support such initiatives in ways that would make them viable in urban areas the size of Norwich.
This Council therefore RESOLVES to:-
(1) Ask the Greater Norwich Development Partnership to press for amendments to national regimes to enable tram or LRT systems to be more realistically considered as a transport for the future development of Norwich; and
(2) To;
a) ask the Local Enterprise Partnership and the Region’s MP’s to lend their support to such an initiative; and
b) lobby national government to provide support to the development of Tram and LRT systems to improve their viability and enable urban areas the size of Norwich to deliver them.”
