Over the years since TAS started monitoring the development of rapid transit schemes, there have been several swings of the pendulum. In the very early 1990s, there was an upsurge of interest, with feasibility studies undertaken in as many as 40 towns and cities around the UK. 

As might have been expected, many of these quickly concluded that there was little prospect of a viable scheme being developed – but others went ahead: much time, effort and funding were devoted to their development.

In the early 1990s, though, authorites became shorter and shorter of money as a result of the recession and the crisis in local government funding that followed the poll tax debacle. As a result, the flow of studies dried up. At the same time, several high-profile projects were dropped, even though they had reached quite advanced stages of development – places like Chester, Cleveland and Edinburgh, not to mention the somewhat tourtuous (and tortured) history of the plans for Avon.  

Nevertheless, some schemes were getting through, and being implemented, from the mid 1980s onwards. Thus, we had Docklands Light Railway, Manchester Metrolink, Sheffield Supertram, Midland Metro, Croydon Tramlink and Nottingham Express Transit. In parallel, we had guided busway developments ranging from the first small scheme in Ipswich to the two Leeds projects.

With the election of New Labour in 1997 and John Prescott’s arrival at the brand new Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions, there was a surge of optimism: we had a pro-public transport government in Whitehall which believed in fighting congestion in a serious and co-ordinated manner. “Surely, it was very heaven to be alive”?

Well, as we now know, that all ended in tears, and in fairly short order too. A Downing Street policy unit paranoid about being perceived to be anti-car, a Deputy Prime Minister who didn’t like trams, having been convinced by the Treasury that they were a waste of money, and finally the fuel tax protest in 2000;  that really frightened the government, especially when it put Tory leader William Hague ahead in the polls for the first and only time in his career as Opposition Leader.

But then the pendulum swung back again. From a 1998 White Paper which poured scorn on light rail as a solution, we moved to the Ten Year Transport Plan in 2001. Prescott had enjoyed a conversion on the road to Damascus (well, Croydon actually), and had been wrong, he said (another unique occasion, the cynics remarked: a politician who admitted a change of mind). Trams did have a role, after all: and to prove it, the plan promised “up to 25″ new lines by 2010. All we scribblers scrabbled around in our databases and worked out which 25 schemes were in, or could be got into, shape for implementation within the ten-year time horizon. It was a struggle, actually, but I for one thought I could identify an appropriate number.

Work on the tendering round duly got under way, but then things started to go awry – this time, sentiment in the private sector changed, largely as a result of financial problems on the new systems.  Whereas Metrolink was a triumph, doubling the market it inherited from the rail lines it repalced in five years, other new schemes were less successful. Sheffield in particular was a financial and market disaster in its early years – thanks to a combination of circumstances around loss of demand, property demolition and the failure of the scheme to deliver the planned speed frequency or fares.

This was followed by Midland Metro – another dog, and then Metrolink’s second line to Salford Quays and Eccles – a slow, torotuous route with a relatively infrequent service – hardly another triumph for steel wheels.

Then came Croydon, scene of Mr Prescott’s conversion, as he was dazzled by the high profile project. Here, too, the original forecasts were derailed – leaving revenue well short of the levels envisaged. Again, it was possible to identify what had gone wrong: LT’s insistence on a 28% fare premium over parallel bus services virtually doomed the system to commercial difficulty even before it opened. This was coupled with a failure to recast the bus network as planned, and much lower levels of concessionary fare reimbursement than envisaged.

All understandable, all fixable: but it did not stop the equity investors in the scheme losing their shirts – and the entire enterprise came pretty close to going under at one stage.

It also became known that construction contractors had lost money on fixed term contracts, and so the private sector began to price their risk properly. By doing so, they priced the systems procured under the franchise model out of the market. As a consequences, schemes to extend the Manchester system and build new lines in Leeds and Liverpool were all refused funding by the Government, as bidders put the price up to reflect the risks they were being asked to take.

That is where we were in 2006. Then things began to turn again: a deal was done to permit some of the extensions to Metrolink in Manchester to proceed – as well as urgent works needed to refurbish the existing system and provide more capacity. After years of prevarication, the full refurbishment of Blackpool’s ailing tramway has also been given the go ahead (partly as a consolation prize for the casino, one suspects, and also because of the implications of saying no: would you want to be saddled with the tag of being the minister who closed Blackpool tramway?).

As we sail into the new era of the Transport Innovation Fund, the plans for Merseyside are once again being revived – and Midland Metro’s extensions are alsio nearing the crunch point.

Could it just be that the pendulum has swung again?  Watch this space!