Suggestion Box

I was reading the Wales on Sunday when I came across an item about the Plaid Cymru conference in Llangollen. The party's leader, Leanne Wood, had given her keynote speech, and among the topics she covered the South Wales Metro got a mention.

Leanne and I discussed this briefly at a public meeting in Mountain Ash, back in the early spring. She'd come up to talk about the party and outline its vision for the future shape of Wales. During the Q&A session afterwards, I put my hand up . Cerith Griffiths, our former Westminster candidate and (at the time) Assembly candidate, spotted me and invited me to speak.

I started off by saying, 'I'm sure there'd be a lot more people here tonight if every bus in the Cynon Valley didn't disappear at six o'clock.'

That got a laugh from everyone, so it was a good start.

I went on to outline the plight of people working outside the Cynon Valley, arriving back in Aberdare or Mountain Ash in the Twilight Zone, and then having to either walk several miles to get home, or try to arrange for family members to meet them every night, or fork out huge amounts of money for a taxi – which also tend to vanish once the daytime peak is over.

(Just last night, in fact, I watched the pool team from one of my local pubs fail spectacularly to get a cab for an away game. The guv'nor ended phoning a pal of his to take them to Miskin, at the lower end of Mountain Ash, and arranging for him to pick them back up afterwards. During the day, you can't move in town for taxis. It's another example of the crazy inversion of supply and demand we see throughout the Valleys.)

Anyway, I went on to talk about the Metro proposals. I gave the meeting my take (which I've written about at length), that focusing on Cardiff initially is putting the cart before the horse. Cardiff already has an adequate public transport feeding into the city centre. Some of the suburbs could do with more provision, and certainly we need more capacity throughout the network as a whole, but that isn't the point. The real shortfall is in the Valleys, as I've said on several occasions.

It's impossible to travel from Aberdare to Merthyr Tydfil (the nearest large town and the home of one of the area's largest employers, Prince Charles Hospital) by public transport before 7.00 a.m., after 6.30 p.m., or in any meaningful fashion on a Sunday. When the other large employers are moving out of town as well (such as the supermarkets, all the big retailers at Cyfartha Retail Park, the new Dunelm store at Upper Boat, to name a few outstanding examples), people have no alternative but to take the car. And when you're on a zero hours contract and/or on the minimum (sorry 'living') wage, how the hell can you afford to run a car?

Which brings me back to the public meeting, and my discussion with Leanne. I sketched out in words my vision of the network: a fast link using the old tunnel between Aberdare and Merthyr Tydfil, which would be reasonably weatherproof (as the Heads of the Valleys Road always gets hit hard in the winter); a new light rail route between the Taff Vale branch line at Treforest and the Great Western main line at Pontyclun, with connections to Church Village, the Royal Glamorgan Hospital, Beddau and Old Llantrisant; a LR to tie the Taff Vale and Rhymney Valley branches together via Abercynon, Nelson and Ystrad Mynach; a continuation through Pontllanfraith to Blackwood, which is already a hub for the Eastern Valleys; from there it's a short hop to the main line at Cwmbran.

Further north, a whole new line would connect the towns at the Heads of the Valleys (Hirwaun, Merthyr, Tredegar, Ebbw Vale, Brynmawr) to the Vale of Neath and thereafter to Swansea.

So far, that's pretty much what the Metro scheme has proposed. But, as I said in Mountain Ash, we need to start at this end – allowing the discrete Valleys communities to have dependable, all-day physical connections which wouldn't be at the mercy of the weather, or vulnerable to a single car accident at a key roundabout. Afterwards, when all those connections are in place, we can worry about tying the whole thing into Cardiff.

Yes, certainly, many thousands of people travel into Cardiff every day, to work or study, or just for leisure; but many thousands of people also don't. Instead, they work, study, shop, visit hospitals or visit family and friends across the Valleys. This gives rise to huge numbers of private cars and crowded fleets of little buses, tackling steep hills and narrow roads which were never designed for this volume of traffic.

Leanne agreed with much of what I'd said. She lives in Penygraig, near Tonypandy in the Rhondda Fawr Valley, and told us that when she was first elected to the Assembly, she used to drive to Cardiff Bay. After a few years of huge tailbacks on the A470, she got fed up and switched to the train. It's now taking her longer to get to the Bay than it had in the first place. I think everyone could see the absurdity of the situation once we'd discussed it in detail.

Anyway, I was heartened to read the coverage of Leanne's speech, in which she made exactly the same point I had:

[W]e have said planned infrastructure projects should begin in the areas needing the investment the most. Metro and City Deal projects planned for the south and the north should not start at the cities, they should start at the points furthest away from the big towns and cities.

Maybe I should have been a politician or a transport engineer after all …