Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

I was in Cardiff the weekend before last, and while I was walking through St David's Centre I saw a large group of students studying a large mural. I wondered what was causing so much excitement, so I decided to check it out for myself. This is what I found. (I know the photo isn't great, because I took it with my phone, but there's a reason for that.) It's a clever idea, isn't it? Grafting Cardiff and the suburbs onto the Tube map – that iconic piece of design which evolves as the network grows and changes – proves that someone at the South Wales Echo (where it originally appeared) has a sense of humour. Unfortunately, it had totally confused the youngsters. A couple of Chinese students were having a very animated discussion about it; a few West African girls were equally enthralled by the idea of the Barry John Line, the John Charles Line, and the Cardiff Arms Dart. I looked at it with them for a few minutes, took a couple of photos, and then turned to them and s...

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 h...

Yesterday, the UK Parliament began debating the construction of HS2, the proposed high-speed rail link which will initially connect London and Birmingham, and thence proceed to the north of England. Its progress through Westminster is set to be a convoluted journey – not unlike that of the trains themselves. So far, nobody has been able to come up with accurate costings for the project, and arguments about the route have raged since the proposals first saw the light of day. It's symptomatic of the way in which transport policy in this country has always been cobbled together. The line is currently set to slice through the Chiltern Hills, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty to the north-west of London. Householders in the area (and some Tory MPs, with an eye to their majorities) have objected to this alternative, and would prefer to see it buried out of sight. It would add to the cost, of course, but an extra few hundred million pounds on a multi- billion pound construction schem...