NOW that at long last Liverpool's tram fantasy is completely dead everybody can start to re-inhabit the real world. I heard a tale recently about how the boss of a European transport group visited the city to give serious consideration to operating the city's proposed tram scheme. He drove along the planned routes, but what he saw disappointed him. He concluded there was not enough activity to justify the investment. He pulled out the next day. Nor was this transport boss the only one to conclude that the scheme wouldn't work. Peter Stoney, an eminent academic at the University of Liverpool, said all along that the scheme amounted to wasteful duplication of transport provision. In the case of route 1, which was to link Kirkby with the city centre, it would have been wasteful triplication because as well as frequent bus services, Kirkby is well served by trains. The fact that nobody was prepared to comprehensively underwrite possible cost overruns on the scheme is further evidence that its economic viability was only ever marginal at best. Now that the final nail has been planted in the coffin of the project, it is necessary to rewrite the whole strategy for transport between Liverpool city centre and the suburbs. This represents an opportunity to do some fresh thinking. But I would suggest that before we can have fresh thinking, we will need to find fresh thinkers. Those that were so wrapped up with the tram scheme are not the best people to tackle the new challenge. Once completed, the three tram lines were meant to bring in 60% of shoppers to the new shops at Liverpool One, Grosvenor's £900m scheme. Now that there are to be no trams people are flapping about how to move this number of people instead. I think a fresh pair of eyes looking at Liverpool for the first time would point to obvious factors that might alleviate this worry. First, many buses coming into the city are under-utilised. There is a lot of spare capacity on existing public transport provision. Second, Big Dig aside, Liverpool is not a congested city. Except for a few routes at rush hour, our streets are not clogged up by cars. This last fact offers Liverpool a major competitive advantage that the local authority seems oblivious to. Shoppers and commuters alike don't want to use public transport or park and ride schemes. Instead they want to park their cars within a short walk of the shops. if we can provide hassle-free parking, shoppers will come to Liverpool rather than travel to the Trafford Centre or Manchester city centre. But the last thing the people who run our public transport system will be arguing is that we should rely more on private transport because that would put them out of a job. The one bit of public transport infrastructure the region does need is direct rail links to Liverpool airport. The money that has been saved on the trams could be used to build a mile-and-a-half heavy rail link between the proposed Liverpool South Parkway rail hub and John Lennon Airport. Most train operators plan to use Parkway. As well as Liverpool city centre, such an extension would provide a fast link to Manchester city centre and Yorkshire. It takes 18 minutes to travel by train between St Albans and London's Kings Cross. It's a similar distance between Liverpool and Manchester, yet it takes 50 minutes to travel by train between the two cities. Why does it have to be so slow? If the transport authority paid attention to the needs of consumers, the tram scheme would never have been proposed, the airport link would be built and it would take a lot less time to get to Manchester. | 
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