Its been confirmed that there will be resurfacing works in Wolverhampton City Centre from late May as work to open the West Midlands Metro extension to the Railway Station continues. Last month saw the first tram on the extension and further tests will take place before a planned for opening at some point in the spring.
The resurfacing works are due to take place on Pipers Row. Signs warning motorists of this work had said it would be between 15th and 19th May but the Express and Star report that it is now likely to take place at the end of the month (we know, very unlike this extension to be delayed with anything!).
A spokeswoman from the Midland Metro Alliance said: “We will be carrying out a short period of resurfacing works in Pipers Row following the completion of earlier drainage works. Signs were put in place to give advance notice of the activity taking place as per legal requirements; activity is now scheduled to begin from late May and updated signage/information will be shared in due course. The scheme is expected to open in the spring.”
Its also noted that work on the Wolverhampton Railway Station tramstop is now completed.
We wait news on an opening date.
Spring started at the end of March didnt it?
spring started 21st March until 20th June,
Summer starts 21st June.
At the end of all this, a process that began over fifteen years ago, what will we have? A few hundred metres of track that virtually doubles back on itself, with no hope of extension around Wolverhampton and that can be walked quicker than by waiting for/catching a tram. Its opening will be a triumph for nothing more than P.R. and will barely improve the transport situation as a whole. This is all we can look forward to in a country that treats innovative public transport as, at best, a joke, at worst as an insidious way of keeping people immobile, disconnected and disenfranchised. If there was a genuine desire for good public transport it would be a fully-funded centralised government policy, with planning for decades in advanced and with a genuine end-goal in sight. Instead we gets off-cuts of schemes, financially compromised, chewed up by committee, spat out and that’s when the PR machine gets to work, grooming it and building it up to be something genuinely game-changing when it’s nothing more than smoke and mirrors.