Following Rhys's comment, in Nantes, France (and several other major provincial French cities, tramlines have been built (and these systems are still being extended) - I think Germany also - and these lines often end in suburban centres, usually a 'centre commercial' comprising a large supermarket, eg LeClerc and a large parade of some 20 to 50 other shops, the sort in most o-o-t shopping centres, clothes, a pharmacy, electrnics etc. Sometimes the line ends at a major sports complex. The suburban tramstops (these lines go right to the urban edge of Nantes) have stimulated considerable urban development for up to 1 kilometre around.
In the UK several provincial cities do have fairly extensive tram or light rail systems, going some way out, eg Newcastle on Tyne, Liverpool, Manchester - these have largely taken over abandoned British rail track. Glasgow's is far less extensive. Nottingham has a system still being built (or maybe finished by now, havent been there for 2 years), goes 3 or 4 miles out from the centre. In the 'burbs of south London, another largely old-BR system has been built, but also with a lot of new on-street rail, linking the major suburban centre of Croydon, 80% of the way out from the centre to urban edge, with other suburbs, out to Wimbledon and Bromley. So the Uk is getting there, but not as fast as other EU countries.
However these systems still take energy to run, electricity, but how / where is that generated? In the UK, renewable elctricity is still a small proportion of the whole, and as more wind farms are built, NIMBY opposition to them grows. There was even a recent story in the UK over prisoners who succesfully opposed a nearby wind farm as the rotating blades generated a flickering effect in their cells, and interfered with their TV reception. 'If you can't stand the windfarm, don't do the crime'.
So these light rail systems are of course an enourmous advance environmentally over cars, but as the energy price rises, their fares are lilely to rise, especially if they are run by private companies rather than government, and again the poor left in unsustainable suburbs will suffer the most.
In the UK a lot of 'near-inner-suburbs' stand derelict. These are the burbs some 1 to 2 miles out from the centre - too far out for succesful gentrification, and with old decaying housing stock, but these areas are more sustainable for an urban lifestyle than burbs 10 miles out or more. People dont want to live there for social reasons such as high crime, noisy neighbours, non-existent social networks, mobile rented housing populations, poor shops, and often paradoxically worse transport conections than burbs further out - buses to places further out may be limited stop, inner urban train stations have closed, and local inner buses may be on convoluted routes round a maze of anti rat run road blocks.
The key to getting people closer in is a major social improvement of the areas people now shun. This would also free up a lot of housing (Newcastle has whole streets, whole neighbourhoods even, of totally empty housing, awaiting demolition and replacement by nothing more than open space, which will soon become unkempt, whilst they are urbanising rural areas further out), and take a lot of the heat out of the UK housing market. But then maybe falling house prices would make us 'feel' (not in reality) poorer, and think of all those older persons moving into nursing homes who would then have less of an asset for the govt to take to pay for their long-term care. That wouldn't do at all, would it?
Hillary Shaw, Geography, University of Southampton
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