by JdeBP | 2025-06-08 14:16:21+00:00
Since there are going to be a lot of people who don't even know England, let alone Coventry:

Coventry is, like many cities in the U.K., burdened with road systems that in some places go back to mediæval times. Yes, the Nazis did famously bomb the city centre, but there are some parts of the mediæval city remaining, and much of the outskirts of the city is where it has expanded since World War 1 to swallow what once were standalone villages like Walsgrave and Stoke that dated back to the times of the Domesday Book. Much of the street systems are the old country roads through those villages, augmented by housing estates built around them. So Coventry does not have a wide and regular street system. There is no grid, Norteamericanos!

There are only a handful of dual carriageways for major arterials. Some of the rest is quite cramped, and the ring-road, an early experiment in U.K. post-WW2 reconstruction that basically taught the U.K. how not to build inner city ring-roads, is a massive barrier to any public transport system. The ring-road was some years back significantly re-built just to make the railway station better accessible, whose entrance is on the ring road.

Coventry is actually fairly well served with bus services, to and from nearby Warwickshire and Solihull, and within Coventry itself. There is a significant electric bus network already in place for some years, and Coventry has been more proactive in moving buses from diesel to electric than those other two have, although they too are gradually replacing the old diesels. Stand at the bus stands on Trinity Street in the city centre, and you'll see mostly electric buses go by.

The ironic thing of this project being placed where it is (aside from the amusing fact that the tram route is literally a route to nowhere, as Queen Victoria Road was blocked off in the mid-20th century when the ring road was constructed and is now a dead-end) is that to construct it they had to divert many of the bus services, since Greyfriars Road is one of the routes to and from the main city centre bus terminus.

Coventry has been quite experimental in recent years when it comes to transport design. Aside from hacking the ring road about, it has experimented with things like converting many of the street intersections around Coventry University (not to be confused with Warwick University, a partner in the headlined project) into shared space intersections.

Would this actually work as a general transport system in Coventry as whole? Almost certainly not. A light rail system from, say, the Coventry Arena to anywhere useful elsewhere in the city would bedevil Jimmy Hill Way. That's why there's a commercial centre right next to the Arena in the first place. In the outskirts of the city the Hipswell Highway and routes like St James Lane/Willenhall Lane and the Holyhead Road are major thoroughfares but some are already down to 1 lane wide in places. And the idea of running a tramway along Radford Road or the Foleshill Road is sheer lunacy to anyone who has seen those roads.

The scope of any tram system is almost certainly physically confined to the old city, and maybe the A4600 and A428. But the old city is actually walkable. The places where public transport is needed is the arterials like the Holyhead Road, already well served by buses. Cynically I expect that much of this is about selling this system to other cities.

And indeed, the partnership with Dudley Council is strongly indicative that this is mainly using Coventry as a staging area for development that will be, if it takes off, more in the rest of the West Midlands than in Coventry itself. There is, physically, more scope for this sort of thing in the road systems of Walsall, Wolverhampton, Dudley, West Bromwich, Wednesbury, Great Barr, et al. than there is in Coventry. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one councillor is being sold the line that this is really to sell it to other cities around the world.