Mayor announces major overhaul of Transport in Greater Manchester

Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham

A major overhaul of transport, beginning in 2018, has been announced by the Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham - outlining his ambition to deliver a safe, reliable, affordable and fully integrated high capacity transport network, with customers at its heart.

The Mayor said: “The public are telling me that things can’t carry on the way they are. Our trains are packed-out and clapped-out. Our buses are confusing and over-priced. And Northern cities don’t have the power to make sense of the chaos and integrate it all.

“The North has been treated as second-class over many years when it comes to transport investment, but that only tells part of the story. Our road, rail and bus services are not only poor individually, they can’t be properly integrated due to an inconsistent national policy framework in which they operate.

“We cannot have a transport system where different modes of transport operate completely independently from each other or, worse, actively competing and undermining each other as we have seen with bus operators and Metrolink.

“It lacks coherence, it’s confusing for passengers, and it doesn’t deliver for a growing 21st century city-region. It is time to bring some order to this chaos.”

In his speech, the Mayor outlined plans to:

• Establish a Mayor’s Strategic Transport Board, which he will Chair with Sir Richard Leese. The board will be asked to provide regular updates on performance, monitor progress on improvements, and ensure decisions are made in a joined-up way.
• Make Greater Manchester the first city region to use new powers to improve bus services
• Introduce contactless bank card payment on Metrolink in late 2018
• Ensure train operators do more to compensate commuters for poor service 
• In Greater Manchester, work is already well under way to explore the new options available to mayoral combined authorities in the Bus Services Act 2017. Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) is currently preparing an assessment of a bus franchising scheme on behalf of Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA).