If we’d have put the Talbot road tramline and tram station to a referendum who knows what the result would have been.
But there would have been strong voices both for and against.
Please go with my hypothetical analogy here and say we all voted. The outcome was a marginal win (52-48) so the tramline development went ahead.
Then let’s fast forward a few years and see the pain it’s caused with road closures and local businesses affected.
The diversions in place cause traffic jams and less foot fall to the shops on Talbot Road. Yet the council say they’re short-term problems and ask us to bear with them through this TraMsition period.
The tramline development is still not finished. If you asked the ones who voted against it they’ll now be even more fixed in their original position. They’ll point to the traffic chaos and the roadworks and disruption as if it’s the end of the world and proves they were right to vote against. They’ll complain about how they used to love shopping at Wilkinson’s and how their lives have been ruined as have the lives of their grandkids who would have loved to shop for stationery and cleaning products at Wilkinson’s in the decades to come. They will complain they used to park in that building above Wilkinson’s and now they have to park elsewhere and they have to get a new pass and use their Visa
(debit card to pay).
And to an extent their grumbles are genuine and understandable. It’s been crap stuck in traffic jams. It’s been a difficult couple of years.
BUT
When it’s finished we’ll have a transformed integrated transport network. It will be finished quite soon. It will be a major achievement in the modernisation of the town centre. It will make Blackpool greener. It will make the lives of shoppers, students, tourists, business folk and commuters more convenient. It will help attract new business into the town.
But the ones who wanted it to remain as it was still say it was ok as it was. Why change? It was a waste of money. We’ve upset stakeholders such as taxi drivers. We’ve turned out backs on them.
When the tram station opens and the digital ticketing system crashes and the tram signal box fails and blocks the line for an hour on a busy Saturday the nay sayers will pounce on this with glee. They’ll love it. They’ll use it to show they were right to vote against the tramline development. But in the end the teething problems will settle. They’ll come to see the benefits of how the town is flourishing as a result. They’ll even begin to use the tram themselves and they’ll pop into the tram station now and again cos they love the little quirky shops in there and the new Wilkinson’s local.
They can buy the grandkids a jotter pad and some pens for the new school term.
The traMsformation will be there for us to reap the rewards for decades and decades. The folk that come after us won’t appreciate or care about the times when we primarily drove into town, and they won’t care we were stuck in traffic jams. They’ll have a more modern improved life as we will have left it better for them as a result of our visionary decision (to vote for the tramline).
Hopefully by now you’ll have drawn parallels with Brexit. It’s daft to keep obsessing about anything and everything you can spin, or rightly point to, as a failure or adverse consequence of Brexit. It’s not really significant. What matters is the longer term. Surely it’s time to move forward with positivity and to embrace the future rather than resist the inevitable. It’s only right to shake the hand of the opponent after you’ve been knocked out rather than show yourself to be a bad sport and claim it was an unfair contest.
Fury is wearing his belt.
The tramline and Station are being readied.
Brexit is irreversible.
Let’s move on together. The future is bright. The future is tangerine.