The first I knew about Connecting Leeds was an email I received on the 19th June 2018 inviting me to attend the launch of a “bus consultation” called Connecting Leeds. It sounded harmless and so I decided not to attend as I was busy. I next heard Connecting Leeds mentioned several weeks later at a community group meeting where someone said they’d seen on the Connecting Leeds website that the scheme involved banning right turns at Hyde Park Corner. This didn’t sound like a bus consultation. When I got home I took a look at the Connecting Leeds website. I found I could only access the details of the scheme by clicking on “Have Your Say.” When I did this, I found that Connecting Leeds isn’t a bus consultation at all. It’s about widening the A660 from Adel to Leeds by taking away grass verges and pavements. The scheme contains many of the proposals that were part of the trolleybus scheme. And just like the trolleybus scheme, Connecting Leeds is sponsored by Leeds City Council and Metro.

In so far as the scheme affected Woodhouse Moor and its environs, its proposals included the following:

• Removal of an unspecified amount of the grass verge adjacent to the inbound lane of the A660 across Woodhouse Moor to create a wider road.
• Removal of all the York stone pavement adjacent to the outbound lane across Woodhouse Moor to create a wider road.
• Extending the bus lay-by at Raglan Road backwards by an un-specified amount to create a “bus only” lane. This was first attempted by Highways in 2008 but was dropped in 2009. The proposal re-surfaced in 2012 as one of two possible routes for the trolleybus. The other route (which was ultimately adopted as the preferred route) was across Monument Moor itself.
• Banning the right turn from Woodhouse Street onto Headingley Lane, and the right turn from Hyde Park Road onto Woodhouse Lane, and diverting all this traffic onto Cliff Road. This would have turned the elegant parade of shops called “The Crescent” into a traffic roundabout.
• Removal of the central reservation, which would have involved relocating the central reservation’s streetlights onto the sides of the road. This would have entailed severe cutting back of the trees at the sides of the road as otherwise the trees would have blocked the light from the street lights.
• The cutting down of several mature trees adjacent to the inbound bus stop at Hyde Park Corner.
• “Altering” the junction of Headingley Lane with Victoria Road (presumably “altering” means demolishing shops. Metro owns the shops).

The deadline for commenting on the scheme was the 3rd August 2018. By that date, the council’s Highways Department had received 71 fully completed official consultation forms. These 71 forms contained 213 comments on each of the following two sections of route: “Headingley Lane between Grosvenor Road and Woodhouse Moor,” and “Woodhouse Lane between Hyde Park Corner and Clarendon Road.” Of the total 213 comments, 210 were opposed to each of the two proposals (making a total of 420 negative comments). Because the number of online comments was relatively small, this meant that by far the majority of comments were opposed to the proposals.

On the 26th September 2018, a reply to a Freedom of Information Request informed me that Connecting Leeds had had 9 meetings with the Leeds Cycling Campaign group and two meetings with Leeds Civic Trust. There had been NO meetings with local community groups.

In September 2017, Insider Media published an article which stated that Leeds City Council had appointed consultants WSP as the development partner for Connecting Leeds. The article quoted Adrian Hames, director at WSP, as saying: “This is a significant win for WSP as it brings together public and private sector clients to deliver a major infrastructure project.” The article also stated that the £173.5 million allocated by the government towards the project, was likely to be supplemented by about £100 million in private investment. Of the total £250 million that would have been spent on the trolleybus scheme, £32 million was allocated towards the cost of consultants. The Insider Media article did not mention how much money WSP was charging the council and Metro for its services.

Since 1937, Leeds City Council’s Highways Department has come up with numerous schemes that would have radically altered the A660. The most recent of these was the trolleybus scheme. The regurgitation of many of the trolleybus proposals in the form of Connecting Leeds, proves that the trolleybus inspector was right when following the conclusion of the £2.6 million public inquiry, he said at paragraph 9.60 of his 12 May 2016 report:

“I can understand that, given the level of expenditure, time and resources that have already been spent on the existing northern corridor, particularly with respect to the Supertram, and the use of trolley vehicles, the Applicants would be reluctant to commit themselves to other corridors or forms of public transport.”