[category]
[title]
Right now, if you want to get from one side of Hertfordshire to the other via public transport, it can take you as long as three hours. Often commuters will cut the time by getting the train into London then travelling back out again. Surely, there’s another way? Well, the local council has been looking into it, and it reckons it has the answer.
Hertfordshire County council has unveiled its vision for a trackless tram network that would through the county and into Essex and drastically cut the travel time to less than an hour. A trackless tram is essentially an electric bus that has the appearance of a tram. It has been dubbed the Hertfordshire Essex Rapid Transit (HERT) and officials say it’s the ‘transport system of the future’.
The council says that the proposed rapid network would be ‘more flexible, less expensive and quicker to deliver’ than alternative options such as bus rapid transit, heavy rail or light rail. It would run from Harlow to Hemel Hempstead via Gilston, Hertford, Hatfield and St Albans, with rail connections at all the hubs except Gilston and with a spur running from St Albans to Croxley.
Like London’s tube network, councillors want to create a system where services are frequent enough that passengers can ‘just turn up’ and don’t have to worry about a schedule. The ambition would be for services to run along the main spine of the HERT every 10 minutes.
Cllr Paul Zukowskyj told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: ‘There's a clear deficit in public transport for east-west travel across Hertfordshire. And rather than allowing private bus companies to take commercial decisions to decide where routes are going to run, we are looking at trying to design a network that is more fit-for-purpose, more coherent and more structured’.
The bad news is that commuters will have to wait a pretty long time before HERT becomes a reality, if it even happens. Given the scale of the proposal, Cllr Zukowskyj estimates that it could cost in excess of £2bn and could take until 2040 to be fully complete as it ‘requires is a lot of bits to be joined up across the route’ and ‘those bits will come forward at different times’.
Stay in the loop: sign up to our free Time Out UK newsletter for the latest UK news and the best stuff happening across the country.