VANTAGE LEIGH-MANCHESTER BUSWAY

摘要

It has taken £68million and the best part of 20 years to deliver Vantage, the 14mile priority bus line connecting Leigh, Salford and Manchester, making use of a stretch of abandoned railway trackbed to achieve 55min off-peak end-to-end journeys with eight buses an hour on most of the route. It opened for business on 3 April. The 4.5mile busway between Leigh and Ellenbrook becomes the third double track kerb guided line in the country after the Cambridgeshire (16mile, two sections) and Luton-Dunstable (8.3mile) busways, both of which came after the much more modest investments in short, mainly single-track kerb guided track through perceived bottlenecks in Leeds, Bradford and Crawley. While this is by no means the end of new bus rapid transit (BRT) in the UK - major schemes are being built in Belfast and Bristol, the first Sprint line is planned for Birmingham, and Leeds awaits a final decision on its New Generation Transport trolleybus rapid transit line-this might be the last guided one to be built. Certainly, no others are either in build or appear to be close to being authorised.