Re: Re: Are we deluding ourselves?

@MrX wrote:

Well, there’s absolutely no reason why tramways shouldn’t be planned, the land reserved etc.

Land needs to be reserved for these kinds of things, so it’s absolutely essential that a city should plan them in aspirationally.

@Radioactiveman wrote:

I accept your point that it may be a long shot, but someone has to think big and aspire to something other than mediocrity.
…What should we put in a development plan?
…We have to look beyond the present gloom to something more aspirational.

i agree with both the above points, but to different degrees:

Reading the development plan, it clearly has aspirational aspects, and that is a good thing to have, but it is largely a practical guideline to what the city council would like to see happen in the city up to 2015.

Aspirations have to be informed by reality, and at the moment that includes budgets.
Practical plans have to be informed by vision and aspirations so that they fuel the imagination of the local population, architects, developers, planners and government to come up with buildings, parks and public transport and spaces that rise abouve “mediocrity”

My basic point is that a tramline is a realistic aspiration for a development plan up to perhaps 2020; Reserving the land for a tramline is a realistic plan for a development plan up to 2015.