Newcastle’s economy is losing £1.7bn a year because of poor public transport and badly planned neighbourhoods, a new study claims.
The research by the Centre for Cities group says that more than four million people living around the Northern cities of Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Liverpool are unable to travel to their city centres via public transport within 30 minutes, restricting them from employment and education opportunities. Only around a third of people in Northern urban areas are well connected to city centres, half the levels of European cities such as Hamburg, Marseille and Bilbao.
Newcastle outperforms Northern counterparts in terms of connectivity, with 46% of residents able to reach the city centre in 30 minutes or less, but that is still well below the similarly-sized French city of Lille, where 70% of people can. The research shines a light on two of the key pledges in the Government’s recent Levelling Up White Paper that it will create a “globally competitive city” in every region of the UK, as well as aspirations to bring public transport systems around the country closer to the standards of services in London.
