Pretentious? Moi?

Miss Piggy (and indeed Sybil Fawlty) used the term “Pretentious, moi?”...

Last month, Nottingham council was the first unitary authority to join the P.T.E.G. This stands for the Passenger Transport Executive Group hitherto reserved for England’s larger metropolitan areas such as West Yorkshire Metro, Liverpool Merseytravel & Greater Manchester (plus observers TfL, Strathclyde, Scotland and now Nottingham).

The P.T.E.G., perhaps pretentiously, likes to call itself by the single word acronym pteg (always italicised and fashionably with a small “p”). The P.T.E.G. prefers to pronounce itself as puh-TEG, emphasis on the TEG. Hmmm. Perhaps pteg is English’s millionth word (a world-wide story of dubious worth that emerged last Wednesday about the growing number of words in the language).

Why would Nottingham wish to join the big boys? Well, Nottingham is seeing both public transport growth and innovation in an environment that is quite literally very colourful. Though the city population is relatively small, greater Nottingham is apparently the seventh largest urban area in Britain. Perhaps greater Nottingham even has aspirations to become a new Integrated Transport Authority as allowed under the Local Transport Act 2008.

And it has a tram. Large conurbation transport executives in P.T.E.G. love trams.

Nottingham looks set to learn from the professional networks within P.T.E.G. And having Nottingham alongside its full members will strengthen P.T.E.G.’s belief that it is central to the English urban transport planning policy debate.

Perhaps like The Muppets’ Miss Piggy, Nottingham is convinced it’s destined for stardom. And, again like Miss P, there ain’t nothin’ that’s gonna stand in their way.

i P.T.E.G. website