Took a little Day 1 trip on the central section of the Elizabeth Line in my lunch hour. Wow. Really incredible. It even smells new. Next time I will take the crazy funicular style lift at Liverpool Street. With interchanges at Farringdon and Whitechapel both providing access to our patch of SE London, this will be our new way of getting to the West End. It was worth the wait.
Took a little Day 1 trip on the central section of the Elizabeth Line in my lunch hour. Wow. Really incredible. It even smells new. Next time I will take the crazy funicular style lift at Liverpool Street. With interchanges at Farringdon and Whitechapel both providing access to our patch of SE London, this will be our new way of getting to the West End. It was worth the wait.
No spoliers!!!
I'm making a shellfish strategic decision to delay my trip until tomorrow!
Daniel Hewitt @DanielHewittITV · 16m NEW: Head of Ofgem says he will be writing to Rishi Sunak today to inform him the price cap is expected to be £2,800 in October, up from £1,971.
The government is going to be so unpopular when that kicks in.
I am in the car listening to "You and yours" on R4 as I have my socially distanced lunch. There are tearful PENSIONERS who are cancelling direct debits and have turned off the heating since Christmas, people living in single rooms, people considering selling their homes and people renting out spare rooms to pay for non- energy essentials. This looks like, as you might suggest, "Stepmom" territory.
So what's the solution? Because as far as I can see the wholesale price of gas is outside the ability of government to influence. The state could subsidise it, but then the state would have to massively increase taxation to pay for it.
Of course, the solution is to have built a bunch of tidal lagoons five years ago. And we should still do that. But that doesn't really help right now.
That's not my problem. Or that of the opposition parties.
Incumbency can be a bit of a b******!
Cynically honest, but entirely truthful.
A Conservative solution might have been to cut taxes, so that people would have more of their take home pay to spend on the rising bills. Instead Rishi and Boris chose to tax and spend, raising taxes even further and using Gordon Brown's preferred tax to do so.
They didn't cause the inflation, but they are making matters worse for working people by raising taxes in order to featherbed the inheritances of those who aren't working for it.
They maxed out the credit card but didn't fix the roof while the sun was shining and so Labour are going to have to clear up the mess. As per.
Nice trolling attempt but of course Osborne did fix the roof, also Hammond whom I didn't like for other reasons also continued Osborne's repairs and for that he deserves credit.
In the final pre-pandemic year of 2019 we had the deficit coming down yet to the the best fiscal position of the UK had seen 2002. This is nothing like Brown turning on the spending taps like a reckless hooligan maxing out the credit card by 2007.
La di da. Talk to the hand basically.
Next thing it'll be "It started in Wuhan" or "It's a GLOBAL Crisis".
Daniel Hewitt @DanielHewittITV · 16m NEW: Head of Ofgem says he will be writing to Rishi Sunak today to inform him the price cap is expected to be £2,800 in October, up from £1,971.
The government is going to be so unpopular when that kicks in.
Indeed… but, to be honest, I remain unclear why a right-wing Conservative government beloved of libertarians even got to a point where they felt that the state should set the price of a commodity.
This is a socialist government, high taxes, high spending, price caps, and a windfall tax looming.
I’m fully expecting rent controls.
And I'm fully expecting some loyalists (not naming names) to try to justify them too.
The sooner Boris is out of office, the better.
But is all this what TSE calls good old fashioned 60s/70s Labour government policies because Boris and his ministers believes in it, believes the country needs high tax high spend - or because of absence of direction and values and ideas in this government? Lady Thatcher and her governments believed in stuff, they had very clear ideas and plans going forward. I disagree with what TSE implies, I don’t think it’s clear Boris believes in the socialism of his government, he just doesn’t believe or understand enough in what the Conservative Party has always stood for. From that point of view he’s never been a fit leader, to beat Corbyn in a one off and then crash, political boom and bust, is not the measurement, you need to have enduring values as foundation to keep on winning.
Boris is basically a Brexity Heseltine as he said himself. This government is essentially New Labour plus Brexit, it is not Thatcherite no but neither is it socialist
It's socialism for the old and a Thatcherite dystopia - but now thanks to Brexit with no means of escape - for anyone under 40.
Even as a figure of speech it's ridiculous to say that there is "no means of escape" because of Brexit. Do you think every country in the world outside the EU is like East Germany?
Daniel Hewitt @DanielHewittITV · 16m NEW: Head of Ofgem says he will be writing to Rishi Sunak today to inform him the price cap is expected to be £2,800 in October, up from £1,971.
The government is going to be so unpopular when that kicks in.
I am in the car listening to "You and yours" on R4 as I have my socially distanced lunch. There are tearful PENSIONERS who are cancelling direct debits and have turned off the heating since Christmas, people living in single rooms, people considering selling their homes and people renting out spare rooms to pay for non- energy essentials. This looks like, as you might suggest, "Stepmom" territory.
So what's the solution? Because as far as I can see the wholesale price of gas is outside the ability of government to influence. The state could subsidise it, but then the state would have to massively increase taxation to pay for it.
Of course, the solution is to have built a bunch of tidal lagoons five years ago. And we should still do that. But that doesn't really help right now.
That's not my problem. Or that of the opposition parties.
Incumbency can be a bit of a b******!
Well, no, but it would be nice if somebody would come up with a solution other than 'the government must do something'. @RochdalePioneers , @Nigelb and @noneoftheabove have all put forward potential ideas. I don't know how workable any of them are but at least they are all something - grateful to all for the thoughts.
Tottenham Court Road to Paddington in FIVE minutes
Farringdon to Canary Wharf: ten minutes
Heathrow to anywhere in central London: thirty minutes, 44 minutes to Canary Wharf
Game-changer for a lot of places along the line
More money spunked on London and the South East while the rest of the nation gets nothing.
Au contraire. We get massive bus cuts.
Rest of the country needs to stop voting Tory if they don't want that kind of thing to happen to them.
Well New Labour gave us sweet FA too in terms of transport investment. Both HS2 and Crossrail started under their watch as well. Money lavished on the south east and London.
Government net support for bus travel in England outside London in real terms (2020/21 prices) rose from £1.02bn in 1996/97 to £1.89bn in 2009/10. By 2019/20 it had fallen back to £1.35bn. So Tory governments = "massive bus cuts" outside of London. Yet these areas keep voting Tory. Data from www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/bus05-subsidies-and-concessions; BUS0502, tab BUS0502b.
That's because most people outside London (and perhaps a few other big cities) never use buses.
Because there aren't any busses.
Nah. There are plenty of buses where I live. There's also a direct train from 5 minutes walk from my front door to 5 minutes walk from my wife's workplace - and it's still better to drive.
Serious question, why is it better to drive.
What's the train journey time and frequency of service?
I suspect I know the answer but it's best to have it confirmed.
2 tph in the peak but not every 30 minutes, 1 tph off-peak. Takes about 20 minutes.
Buses are about every 5 minutes but obviously much slower, journey time up to an hour in the peak.
Thought it would be - that's the typical story of too slow compared to driving (bus) and a too infrequent train service...
Even if there was a train every 15 minutes it would still be better to drive. Cheaper, for one thing.
That's a function of the way you pay for driving.
You pay a huge upfront cost to have a car, and several large costs each year to continue to own one - but once you do that, the costs per mile are pretty low. Whereas the costs to you personally of having public transport available are very low, but the costs per mile of making a journey are high.
If this is seen as a problem there are solutions, but they require more of a remodelling of behaviours than most people are prepared to make. (Our family wouldn't need to own two cars - what a waste of assets! - if we could be reasonably sure one would be available to use when we wanted. The cost per mile could be high, but the overall cost of motoring would still be lower - but the motivation to use non-car modes when we could, like, for 800m trips to One Stop to buy milk, would be there. We'd be better off, public transport would be more viable and therefore more plentiful and therefore more attractive, the planet would be cleaner. But we'd have to stop using the boot of the car as a shed for things-without-permanent-homes.)
A couple of decades ago I worked on a project for the DfT. I developed the road routing portion of their transport portal. The basic idea being you would put in origin and destination and it would give you a route for road, rail and bus to get there. The idea being when people used it and saw how much cheaper and convenient public transport was that they would get out of their cars.
They ended up loading all sorts of costs such as cost of car, wear and tear, insurance onto the road costing. As I remember cost of car was calculated for example as average price paid for a new car/ average number of miles expected in a cars lifetime.
85% of the time it was still cheaper and quicker to go by car than public transport. This number rapidly increasing as you added car occupants. As I remember we calculated put car passengers to 2 and it was literally 5% of journeys that were cheaper by public transport still.
Comments
I'm making a shellfish strategic decision to delay my trip until tomorrow!
Next thing it'll be "It started in Wuhan" or "It's a GLOBAL Crisis".
They ended up loading all sorts of costs such as cost of car, wear and tear, insurance onto the road costing. As I remember cost of car was calculated for example as average price paid for a new car/ average number of miles expected in a cars lifetime.
85% of the time it was still cheaper and quicker to go by car than public transport. This number rapidly increasing as you added car occupants. As I remember we calculated put car passengers to 2 and it was literally 5% of journeys that were cheaper by public transport still.