Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
A quick dive into the costs of running the road network in the UK:
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
Some of that is ridiculous or out of date.
Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma so looking at the future that is an utterly preposterous thing to include.
But not as preposterous as including "congestion" as a "cost". Congestion isn't a cost, its something the drivers experience themselves. Yes sitting in traffic is wasted time, but so is standing at the station or the bus stop waiting for your train or bus to arrive. Would you include that as a "cost" to the UK in the same way you're trying to pretend that its a cost for drivers? Its not a cost, its a choice as to how people are spending their time.
My wife takes two busses to get work because she doesn't drive, one into the town centre, then one out again to her work, it takes her an hour to get to work. If I drive her route it takes me 12 minutes if the road is clear, or about 15 minutes if the road is congested. Which is the bigger "cost" of wasted time, the potential 3 minutes of me stuck in traffic, or the extra three quarters of an hour her journey takes using public transport?
I had a lot of time to think about the Confidence vote yesterday, on the train up to London (Stonehenge exhibition, I can highly recommend it), and was pondering the numbers.
The actual result was pretty much in the sweet spot of what I'd hoped for to create maximum damage to the Cons, but what I had expected was a narrow defeat for Johnson. Going over it, I have come to the conclusion that the numbers didn't add up for a defeat because there was no alternative candidate running an active campaign to dislodge him. Of course, candidates were being talked up over the weekend and during the hours before the vote, but there was no sign of activity to organise votes to give someone momentum for an actual contest.
There are various possible conclusions: 1. Someone today is kicking themselves for not having the spine to put their head over the parapet and get the anti vote over the finishing line 2. No one can currently muster enough support to make it worthwhile running such a campaign either for the confidence vote or a contest. 3. Someone - singular or plural - wants Johnson to continue in place, taking the blame for more and more disasters in governance, until they can see a period of good news on the horizon and can step forward to take the credit. In other words, they are willing for the country to continue to suffer in the cause of their personal ambition, and would also happily see the Conservative party suffer even more damage if they can become the big fish in a small pond somewhere down the line.
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
We DID used to be much better at these things! We had Road Construction Units who would move from one project to another, with teams of contractors who would win contract after contract. We had railway electrification units who wired up routes on a rolling basis.
This is the British stupidity, our sickness of the last 50 years. We need better infrastructure. Roads. Railways. Fibre Broadband. Power Generation. Public facilities (schools, hospitals). All of which generate a clear return on investment. Which drive economic productivity and output.
And yet all we hear is "who will pay for it" "how much will it cost" "why should I pay more taxes for that". Its always the cost side of the equation and no consideration for the benefit side. And it has become the same with big companies - instead of investing they pile cash reserves up and pay more dividends in the immediate term with little consideration for the future.
Another issue was when the EU provided us with social fund money for infrastructure projects, did we spend the money on a Millau Viaduct? No we spent it in cobblestones in Cemaes Bay.
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
Wasn’t one of the reasons HS2 has been so slow, that a lot of railway-building skills had basically been lost, because the UK had done so little of it in the past decades? They had to do an awful lot of training with the teams they recruited, before they could work on the project.
Yep. & now we’re going to flush all that knowledge down the drain by cancelling the rest of the HS network & dropping all the other rail upgrade projects into the round filing cabinet.
It’s economic short-termism of the worst kind. National systems of any sort (the NHS, the roads, the railways, whatever) are a system. If you don’t consider the entire system then you’re doomed to this kind of stop-start manic depressive expense whenever you try to fix or build anything.
On the other hand Nothing undermines the Union with Scotland quite like Boris Johnson. If he's that concerned he should quit. For the good of the Union.
NEW: Every day Boris Johnson hangs on increases risk of break-up of Britain.
If people are threatening violence they should be prosecuted.
And if it is done so by organisations then they can be prescribed and banned as a terrorist organisation. As far as I can see the legislation around this is already in place, just needs some enforcement where violence is being threatened.
They won’t enforce anything. They’ll come round your house for a racist tweet, but you can force a teacher into lifelong hiding, for fear of decapitation, and they wont and don’t do anything
Nonsense. Plenty of people are arrested for extreme Muslim terrorism. Perhaps it should be a few more and some edge cases are incorrectly missed, but enforcement does happen against those threatening violence, whatever their religious or political beliefs.
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
We DID used to be much better at these things! We had Road Construction Units who would move from one project to another, with teams of contractors who would win contract after contract. We had railway electrification units who wired up routes on a rolling basis.
This is the British stupidity, our sickness of the last 50 years. We need better infrastructure. Roads. Railways. Fibre Broadband. Power Generation. Public facilities (schools, hospitals). All of which generate a clear return on investment. Which drive economic productivity and output.
And yet all we hear is "who will pay for it" "how much will it cost" "why should I pay more taxes for that". Its always the cost side of the equation and no consideration for the benefit side. And it has become the same with big companies - instead of investing they pile cash reserves up and pay more dividends in the immediate term with little consideration for the future.
A million likes from me!
So how do we fix it? Yes OK New Labour got on with some of the public facilities but hobbled them with PFI contracts where its £40 for a lightbulb - because even then with a 179 majority it was politically unfeasible to borrow to invest with positive ROI. And then we had the crash and Osbrown slashed spending on anything (because "we can't afford it") whilst managing to ramp up PFI contracts anyway.
One example - the only way we are going to get fibre broadband to the premises - with all the productivity gains that brings - is to have StateCo build the infrastructure. I don't want them to sell me broadband, leave that to the market. But Openreach and the few private providers simply will not do the job because profit.
Why StateCo? Because its a multi-£billion project. Using cash borrowed at state interest rates. Which will employ whole teams of people on a multi-year project to build the network and lay the cables. Profit isn't the consideration so we get the infrastructure at cost price and into the places where profit would otherwise either say no or make it stupidly expensive and thus kill the economic benefit.
This is one of the dumb things about how national politics works. You can only be prime minister of your own country, so every single leader is inexperienced and untested. Britain is a relatively big and important country so if you want to be Prime Minister of Britain you should start with a little country like Estonia and show you can do a decent job.
The British did start doing this with central bank governors, in fairness.
One thing about public transport is it'll always have large limitations in rural areas. One journey I do semi-frequently is Oldcotes to Killamarsh and back. 23 minutes in the car, googling it it's 2 hrs 11 by triple change public transport one way.
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
We DID used to be much better at these things! We had Road Construction Units who would move from one project to another, with teams of contractors who would win contract after contract. We had railway electrification units who wired up routes on a rolling basis.
This is the British stupidity, our sickness of the last 50 years. We need better infrastructure. Roads. Railways. Fibre Broadband. Power Generation. Public facilities (schools, hospitals). All of which generate a clear return on investment. Which drive economic productivity and output.
And yet all we hear is "who will pay for it" "how much will it cost" "why should I pay more taxes for that". Its always the cost side of the equation and no consideration for the benefit side. And it has become the same with big companies - instead of investing they pile cash reserves up and pay more dividends in the immediate term with little consideration for the future.
A million likes from me!
So how do we fix it? Yes OK New Labour got on with some of the public facilities but hobbled them with PFI contracts where its £40 for a lightbulb - because even then with a 179 majority it was politically unfeasible to borrow to invest with positive ROI. And then we had the crash and Osbrown slashed spending on anything (because "we can't afford it") whilst managing to ramp up PFI contracts anyway.
One example - the only way we are going to get fibre broadband to the premises - with all the productivity gains that brings - is to have StateCo build the infrastructure. I don't want them to sell me broadband, leave that to the market. But Openreach and the few private providers simply will not do the job because profit.
Why StateCo? Because its a multi-£billion project. Using cash borrowed at state interest rates. Which will employ whole teams of people on a multi-year project to build the network and lay the cables. Profit isn't the consideration so we get the infrastructure at cost price and into the places where profit would otherwise either say no or make it stupidly expensive and thus kill the economic benefit.
I'm not 100% sure about that.
I currently have 2 options for 1gigabyte internet - Virgin and Youfibre. Openreach may be along eventually but given the mess that our exchange is I suspect we aren't a priority.
And that is just 1 town - the issue isn't going to be areas with dense populations (although I have a friend in Greeenwich with laughably dire broadband for "reasons") but those in the countryside where the costs don't really work unless everyone chips in (see B4RN for an example).
So there are areas where the approach will work but Broadband and Mobiles isn't 1 of them because it's largely covered.
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
Wasn’t one of the reasons HS2 has been so slow, that a lot of railway-building skills had basically been lost, because the UK had done so little of it in the past decades? They had to do an awful lot of training with the teams they recruited, before they could work on the project.
Yep. & now we’re going to flush all that knowledge down the drain by cancelling the rest of the HS network & dropping all the other rail upgrade projects into the round filing cabinet.
It’s economic short-termism of the worst kind. National systems of any sort (the NHS, the roads, the railways, whatever) are a system. If you don’t consider the entire system then you’re doomed to this kind of stop-start manic depressive expense whenever you try to fix or build anything.
It's worse than that. The easiest way to destroy a company is to start cutting back because it ensures the good people start looking for (and leave for) better options before things go pear shaped.
Oh and Phil, looking at your "costs" of accidents in that chart, the overwhelming majority of it is insurance and damage to property, which is costs borne by the drivers themselves.
The total cost of medical and ambulances for all incidents reported to the Police were less than half a billion, with an extra more than a billion added on top as an estimate for events not reported to the Police which seems interesting to say the least.
I accept Boris is a deeply flawed PM but he does have charisma and "boosterism" which I think all the alternatives lack. Some may be quite competent but it's not obvious to me that that is the case. Who would you make the case for on the grounds of competence or better still ability?
I've already said that I think Hunt is the best bet, but I'm not really fussed too much. There are a few people I think would be worse, but anyone ANYONE will do.
I don't want charisma. That's for game show hosts. I want someone who can do the job. We need to quit this destructive pattern of thinking that says politics is entertainment.
How about Theresa May?
Theresa May shows why charisma is a part of the job.
Its not just relevant at election time, its also about being able to connect with others in order to get them to get the job done in Parliament and elsewhere by passing votes etc
Theresa May was the worst PM in centuries and was utterly unable to get her flagship policy through Parliament despite it being the one thing she spent her premiership working on for years and spending months trying to ram it through Parliament.
Modern Prime Ministers who have been able to get stuff done have all had charisma, different types of charisma, but they've all had it.
You need both integrity and charisma. May was bad, Boris is worse.
The fact May couldn’t pass Brexit had as much to do with integrity free Boris manipulating the situation for a run at no10 than it did Mays lack of charisma.
Warning: the following comment might shock, offend and upset.
I quite liked Teresa May!
And I agree with Jonathan. I think her deal was probably as good as could have been achieved from where she started from and may well have got through parliament if Boris hadn't exploited the situation for his own ends.
I agree. She got the best deal out of a bad situation.
It should have been voted through. Labour are partly to blame for this. It's easy to forget we only joined the EU in the first place because sufficient Labour MPs were on board.
She did not, for the same reason that Boris did not - no credible threat of no deal Brexit. In both cases, the EU knew that any British threat to walk away was a bluff, so they had the stronger negotiating position. Lord Frost has said as much. The choice was between two 'bad' deals, and yes, of the two, May's backstop would have been the easier to handle of the two, whilst Boris’s offers greater freedom of action (but not for the whole UK).
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
A quick dive into the costs of running the road network in the UK:
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
Some of that is ridiculous or out of date.
Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma so looking at the future that is an utterly preposterous thing to include.
But not as preposterous as including "congestion" as a "cost". Congestion isn't a cost, its something the drivers experience themselves. Yes sitting in traffic is wasted time, but so is standing at the station or the bus stop waiting for your train or bus to arrive. Would you include that as a "cost" to the UK in the same way you're trying to pretend that its a cost for drivers? Its not a cost, its a choice as to how people are spending their time.
My wife takes two busses to get work because she doesn't drive, one into the town centre, then one out again to her work, it takes her an hour to get to work. If I drive her route it takes me 12 minutes if the road is clear, or about 15 minutes if the road is congested. Which is the bigger "cost" of wasted time, the potential 3 minutes of me stuck in traffic, or the extra three quarters of an hour her journey takes using public transport?
Congestion is a cost. It’s hour after hour of your time that you sit there, when you could be doing something else. Something economically more productive. If you’re on the roads for work it’s an insidious tax that bleeds out your productivity & for what? Nothing at all. Just sat there staring at the vehicle in front of you.
If you don’t understand how congestion can be a cost, then you’re economically illiterate, but wait you’re a US-style right libertarian so that goes without saying
Sure: electric cars are pretty good on the local pollution front, although you do still need to account for tyre wear & the particulates that produces, so it’s not zero impact.
It’s interesting that you completely ignore the human costs of the road network though. All those broken legs, head injuries, broken lives. If we applied the same economic accounting for those to the road network as we do to the rail network then all these arguments about subsidies disappear on the spot.
Do we even need trains with all the whizzy electric cars we're going to be driving in the medium term ? They blow the "green" argument out the water I think.
Not enough road space in our cities to replace trains with electric cars, and if you reengineered our cities to accommodate the cars I think they'd be much less pleasant to live in.
We walked past part of one of the numerous new estates around here - would love to know how people are going to charge their electric cars when most families have 2 cars and only 1 parking space.
It's fairly simple really. You don't need to charge very often. The eniro that I have gets charged once a fortnight.
Could be terror, could be a terrible accident. Reasons to think it is terror: it’s right next to a church and it is - apparently - the scene of a previous lethal terror attack, by a truck, on the Berlin Christmas Market in 2016
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
We DID used to be much better at these things! We had Road Construction Units who would move from one project to another, with teams of contractors who would win contract after contract. We had railway electrification units who wired up routes on a rolling basis.
This is the British stupidity, our sickness of the last 50 years. We need better infrastructure. Roads. Railways. Fibre Broadband. Power Generation. Public facilities (schools, hospitals). All of which generate a clear return on investment. Which drive economic productivity and output.
And yet all we hear is "who will pay for it" "how much will it cost" "why should I pay more taxes for that". Its always the cost side of the equation and no consideration for the benefit side. And it has become the same with big companies - instead of investing they pile cash reserves up and pay more dividends in the immediate term with little consideration for the future.
A million likes from me!
So how do we fix it? Yes OK New Labour got on with some of the public facilities but hobbled them with PFI contracts where its £40 for a lightbulb - because even then with a 179 majority it was politically unfeasible to borrow to invest with positive ROI. And then we had the crash and Osbrown slashed spending on anything (because "we can't afford it") whilst managing to ramp up PFI contracts anyway.
One example - the only way we are going to get fibre broadband to the premises - with all the productivity gains that brings - is to have StateCo build the infrastructure. I don't want them to sell me broadband, leave that to the market. But Openreach and the few private providers simply will not do the job because profit.
Why StateCo? Because its a multi-£billion project. Using cash borrowed at state interest rates. Which will employ whole teams of people on a multi-year project to build the network and lay the cables. Profit isn't the consideration so we get the infrastructure at cost price and into the places where profit would otherwise either say no or make it stupidly expensive and thus kill the economic benefit.
But don't worry. At StateCo, within about 10 minutes, the facilities will all have to be in the right constituencies, contracted work by StateCo will have to be "strategically placed" etc etc.
One thing about public transport is it'll always have large limitations in rural areas. One journey I do semi-frequently is Oldcotes to Killamarsh and back. 23 minutes in the car, googling it it's 2 hrs 11 by triple change public transport one way.
Of which I bet the public transport route is heavily subsidised and people who want that to continue will claim that your 23 minutes should be taxed due to its "wasted time" of congestion. 😂
You never hear anyone claim that the almost 2 hours extra needs to be taxed.
Trivial Gossip Klaxon: If I have understood this correctly, the Leader of East Devon Council (which covers Tiv&Hon) who was elected as an Independent, has just joined the Lib Dems.
Hardly a fag paper between East Devon independents and the LibDems anyway. In East Devon, the Claire Wright Independents got 40% in 2019, the LibDems under 3%.
Did you ever meet Claire Wright? In Sasha Swire's book she was portrayed as a nasty piece of work. Swire's biased of course, but Swire does seem very honest about all sorts of stuff. An entertaining read.
Never did. Not had much dealing with east Devon politics, but she must have been formidable as she came close to winning. Forests of posters for her when I drove through the seat during the election.
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
A quick dive into the costs of running the road network in the UK:
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
Some of that is ridiculous or out of date.
Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma so looking at the future that is an utterly preposterous thing to include.
But not as preposterous as including "congestion" as a "cost". Congestion isn't a cost, its something the drivers experience themselves. Yes sitting in traffic is wasted time, but so is standing at the station or the bus stop waiting for your train or bus to arrive. Would you include that as a "cost" to the UK in the same way you're trying to pretend that its a cost for drivers? Its not a cost, its a choice as to how people are spending their time.
My wife takes two busses to get work because she doesn't drive, one into the town centre, then one out again to her work, it takes her an hour to get to work. If I drive her route it takes me 12 minutes if the road is clear, or about 15 minutes if the road is congested. Which is the bigger "cost" of wasted time, the potential 3 minutes of me stuck in traffic, or the extra three quarters of an hour her journey takes using public transport?
Congestion is a cost. It’s hour after hour of your time that you sit there, when you could be doing something else. Something economically more productive. If you’re on the roads for work it’s an insidious tax that bleeds out your productivity & for what? Nothing at all. Just sat there staring at the vehicle in front of you.
If you don’t understand how congestion can be a cost, then you’re economically illiterate, but wait you’re a US-style right libertarian so that goes without saying
Sure: electric cars are pretty good on the local pollution front, although you do still need to account for tyre wear & the particulates that produces, so it’s not zero impact.
It’s interesting that you completely ignore the human costs of the road network though. All those broken legs, head injuries, broken lives. If we applied the same economic accounting for those to the road network as we do to the rail network then all these arguments about subsidies disappear on the spot.
Hour after hour just sat there when you could be doing something else?
You do realise that in almost all the country, driving cars is quicker than public transport don't you? So if you want driving to be taxed due to its wasted time, then presumably you want public transport even heavier taxed due to its wasted time?
Or are you just being a hypocrite? 🤔
Human costs are again a choice that people make, I go on the road network aware that I am at risk of an accident, it is a choice I make knowingly. So yes, that's my choice, my risk. Just as if a footballer break a leg, that's a risk they knowingly took.
This is one of the dumb things about how national politics works. You can only be prime minister of your own country, so every single leader is inexperienced and untested. Britain is a relatively big and important country so if you want to be Prime Minister of Britain you should start with a little country like Estonia and show you can do a decent job.
The British did start doing this with central bank governors, in fairness.
The danger of this though is that you start to see a country as akin to a company. In order to run the UK you really need a pretty considerable understanding of the UK. Likewise for Estonia. When Carney left as central bank governor it was remarked by someone (don't remember who) that his replacement ought to have a strong understanding of the UK economy. Which felt like a bit of a dig at Carney.
Oh and Phil, looking at your "costs" of accidents in that chart, the overwhelming majority of it is insurance and damage to property, which is costs borne by the drivers themselves.
The total cost of medical and ambulances for all incidents reported to the Police were less than half a billion, with an extra more than a billion added on top as an estimate for events not reported to the Police which seems interesting to say the least.
That’s a fair point: I switched between a national accounting of the costs of the road network & the question of whether drivers pay their way in taxation for the costs imposed in that summary & some of those costs fall back on drivers themselves. Apologies.
(There’s also the obvious question of whether taxation on driving should purely pay for the costs of driving - that’s a political question of course.)
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
A quick dive into the costs of running the road network in the UK:
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
Some of that is ridiculous or out of date.
Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma so looking at the future that is an utterly preposterous thing to include.
But not as preposterous as including "congestion" as a "cost". Congestion isn't a cost, its something the drivers experience themselves. Yes sitting in traffic is wasted time, but so is standing at the station or the bus stop waiting for your train or bus to arrive. Would you include that as a "cost" to the UK in the same way you're trying to pretend that its a cost for drivers? Its not a cost, its a choice as to how people are spending their time.
My wife takes two busses to get work because she doesn't drive, one into the town centre, then one out again to her work, it takes her an hour to get to work. If I drive her route it takes me 12 minutes if the road is clear, or about 15 minutes if the road is congested. Which is the bigger "cost" of wasted time, the potential 3 minutes of me stuck in traffic, or the extra three quarters of an hour her journey takes using public transport?
At least she had a nice car ride in today from your good self, I assume.....
Maybe the best thing would be a referendum in NI on the issue of the protocol?
I do find Johnson's continued backing for the DUP surprising. Has he actually started to feel guilty about his lies?
No but he is worried about the break up of the union, hence his rebranding the country as the UK rather than Britain. No policy mind, just marketing.
Yes but the policy towards Northern Ireland in some ways undermines the Union with Scotland. After all if Northern Ireland can be a special case why can't Scotland which voted by an even bigger margin to stay in the EU?
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
A quick dive into the costs of running the road network in the UK:
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
Some of that is ridiculous or out of date.
Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma so looking at the future that is an utterly preposterous thing to include.
But not as preposterous as including "congestion" as a "cost". Congestion isn't a cost, its something the drivers experience themselves. Yes sitting in traffic is wasted time, but so is standing at the station or the bus stop waiting for your train or bus to arrive. Would you include that as a "cost" to the UK in the same way you're trying to pretend that its a cost for drivers? Its not a cost, its a choice as to how people are spending their time.
My wife takes two busses to get work because she doesn't drive, one into the town centre, then one out again to her work, it takes her an hour to get to work. If I drive her route it takes me 12 minutes if the road is clear, or about 15 minutes if the road is congested. Which is the bigger "cost" of wasted time, the potential 3 minutes of me stuck in traffic, or the extra three quarters of an hour her journey takes using public transport?
At least she had a nice car ride in today from your good self, I assume.....
I offered, but she'd already left before I woke up. She enjoys it, she listens to podcasts through headphones on her journey in and she says it starts her day off right she doesn't like breaking the habit, I don't get that personally but to each their own. The exception is bank holidays or if she does weekends, I always drive her in on bank holidays, it can be an hour between busses then.
This is one of the dumb things about how national politics works. You can only be prime minister of your own country, so every single leader is inexperienced and untested. Britain is a relatively big and important country so if you want to be Prime Minister of Britain you should start with a little country like Estonia and show you can do a decent job.
The British did start doing this with central bank governors, in fairness.
Mark Carney was hardly a success as Governor of the BOE. But then I suppose he hadn't actually shown he'd done a decent job anywhere else, so he's not really an example of your model in action.
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
A quick dive into the costs of running the road network in the UK:
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
Some of that is ridiculous or out of date.
Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma so looking at the future that is an utterly preposterous thing to include.
But not as preposterous as including "congestion" as a "cost". Congestion isn't a cost, its something the drivers experience themselves. Yes sitting in traffic is wasted time, but so is standing at the station or the bus stop waiting for your train or bus to arrive. Would you include that as a "cost" to the UK in the same way you're trying to pretend that its a cost for drivers? Its not a cost, its a choice as to how people are spending their time.
My wife takes two busses to get work because she doesn't drive, one into the town centre, then one out again to her work, it takes her an hour to get to work. If I drive her route it takes me 12 minutes if the road is clear, or about 15 minutes if the road is congested. Which is the bigger "cost" of wasted time, the potential 3 minutes of me stuck in traffic, or the extra three quarters of an hour her journey takes using public transport?
Congestion is a cost. It’s hour after hour of your time that you sit there, when you could be doing something else. Something economically more productive. If you’re on the roads for work it’s an insidious tax that bleeds out your productivity & for what? Nothing at all. Just sat there staring at the vehicle in front of you.
If you don’t understand how congestion can be a cost, then you’re economically illiterate, but wait you’re a US-style right libertarian so that goes without saying
Sure: electric cars are pretty good on the local pollution front, although you do still need to account for tyre wear & the particulates that produces, so it’s not zero impact.
It’s interesting that you completely ignore the human costs of the road network though. All those broken legs, head injuries, broken lives. If we applied the same economic accounting for those to the road network as we do to the rail network then all these arguments about subsidies disappear on the spot.
Hour after hour just sat there when you could be doing something else?
You do realise that in almost all the country, driving cars is quicker than public transport don't you? So if you want driving to be taxed due to its wasted time, then presumably you want public transport even heavier taxed due to its wasted time?
Or are you just being a hypocrite? 🤔
Human costs are again a choice that people make, I go on the road work aware that I am at risk of an accident, it is a choice I make knowingly. So yes, that's my choice, my risk. Just as if a footballer break a leg, that's a risk they knowingly took.
Economically, the cost of congestion is what it is: It doesn’t matter whether other options are slower. (I do think that £7billion figure is fairly crude though - unsurprisingly the economic cost of congestion tends to be bid up by pro-road organisations as part of the process of lobbying for road network improvements!)
We do indeed make decisions about human costs, but they are still costs regardless.
(& I may well be a hypocrite - I suspect hypocrisy is the human condition!)
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
We DID used to be much better at these things! We had Road Construction Units who would move from one project to another, with teams of contractors who would win contract after contract. We had railway electrification units who wired up routes on a rolling basis.
This is the British stupidity, our sickness of the last 50 years. We need better infrastructure. Roads. Railways. Fibre Broadband. Power Generation. Public facilities (schools, hospitals). All of which generate a clear return on investment. Which drive economic productivity and output.
And yet all we hear is "who will pay for it" "how much will it cost" "why should I pay more taxes for that". Its always the cost side of the equation and no consideration for the benefit side. And it has become the same with big companies - instead of investing they pile cash reserves up and pay more dividends in the immediate term with little consideration for the future.
A million likes from me!
So how do we fix it? Yes OK New Labour got on with some of the public facilities but hobbled them with PFI contracts where its £40 for a lightbulb - because even then with a 179 majority it was politically unfeasible to borrow to invest with positive ROI. And then we had the crash and Osbrown slashed spending on anything (because "we can't afford it") whilst managing to ramp up PFI contracts anyway.
One example - the only way we are going to get fibre broadband to the premises - with all the productivity gains that brings - is to have StateCo build the infrastructure. I don't want them to sell me broadband, leave that to the market. But Openreach and the few private providers simply will not do the job because profit.
Why StateCo? Because its a multi-£billion project. Using cash borrowed at state interest rates. Which will employ whole teams of people on a multi-year project to build the network and lay the cables. Profit isn't the consideration so we get the infrastructure at cost price and into the places where profit would otherwise either say no or make it stupidly expensive and thus kill the economic benefit.
I'm not 100% sure about that.
I currently have 2 options for 1gigabyte internet - Virgin and Youfibre. Openreach may be along eventually but given the mess that our exchange is I suspect we aren't a priority.
And that is just 1 town - the issue isn't going to be areas with dense populations (although I have a friend in Greeenwich with laughably dire broadband for "reasons") but those in the countryside where the costs don't really work unless everyone chips in (see B4RN for an example).
So there are areas where the approach will work but Broadband and Mobiles isn't 1 of them because it's largely covered.
A few months ago Gigaclear came along and dug up literally every road in our large village to put in FTTP over the course of about a month. They also at the same time put a feed to everyone's house that they can use if they sign up to service. I know they also did the same in a small town nearby.
Another new provider (Swish) seems to be about to come online in our village. They haven't been digging up the roads but have been putting in their own cabinets. I guess they may well be using the same tunnels that were put in for Gigaclear. Maybe they had some of sharing agreement?
In any case, the net result is that everyone in our village can now get 1Gbps broadband if they choose to from a selection of providers. As far as I'm aware, no public money was involved.
There's a Conservative MP arrested on rape charges, but we're told he's innocent until proven guilty. Doesn't the same apply here?
Personally, I think if you get as far as an arrest or trial, it's appropriate for such a person to step back, or be made to step back, while such matters are ongoing.
There's a Conservative MP arrested on rape charges, but we're told he's innocent until proven guilty. Doesn't the same apply here?
Personally, I think if you get as far as an arrest or trial, it's appropriate for such a person to step back, or be made to step back, while such matters are ongoing.
Point of order - Noone has been charged as yet for the r incident
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
We DID used to be much better at these things! We had Road Construction Units who would move from one project to another, with teams of contractors who would win contract after contract. We had railway electrification units who wired up routes on a rolling basis.
This is the British stupidity, our sickness of the last 50 years. We need better infrastructure. Roads. Railways. Fibre Broadband. Power Generation. Public facilities (schools, hospitals). All of which generate a clear return on investment. Which drive economic productivity and output.
And yet all we hear is "who will pay for it" "how much will it cost" "why should I pay more taxes for that". Its always the cost side of the equation and no consideration for the benefit side. And it has become the same with big companies - instead of investing they pile cash reserves up and pay more dividends in the immediate term with little consideration for the future.
A million likes from me!
So how do we fix it? Yes OK New Labour got on with some of the public facilities but hobbled them with PFI contracts where its £40 for a lightbulb - because even then with a 179 majority it was politically unfeasible to borrow to invest with positive ROI. And then we had the crash and Osbrown slashed spending on anything (because "we can't afford it") whilst managing to ramp up PFI contracts anyway.
One example - the only way we are going to get fibre broadband to the premises - with all the productivity gains that brings - is to have StateCo build the infrastructure. I don't want them to sell me broadband, leave that to the market. But Openreach and the few private providers simply will not do the job because profit.
Why StateCo? Because its a multi-£billion project. Using cash borrowed at state interest rates. Which will employ whole teams of people on a multi-year project to build the network and lay the cables. Profit isn't the consideration so we get the infrastructure at cost price and into the places where profit would otherwise either say no or make it stupidly expensive and thus kill the economic benefit.
I'm not 100% sure about that.
I currently have 2 options for 1gigabyte internet - Virgin and Youfibre. Openreach may be along eventually but given the mess that our exchange is I suspect we aren't a priority.
And that is just 1 town - the issue isn't going to be areas with dense populations (although I have a friend in Greeenwich with laughably dire broadband for "reasons") but those in the countryside where the costs don't really work unless everyone chips in (see B4RN for an example).
So there are areas where the approach will work but Broadband and Mobiles isn't 1 of them because it's largely covered.
We have FTTC. My office has a leased line installed by Bank of Scotland at presumably great cost a decade or so ago. Cost of switching that back on despite no infrastructure costs? £900 per month, and no, sir can't throttle the bandwidth to reduce the cost. Could have a much shorter fibre line put in, but build cost close to £10k to shove a cable through a conduit that is already there and directly outside (has been surveyed and the *surveyor* said the price was crazy). Or some hybrid where even the BT sales guy couldn't find any reason why paying them £200 a month for 16meg up/down made any sense at all.
Its fine if you live somewhere they are interested in. Less so when they're not. For a decade my 2006 built estate had 4meg because Openreach - who installed our phone lines - said we didn't exist. Exact words quoted to me when referring to their roll-out map of 2005. Eventually Virgin Media came along. Great for the main streets. For the 3 houses so often put in the corners on a mini cul-de-sac? Nothing. And short of hiring a contractor yourself zero way to get connected to the main run a few metres away.
Which is why the state needs to do it. The private sector couldn't give a toss.
There's a Conservative MP arrested on rape charges, but we're told he's innocent until proven guilty. Doesn't the same apply here?
Personally, I think if you get as far as an arrest or trial, it's appropriate for such a person to step back, or be made to step back, while such matters are ongoing.
Of course it applies, though yes its normal for people to step back, the Conservative MP isn't allowed onto the Parliamentary estate.
It seems really unusual that matters have reached the going to trial stage and he is still leader of the Council and being quoted (without party mentioned) in the BBC on that today, rather than stepping back until the trial is resolved.
Not to me. Regardless of your politics, Rishi looks professional and, if his charisma is not at Borisian levels, he at least outshines Hunt and Truss. People will also see the various rebates and in six weeks or so, the NIC threshold rise will land on their payslips.
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
A quick dive into the costs of running the road network in the UK:
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
Some of that is ridiculous or out of date.
Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma so looking at the future that is an utterly preposterous thing to include.
But not as preposterous as including "congestion" as a "cost". Congestion isn't a cost, its something the drivers experience themselves. Yes sitting in traffic is wasted time, but so is standing at the station or the bus stop waiting for your train or bus to arrive. Would you include that as a "cost" to the UK in the same way you're trying to pretend that its a cost for drivers? Its not a cost, its a choice as to how people are spending their time.
My wife takes two busses to get work because she doesn't drive, one into the town centre, then one out again to her work, it takes her an hour to get to work. If I drive her route it takes me 12 minutes if the road is clear, or about 15 minutes if the road is congested. Which is the bigger "cost" of wasted time, the potential 3 minutes of me stuck in traffic, or the extra three quarters of an hour her journey takes using public transport?
"Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma"
Of course this isn't remotely true.
Trams are a good solution to particulate pollution, which causes asthma (among other things). Electric cars, not so good.
There's also a massive cost to having streets everywhere littered with parked cars, as well as the cost of children not being safe to play in the streets where they live.
Extraordinary. And depressing. Nothing will happen to this man. Imagine if it was some white guy threatening Muslims…
"Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." #chilling
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
We DID used to be much better at these things! We had Road Construction Units who would move from one project to another, with teams of contractors who would win contract after contract. We had railway electrification units who wired up routes on a rolling basis.
This is the British stupidity, our sickness of the last 50 years. We need better infrastructure. Roads. Railways. Fibre Broadband. Power Generation. Public facilities (schools, hospitals). All of which generate a clear return on investment. Which drive economic productivity and output.
And yet all we hear is "who will pay for it" "how much will it cost" "why should I pay more taxes for that". Its always the cost side of the equation and no consideration for the benefit side. And it has become the same with big companies - instead of investing they pile cash reserves up and pay more dividends in the immediate term with little consideration for the future.
A million likes from me!
So how do we fix it? Yes OK New Labour got on with some of the public facilities but hobbled them with PFI contracts where its £40 for a lightbulb - because even then with a 179 majority it was politically unfeasible to borrow to invest with positive ROI. And then we had the crash and Osbrown slashed spending on anything (because "we can't afford it") whilst managing to ramp up PFI contracts anyway.
One example - the only way we are going to get fibre broadband to the premises - with all the productivity gains that brings - is to have StateCo build the infrastructure. I don't want them to sell me broadband, leave that to the market. But Openreach and the few private providers simply will not do the job because profit.
Why StateCo? Because its a multi-£billion project. Using cash borrowed at state interest rates. Which will employ whole teams of people on a multi-year project to build the network and lay the cables. Profit isn't the consideration so we get the infrastructure at cost price and into the places where profit would otherwise either say no or make it stupidly expensive and thus kill the economic benefit.
I'm not 100% sure about that.
I currently have 2 options for 1gigabyte internet - Virgin and Youfibre. Openreach may be along eventually but given the mess that our exchange is I suspect we aren't a priority.
And that is just 1 town - the issue isn't going to be areas with dense populations (although I have a friend in Greeenwich with laughably dire broadband for "reasons") but those in the countryside where the costs don't really work unless everyone chips in (see B4RN for an example).
So there are areas where the approach will work but Broadband and Mobiles isn't 1 of them because it's largely covered.
A few months ago Gigaclear came along and dug up literally every road in our large village to put in FTTP over the course of about a month. They also at the same time put a feed to everyone's house that they can use if they sign up to service. I know they also did the same in a small town nearby.
Another new provider (Swish) seems to be about to come online in our village. They haven't been digging up the roads but have been putting in their own cabinets. I guess they may well be using the same tunnels that were put in for Gigaclear. Maybe they had some of sharing agreement?
In any case, the net result is that everyone in our village can now get 1Gbps broadband if they choose to from a selection of providers. As far as I'm aware, no public money was involved.
It won't be tunnels, so much as the previous fibre will probably have been run in plastic ducts.
There are various subsidies in action, I believe. A big issue was - and is - getting cooperation out of BT for access to connect equipment. This held up the fibre-into-your-home installation round where I live for a couple of weeks.
IIRC the target is 85% coverage of Gigabit internet by 2025.
Not to me. Regardless of your politics, Rishi looks professional and, if his charisma is not at Borisian levels, he at least outshines Hunt and Truss. People will also see the various rebates and in six weeks or so, the NIC threshold rise will land on their payslips.
He's extremely popular when he hands out great wodges of cash.
I love how HR haughtily insists that traffic congestion doesn't economically cost the economy whereas economists and governments of the last hundred years have been able to lay out in detail why it IS a cost.
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
A quick dive into the costs of running the road network in the UK:
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
Some of that is ridiculous or out of date.
Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma so looking at the future that is an utterly preposterous thing to include.
But not as preposterous as including "congestion" as a "cost". Congestion isn't a cost, its something the drivers experience themselves. Yes sitting in traffic is wasted time, but so is standing at the station or the bus stop waiting for your train or bus to arrive. Would you include that as a "cost" to the UK in the same way you're trying to pretend that its a cost for drivers? Its not a cost, its a choice as to how people are spending their time.
My wife takes two busses to get work because she doesn't drive, one into the town centre, then one out again to her work, it takes her an hour to get to work. If I drive her route it takes me 12 minutes if the road is clear, or about 15 minutes if the road is congested. Which is the bigger "cost" of wasted time, the potential 3 minutes of me stuck in traffic, or the extra three quarters of an hour her journey takes using public transport?
Congestion is a cost. It’s hour after hour of your time that you sit there, when you could be doing something else. Something economically more productive. If you’re on the roads for work it’s an insidious tax that bleeds out your productivity & for what? Nothing at all. Just sat there staring at the vehicle in front of you.
If you don’t understand how congestion can be a cost, then you’re economically illiterate, but wait you’re a US-style right libertarian so that goes without saying
Sure: electric cars are pretty good on the local pollution front, although you do still need to account for tyre wear & the particulates that produces, so it’s not zero impact.
It’s interesting that you completely ignore the human costs of the road network though. All those broken legs, head injuries, broken lives. If we applied the same economic accounting for those to the road network as we do to the rail network then all these arguments about subsidies disappear on the spot.
Hour after hour just sat there when you could be doing something else?
You do realise that in almost all the country, driving cars is quicker than public transport don't you? So if you want driving to be taxed due to its wasted time, then presumably you want public transport even heavier taxed due to its wasted time?
Or are you just being a hypocrite? 🤔
Human costs are again a choice that people make, I go on the road work aware that I am at risk of an accident, it is a choice I make knowingly. So yes, that's my choice, my risk. Just as if a footballer break a leg, that's a risk they knowingly took.
Economically, the cost of congestion is what it is: It doesn’t matter whether other options are slower. (I do think that £7billion figure is fairly crude though - unsurprisingly the economic cost of congestion tends to be bid up by pro-road organisations as part of the process of lobbying for road network improvements!)
We do indeed make decisions about human costs, but they are still costs regardless.
(& I may well be a hypocrite - I suspect hypocrisy is the human condition!)
Of course it matters if other options are slower, it means that other options "cost" even more in time.
If we're factoring in wasted time, then given that in the overwhelming majority of the nation public transport is the quickest option, by far, then that should be a net negative cost for driving. In which case that's an argument to subsidise driving ahead of public transport.
Extraordinary. And depressing. Nothing will happen to this man. Imagine if it was some white guy threatening Muslims…
"Birmingham will not tolerate the disrespect of our prophet (pbuh). There will outcomes from your actions. You will have repercussions for your actions. We have been trained from birth that we must defend the honour of our prophet & we will lay our life on the line." #chilling
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
A quick dive into the costs of running the road network in the UK:
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
Some of that is ridiculous or out of date.
Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma so looking at the future that is an utterly preposterous thing to include.
But not as preposterous as including "congestion" as a "cost". Congestion isn't a cost, its something the drivers experience themselves. Yes sitting in traffic is wasted time, but so is standing at the station or the bus stop waiting for your train or bus to arrive. Would you include that as a "cost" to the UK in the same way you're trying to pretend that its a cost for drivers? Its not a cost, its a choice as to how people are spending their time.
My wife takes two busses to get work because she doesn't drive, one into the town centre, then one out again to her work, it takes her an hour to get to work. If I drive her route it takes me 12 minutes if the road is clear, or about 15 minutes if the road is congested. Which is the bigger "cost" of wasted time, the potential 3 minutes of me stuck in traffic, or the extra three quarters of an hour her journey takes using public transport?
Electric cars can still cause pollution wherever the electricity is generated.
If you're gaining 45 minutes plus by driving compared to going on a bus, you personally are avoiding a huge "cost" of wasted time. In which case, you should presumably be willing to pay a premium for that option, including in terms of what you pay the government.
On fuel, a reduction in VAT to 5% would be a better move for the treasury than a big duty cut. Certain people and companies can get the VAT back, absolutely no-one reclaims duty. It'd be the equivalent of a 27p duty cut and would send the green lobby bananas creating the perfect opponents for the government as an added bonus
If it gets much worse I think the government is going to have t
A difference I noticed in Denmark where my son lives is the number of driverless trains. Scandinavia isn't renowned for right-wing excesses, but they don't regard this as abnormal.
Unions exist to boost the pay of workers. The leaders may be left-wing sometimes, but they know which side their bread is buttered. Keep the numbers up and the pay rises coming and they can support North Korea if they like.
I think the sad truth is the network is going to need to be largely automated in the longer term - just as firemen, loco cleaners and signalmen went so will many drivers. This will need to be together with remote condition monitoring of assets using AI and more automated asset maintenance.
Staffing costs are phenomenally expensive.
Less than you’d think. A nine-coach IET needs one driver and (depending on union agreements) possibly one guard. Most of the southern commuter fleet just needs one driver. Even a ten-coach Voyager, among the most expensive type of train to operate, needs one driver and two guards.
There is some fat to be trimmed - I can’t see ticket offices surviving for long in all but the biggest stations. But train and station staff costs aren’t what are killing the railway.
The real problem is infrastructure. Track renewals and even the most modest enhancements are phenomenally expensive. A new basic station costs £14m absolute minimum. £14m!! For a concrete platform, an expanse of tarmac car park, and a little station building. It’s insane. The Northumberland Line reopening is costing £166m just to run slow passenger trains on existing tracks.
Have you looked at the per km cost of building a motorway recently? Eyewatering, that’s before we get to the maintenance costs!
I’d guess that the cost of building a station also has to include all the signalling & track work, which can’t be cheap. Track renewal requires a complete replacement of the track bed.
Infrastructure costs real money, whichever way you slice it.
Anyone who has had construction work done on their house knows that building materials costs add up very quickly. It doesn't surprise me that these projects are so expensive. However I do think we could control costs better if we had a well developed pipeline of projects across road, rail, schools and hospitals etc rather than short termism dictated by the political cycle and Treasury penny pinchers. Things like TBMs could be reused, there could be a dedicated rail electrification team that moves from one project to the next instead of building everything from scratch. I have a feeling that we used to be a lot better at this kind of thing.
We DID used to be much better at these things! We had Road Construction Units who would move from one project to another, with teams of contractors who would win contract after contract. We had railway electrification units who wired up routes on a rolling basis.
This is the British stupidity, our sickness of the last 50 years. We need better infrastructure. Roads. Railways. Fibre Broadband. Power Generation. Public facilities (schools, hospitals). All of which generate a clear return on investment. Which drive economic productivity and output.
And yet all we hear is "who will pay for it" "how much will it cost" "why should I pay more taxes for that". Its always the cost side of the equation and no consideration for the benefit side. And it has become the same with big companies - instead of investing they pile cash reserves up and pay more dividends in the immediate term with little consideration for the future.
A million likes from me!
So how do we fix it? Yes OK New Labour got on with some of the public facilities but hobbled them with PFI contracts where its £40 for a lightbulb - because even then with a 179 majority it was politically unfeasible to borrow to invest with positive ROI. And then we had the crash and Osbrown slashed spending on anything (because "we can't afford it") whilst managing to ramp up PFI contracts anyway.
One example - the only way we are going to get fibre broadband to the premises - with all the productivity gains that brings - is to have StateCo build the infrastructure. I don't want them to sell me broadband, leave that to the market. But Openreach and the few private providers simply will not do the job because profit.
Why StateCo? Because its a multi-£billion project. Using cash borrowed at state interest rates. Which will employ whole teams of people on a multi-year project to build the network and lay the cables. Profit isn't the consideration so we get the infrastructure at cost price and into the places where profit would otherwise either say no or make it stupidly expensive and thus kill the economic benefit.
But don't worry. At StateCo, within about 10 minutes, the facilities will all have to be in the right constituencies, contracted work by StateCo will have to be "strategically placed" etc etc.
And the priority areas for completing the work, will match closely to a list of marginal constituencies for the next election. Good luck getting any work done if you live in a safe seat.
Not to me. Regardless of your politics, Rishi looks professional and, if his charisma is not at Borisian levels, he at least outshines Hunt and Truss. People will also see the various rebates and in six weeks or so, the NIC threshold rise will land on their payslips.
Maybe he should resign and carry the torch for the 148 ers
Not to me. Regardless of your politics, Rishi looks professional and, if his charisma is not at Borisian levels, he at least outshines Hunt and Truss. People will also see the various rebates and in six weeks or so, the NIC threshold rise will land on their payslips.
Dangerous for Boris. If the consensus wraps around Sunak as the Chosen Heir, then suddenly Boris is much much easier to overthrow. He’s the Chancellor, he’s articulate, he understand enormous sums of money. OK he could run under a park bench without hitting his head, but still
This is one of the dumb things about how national politics works. You can only be prime minister of your own country, so every single leader is inexperienced and untested. Britain is a relatively big and important country so if you want to be Prime Minister of Britain you should start with a little country like Estonia and show you can do a decent job.
The British did start doing this with central bank governors, in fairness.
The danger of this though is that you start to see a country as akin to a company. In order to run the UK you really need a pretty considerable understanding of the UK. Likewise for Estonia. When Carney left as central bank governor it was remarked by someone (don't remember who) that his replacement ought to have a strong understanding of the UK economy. Which felt like a bit of a dig at Carney.
It's a somewhat unfashionable notion, but they also need to have a strong sense of loyalty to the UK. If there was a Davos-inspired doctrine that Carney was signed up to, and its implementation made the UK poorer, Carney wouldn't have hesitated in implementing it as Governor. I am certain that he viewed his role as simply a part of the global machine, like he was at the IMF, World Bank etc.
I love how HR haughtily insists that traffic congestion doesn't economically cost the economy whereas economists and governments of the last hundred years have been able to lay out in detail why it IS a cost.
But BR insists he is right of course.
That's not what I said. I said its ridiculous to count the "cost" of congestion as a reason to tax drivers, without taking into account the "cost" of other modes of transport, which typically end up "costing" much, much more.
Driving typically "costs" the least amount of time in the overwhelming majority of the country, so it has the least time "cost" not the most.
He's alive! Last chance saloon Rishbot, do the deed Morning all
Yes
He’s not ideal and he’s 3 centimetres high, but fuck it. Anyone will do, now.
Come on Rishi. Push Boris over. Save us from this nightmare
What’s he got to lose? 2 years as Chancellor being constantly undermined and menaced by Boris, followed by a bad defeat then his career ends and he fucks off to Santa Barbara?
OR he goes for the kill, and he actually becomes prime minister of the United Kingdom, the ultimate job, everybody breathes a sigh of relief, everyone is deeply thankful, and he has a decent chance of a small majority in 2024
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
A quick dive into the costs of running the road network in the UK:
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
Some of that is ridiculous or out of date.
Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma so looking at the future that is an utterly preposterous thing to include.
But not as preposterous as including "congestion" as a "cost". Congestion isn't a cost, its something the drivers experience themselves. Yes sitting in traffic is wasted time, but so is standing at the station or the bus stop waiting for your train or bus to arrive. Would you include that as a "cost" to the UK in the same way you're trying to pretend that its a cost for drivers? Its not a cost, its a choice as to how people are spending their time.
My wife takes two busses to get work because she doesn't drive, one into the town centre, then one out again to her work, it takes her an hour to get to work. If I drive her route it takes me 12 minutes if the road is clear, or about 15 minutes if the road is congested. Which is the bigger "cost" of wasted time, the potential 3 minutes of me stuck in traffic, or the extra three quarters of an hour her journey takes using public transport?
Congestion is a cost. It’s hour after hour of your time that you sit there, when you could be doing something else. Something economically more productive. If you’re on the roads for work it’s an insidious tax that bleeds out your productivity & for what? Nothing at all. Just sat there staring at the vehicle in front of you.
If you don’t understand how congestion can be a cost, then you’re economically illiterate, but wait you’re a US-style right libertarian so that goes without saying
Sure: electric cars are pretty good on the local pollution front, although you do still need to account for tyre wear & the particulates that produces, so it’s not zero impact.
It’s interesting that you completely ignore the human costs of the road network though. All those broken legs, head injuries, broken lives. If we applied the same economic accounting for those to the road network as we do to the rail network then all these arguments about subsidies disappear on the spot.
The problem is you are using a cost for congestion that doesn't tie in to the cost for road users. The annual cost of delay is what delays cost now with the current network. The figure we should use is the cost delay that is being saved by the 12 million spent on road repairs, and whatever the cost of new toads is. So if the money spent means that 2 billion of congestion is avoided then that is a return on that investment.
Oh and Phil, looking at your "costs" of accidents in that chart, the overwhelming majority of it is insurance and damage to property, which is costs borne by the drivers themselves.
The total cost of medical and ambulances for all incidents reported to the Police were less than half a billion, with an extra more than a billion added on top as an estimate for events not reported to the Police which seems interesting to say the least.
That’s a fair point: I switched between a national accounting of the costs of the road network & the question of whether drivers pay their way in taxation for the costs imposed in that summary & some of those costs fall back on drivers themselves. Apologies.
(There’s also the obvious question of whether taxation on driving should purely pay for the costs of driving - that’s a political question of course.)
Which suggests that a total of £17billion was spent on the roads in 2016/17.
The numbers shift fairly radically depending on what you choose to include I presume. You can see what’s included in the DfT data table, but statistica doesn’t offer that to non-paying users.
He's alive! Last chance saloon Rishbot, do the deed Morning all
Yes
He’s not ideal and he’s 3 centimetres high, but fuck it. Anyone will do, now.
Come on Rishi. Push Boris over. Save us from this nightmare
What’s he got to lose? 2 years as Chancellor being constantly undermined and menaced by Boris, followed by a bad defeat then his career ends and he fucks off to Santa Barbara?
OR he goes for the kill, and he actually becomes prime minister of the United Kingdom, the ultimate job, everybody breathes a sigh of relief, everyone is deeply thankful, and he has a decent chance of a small majority in 2024
HURRY UP SUNAK
Sunak - Hunt would be a great combo, the left would focus relentlessly on the amusing portmanteau of their names and together they'd eek out another Con - DUP minority gov't in 2024.
He's alive! Last chance saloon Rishbot, do the deed Morning all
Yes
He’s not ideal and he’s 3 centimetres high, but fuck it. Anyone will do, now.
Come on Rishi. Push Boris over. Save us from this nightmare
What’s he got to lose? 2 years as Chancellor being constantly undermined and menaced by Boris, followed by a bad defeat then his career ends and he fucks off to Santa Barbara?
OR he goes for the kill, and he actually becomes prime minister of the United Kingdom, the ultimate job, everybody breathes a sigh of relief, everyone is deeply thankful, and he has a decent chance of a small majority in 2024
HURRY UP SUNAK
If he was going to do a great job, his response to the cost of living crisis would have been completely different. He'd look smarter than Boris on state occasions. That's nice, but that's it.
I would like him to see off Boris, but not win, a la Hezza, allowing the good ship Penny to sail to victory.
He's alive! Last chance saloon Rishbot, do the deed Morning all
Yes
He’s not ideal and he’s 3 centimetres high, but fuck it. Anyone will do, now.
Come on Rishi. Push Boris over. Save us from this nightmare
What’s he got to lose? 2 years as Chancellor being constantly undermined and menaced by Boris, followed by a bad defeat then his career ends and he fucks off to Santa Barbara?
OR he goes for the kill, and he actually becomes prime minister of the United Kingdom, the ultimate job, everybody breathes a sigh of relief, everyone is deeply thankful, and he has a decent chance of a small majority in 2024
HURRY UP SUNAK
Rishi need is to avoid the voting going to the members where he will lose to the loonier candidate.
So there is little point rushing it at the moment - best to wait until he safely ends up in No 10 when Bozo goes.
He's alive! Last chance saloon Rishbot, do the deed Morning all
Yes
He’s not ideal and he’s 3 centimetres high, but fuck it. Anyone will do, now.
Come on Rishi. Push Boris over. Save us from this nightmare
What’s he got to lose? 2 years as Chancellor being constantly undermined and menaced by Boris, followed by a bad defeat then his career ends and he fucks off to Santa Barbara?
OR he goes for the kill, and he actually becomes prime minister of the United Kingdom, the ultimate job, everybody breathes a sigh of relief, everyone is deeply thankful, and he has a decent chance of a small majority in 2024
He's alive! Last chance saloon Rishbot, do the deed Morning all
Yes
He’s not ideal and he’s 3 centimetres high, but fuck it. Anyone will do, now.
Come on Rishi. Push Boris over. Save us from this nightmare
What’s he got to lose? 2 years as Chancellor being constantly undermined and menaced by Boris, followed by a bad defeat then his career ends and he fucks off to Santa Barbara?
OR he goes for the kill, and he actually becomes prime minister of the United Kingdom, the ultimate job, everybody breathes a sigh of relief, everyone is deeply thankful, and he has a decent chance of a small majority in 2024
HURRY UP SUNAK
It'll be fine as long as he can manage to remain in close up at all times. And never, never, stand next to the soldier the army have sent to embarrass him.
I wonder if Hunt publicly coming out against got the rebellion up to 148 from perhaps say 120 odd ? He's a credible next PM. Sunak resigning would get the numbers over the top, but put him in a less advantageous position for the leadership race perhaps..
He's alive! Last chance saloon Rishbot, do the deed Morning all
Yes
He’s not ideal and he’s 3 centimetres high, but fuck it. Anyone will do, now.
Come on Rishi. Push Boris over. Save us from this nightmare
What’s he got to lose? 2 years as Chancellor being constantly undermined and menaced by Boris, followed by a bad defeat then his career ends and he fucks off to Santa Barbara?
OR he goes for the kill, and he actually becomes prime minister of the United Kingdom, the ultimate job, everybody breathes a sigh of relief, everyone is deeply thankful, and he has a decent chance of a small majority in 2024
HURRY UP SUNAK
If he was going to do a great job, his response to the cost of living crisis would have been completely different. He'd look smarter than Boris on state occasions. That's nice, but that's it.
I would like him to see off Boris, but not win, a la Hezza, allowing the good ship Penny to sail to victory.
I don’t care who does it now, I barely care who wins. Anyone is better than this. However I’ve gone off Hunt again. He’s a dick. And Wallace. And Javid.
OK I do care who wins
But Sunak is the most plausible, probably, and I can see him scratching out a victory over Starmer
I love how HR haughtily insists that traffic congestion doesn't economically cost the economy whereas economists and governments of the last hundred years have been able to lay out in detail why it IS a cost.
But BR insists he is right of course.
That's not what I said. I said its ridiculous to count the "cost" of congestion as a reason to tax drivers, without taking into account the "cost" of other modes of transport, which typically end up "costing" much, much more.
Driving typically "costs" the least amount of time in the overwhelming majority of the country, so it has the least time "cost" not the most.
This is partially my fault for eliding the difference between the costs imposed on & paid by actual drivers & the national cost of the road network as a whole system. broken up into costs paid by different sectors.
When making these kind of economic arguments, it’s important to be clear about what kind of accounting you’re doing & I wasn’t which a) messed up my numbers in the first place & b) led to people making different arguments across each other.
He's alive! Last chance saloon Rishbot, do the deed Morning all
Yes
He’s not ideal and he’s 3 centimetres high, but fuck it. Anyone will do, now.
Come on Rishi. Push Boris over. Save us from this nightmare
What’s he got to lose? 2 years as Chancellor being constantly undermined and menaced by Boris, followed by a bad defeat then his career ends and he fucks off to Santa Barbara?
OR he goes for the kill, and he actually becomes prime minister of the United Kingdom, the ultimate job, everybody breathes a sigh of relief, everyone is deeply thankful, and he has a decent chance of a small majority in 2024
HURRY UP SUNAK
He is just too rich to become PM
The conflicts of interest are impossible (not his fault personally: just the situation).
One thing to have lots of moolah and a non-dom spouse when handing out the bread, but quite another when things tighten ... a huge open goal for the opposition.
I would like him to see off Boris, but not win, a la Hezza, allowing the good ship Penny to sail to victory.
I'm not the target audience so what the fuck do I know but I fail to see the political appeal of the chunky tory milf. The last three years of her political career have been managed decline. How the fuck do you get to potential PM from there? She flashed her Beetle Bonnet on that diving program but there has to be more to it.
I wonder if Hunt publicly coming out against got the rebellion up to 148 from perhaps say 120 odd ? He's a credible next PM. Sunak resigning would get the numbers over the top, but put him in a less advantageous position for the leadership race perhaps..
The idea that we now all draw the line and move on is absurd. None of the problems with BJ that drove the VONC have gone away, there are signs that some continue to get worse. Its the issues that drive this, and him getting reamed on Monday is not a cure-all which means they can now get on with whatever they think they are getting on whith.
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
A quick dive into the costs of running the road network in the UK:
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
Some of that is ridiculous or out of date.
Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma so looking at the future that is an utterly preposterous thing to include.
But not as preposterous as including "congestion" as a "cost". Congestion isn't a cost, its something the drivers experience themselves. Yes sitting in traffic is wasted time, but so is standing at the station or the bus stop waiting for your train or bus to arrive. Would you include that as a "cost" to the UK in the same way you're trying to pretend that its a cost for drivers? Its not a cost, its a choice as to how people are spending their time.
My wife takes two busses to get work because she doesn't drive, one into the town centre, then one out again to her work, it takes her an hour to get to work. If I drive her route it takes me 12 minutes if the road is clear, or about 15 minutes if the road is congested. Which is the bigger "cost" of wasted time, the potential 3 minutes of me stuck in traffic, or the extra three quarters of an hour her journey takes using public transport?
Electric cars can still cause pollution wherever the electricity is generated.
If you're gaining 45 minutes plus by driving compared to going on a bus, you personally are avoiding a huge "cost" of wasted time. In which case, you should presumably be willing to pay a premium for that option, including in terms of what you pay the government.
Any pollution that electricity is costing us should be charged equitably on all electricity, not just drivers.
If you're gaining 45 minutes + by driving then how can you count "congestion" as a cost because of the wasted time. The time "wasted" is negative 45 minutes, while the time "wasted" for much of the country of travelling by car instead of rail can be an hour or more.
He's alive! Last chance saloon Rishbot, do the deed Morning all
Yes
He’s not ideal and he’s 3 centimetres high, but fuck it. Anyone will do, now.
Come on Rishi. Push Boris over. Save us from this nightmare
What’s he got to lose? 2 years as Chancellor being constantly undermined and menaced by Boris, followed by a bad defeat then his career ends and he fucks off to Santa Barbara?
OR he goes for the kill, and he actually becomes prime minister of the United Kingdom, the ultimate job, everybody breathes a sigh of relief, everyone is deeply thankful, and he has a decent chance of a small majority in 2024
HURRY UP SUNAK
Rishi need is to avoid the voting going to the members where he will lose to the loonier candidate.
So there is little point rushing it at the moment - best to wait until he safely ends up in No 10 when Bozo goes.
Only way Sunak now has a chance of winning the membership is if MPs put him and Hunt in the final 2. However even then the members might vote for Hunt as Sunak's popularity has plummeted with the grassroots
I would like him to see off Boris, but not win, a la Hezza, allowing the good ship Penny to sail to victory.
I'm not the target audience so what the fuck do I know but I fail to see the political appeal of the chunky tory milf. The last three years of her political career have been managed decline. How the fuck do you get to potential PM from there? She flashed her Beetle Bonnet on that diving program but there has to be more to it.
I would like him to see off Boris, but not win, a la Hezza, allowing the good ship Penny to sail to victory.
I'm not the target audience so what the fuck do I know but I fail to see the political appeal of the chunky tory milf. The last three years of her political career have been managed decline. How the fuck do you get to potential PM from there? She flashed her Beetle Bonnet on that diving program but there has to be more to it.
It’s precisely because there is nothing to see that she appeals. She’s a green screen on which to project Thatcher 2.0
Also, who the fuck else?
Javid: so so dull Wallace: even more dull Hunt: dull with a hint of psychosis (that eerie marionette smile) Truss: psychosis with a hint of dullness? Tudgendhat: who? Sunak: inch high billionaire, nice suits Gove: ahahaha
This is one of the dumb things about how national politics works. You can only be prime minister of your own country, so every single leader is inexperienced and untested. Britain is a relatively big and important country so if you want to be Prime Minister of Britain you should start with a little country like Estonia and show you can do a decent job.
The British did start doing this with central bank governors, in fairness.
Only they chose the wrong one - from Canada instead of Australia.
He's alive! Last chance saloon Rishbot, do the deed Morning all
Yes
He’s not ideal and he’s 3 centimetres high, but fuck it. Anyone will do, now.
Come on Rishi. Push Boris over. Save us from this nightmare
What’s he got to lose? 2 years as Chancellor being constantly undermined and menaced by Boris, followed by a bad defeat then his career ends and he fucks off to Santa Barbara?
OR he goes for the kill, and he actually becomes prime minister of the United Kingdom, the ultimate job, everybody breathes a sigh of relief, everyone is deeply thankful, and he has a decent chance of a small majority in 2024
HURRY UP SUNAK
He is just too rich to become PM
He is articulate and successful and would make an excellent alternative, but others will go under the spotlight before winning the prize
As a supporter of the 148 I will just be content to see Boris leave office
He's alive! Last chance saloon Rishbot, do the deed Morning all
Yes
He’s not ideal and he’s 3 centimetres high, but fuck it. Anyone will do, now.
Come on Rishi. Push Boris over. Save us from this nightmare
What’s he got to lose? 2 years as Chancellor being constantly undermined and menaced by Boris, followed by a bad defeat then his career ends and he fucks off to Santa Barbara?
OR he goes for the kill, and he actually becomes prime minister of the United Kingdom, the ultimate job, everybody breathes a sigh of relief, everyone is deeply thankful, and he has a decent chance of a small majority in 2024
HURRY UP SUNAK
He has absolutely nothing to lose. There will be no more money for splashing, so he needs promotion or to retire and enjoy his cash and wife in sunnier climes. Hes not a careerist, he doesnt need to be
I would like him to see off Boris, but not win, a la Hezza, allowing the good ship Penny to sail to victory.
I'm not the target audience so what the fuck do I know but I fail to see the political appeal of the chunky tory milf. The last three years of her political career have been managed decline. How the fuck do you get to potential PM from there? She flashed her Beetle Bonnet on that diving program but there has to be more to it.
It’s precisely because there is nothing to see that she appeals. She’s a green screen on which to project Thatcher 2.0
Also, who the fuck else?
Javid: so so dull Wallace: even more dull Hunt: dull with a hint of psychosis (that eerie marionette smile) Truss: psychosis with a hint of dullness? Tudgendhat: who? Sunak: inch high billionaire, nice suits Gove: ahahaha
The question which rarely gets asked is What will they do? Javid at least made a stab at coherence on that front this morning.
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
A quick dive into the costs of running the road network in the UK:
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
Some of that is ridiculous or out of date.
Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma so looking at the future that is an utterly preposterous thing to include.
But not as preposterous as including "congestion" as a "cost". Congestion isn't a cost, its something the drivers experience themselves. Yes sitting in traffic is wasted time, but so is standing at the station or the bus stop waiting for your train or bus to arrive. Would you include that as a "cost" to the UK in the same way you're trying to pretend that its a cost for drivers? Its not a cost, its a choice as to how people are spending their time.
My wife takes two busses to get work because she doesn't drive, one into the town centre, then one out again to her work, it takes her an hour to get to work. If I drive her route it takes me 12 minutes if the road is clear, or about 15 minutes if the road is congested. Which is the bigger "cost" of wasted time, the potential 3 minutes of me stuck in traffic, or the extra three quarters of an hour her journey takes using public transport?
Electric cars can still cause pollution wherever the electricity is generated.
If you're gaining 45 minutes plus by driving compared to going on a bus, you personally are avoiding a huge "cost" of wasted time. In which case, you should presumably be willing to pay a premium for that option, including in terms of what you pay the government.
Any pollution that electricity is costing us should be charged equitably on all electricity, not just drivers.
If you're gaining 45 minutes + by driving then how can you count "congestion" as a cost because of the wasted time. The time "wasted" is negative 45 minutes, while the time "wasted" for much of the country of travelling by car instead of rail can be an hour or more.
Which suggests that £5billion of the £7billion cost occurs in London, which of course has a (mostly) great public transport network, at least compared to the rest of the country.
They say: “The lost revenue is down to wasted fuel, the extra cost of transporting goods through congested areas, and lost productivity due to workers being sat in jams.”
which instantly demonstrates how hard accounting for this stuff appropriately is: If you want to know the answer to “are drivers paying their way?” then you can’t use that £7bllion figure directly, you have to take off the fuel costs (because drivers are paying those directly). The other costs are externalities of congestion that you want to include, because drivers aren’t paying for those themselves. This figure doesn’t try to include any accounting for the “human cost” of congestion of course.
(It does appear that the authors have considered your point however BR: this number seems to be an estimate of the real economic costs, not intangibles.)
Tiverton By Election: as the Tories "go on the attack" the Leader of Neighbouring East Devon Council has joined the Lib Dems and urged Tiverton folk to vote for that party. He was a member of the East Devon Alliance. No doubt the Lib Dems will make a lot of that, you can see the leaflet already!.
Re Hunt breaking cover against Johnson, he who wields the knife never wears the crown comes to mind.
I think the nasty way Dorries attacked Hunt, which was inexcusable, has damaged his prospects and I just do not see the membership electing him though a place in the cabinet would be very sensible
I would like him to see off Boris, but not win, a la Hezza, allowing the good ship Penny to sail to victory.
I'm not the target audience so what the fuck do I know but I fail to see the political appeal of the chunky tory milf. The last three years of her political career have been managed decline. How the fuck do you get to potential PM from there? She flashed her Beetle Bonnet on that diving program but there has to be more to it.
It’s precisely because there is nothing to see that she appeals. She’s a green screen on which to project Thatcher 2.0
Also, who the fuck else?
Javid: so so dull Wallace: even more dull Hunt: dull with a hint of psychosis (that eerie marionette smile) Truss: psychosis with a hint of dullness? Tudgendhat: who? Sunak: inch high billionaire, nice suits Gove: ahahaha
The question which rarely gets asked is What will they do? Javid at least made a stab at coherence on that front this morning.
Kay Burley beat the shit out of him over his tax arrangements. That will definitely come up again if he suddenly gets ambitious.
Britain Elects has posted the 'i'll wait for Survation' mugs indicating a poll with interestung resukts incoming. Unclear if constituency/by or national but the last GB poll from them was 42 to 33 late April........
I would like him to see off Boris, but not win, a la Hezza, allowing the good ship Penny to sail to victory.
I'm not the target audience so what the fuck do I know but I fail to see the political appeal of the chunky tory milf. The last three years of her political career have been managed decline. How the fuck do you get to potential PM from there? She flashed her Beetle Bonnet on that diving program but there has to be more to it.
It’s precisely because there is nothing to see that she appeals. She’s a green screen on which to project Thatcher 2.0
Also, who the fuck else?
Javid: so so dull Wallace: even more dull Hunt: dull with a hint of psychosis (that eerie marionette smile) Truss: psychosis with a hint of dullness? Tudgendhat: who? Sunak: inch high billionaire, nice suits Gove: ahahaha
Javid - tax dodger in ways that no-one else has been including Rishi - so it won't be him.
Any body seen and read this thread? Seems pretty poor if true. How could we trust them on anything controversial again?
My experience of the 2017 General Election was probably a bit different from Andrew's.
Firstly, it is worth noting just how dramatically the opinion polls changed during the course of the campaign. This isn't how things are supposed to happen.
The big beasts are stirring. BoZo's days are numbered
I don't know who these 'big beasts' are that you talk of. There is no room for anyone else in the era of big dog, a rather ironic name I would suggest as he really just resembles a greedy over fed labrador drooling all over the floor demanding constant food insisting that the whole place belongs to him.
Perhaps instead of fantasising about driverless trains and how a digital railway can fix infrastructure problems without construction, they might instead go and study why our railway system is so absurdly expensive.
It didn't used to be like this pre-privatisation. So its the change in structure - not ownership - which has driven this. A myriad of contracts and performance clauses and penalties. A "build it to withstand a direct nuclear strike and you are legally liable for it not getting nuked for the next 40 years" clause that exploded HS2 construction costs. Rolling stock that costs multiple times its real cost because in today's DfT dictated railway there is no guarantee your rolling stock will be used for more than a few years (yet another nearly new fleet just being parked up as we speak).
Instead of lazy war with the workers tropes, they should go to Germany. Italy. The Netherlands. See how they manage to do everything better for a lot less costs. Then do that.
Or we could go back to pre-privatisation levels of usage of the railways. There was a long-term downwards trend in railway usage until the 1990s and post-privatisation it has more than doubled (pre-pandemic).
Abolish all railways subsidies and allow railways to operate on whatever people are prepared to pay for which will be a fraction of the volume, just as it used to be before fuel duty started getting ramped up to insane levels to push people onto rails instead.
We don't get subsidised to drive a car, we get heavily taxed, there is no reason to subsidise railways, let people choose whatever means of transport suits them personally and let that be that on a level playing field.
A quick dive into the costs of running the road network in the UK:
In direct expenditure terms, sure: the main tax drivers pay is on fuel & that raised about £26billion in 2021. Vehicle exise duty raised just under £7billion. At the same time, about £12billion was spent on road maintenance that year (source for the first is UK gov website, the latter comes from statistica.) So on the face of it, drivers are paying £33billion for £12billion of services.
So including accident costs drives the cost of the road network to £22billion, even if we ignore the personal cost of the injuries sustained & only care about the economic impact (& that was in a pandemic year: the cost in 2018 was £13billion.)
Are there other externalities we’re not considering? Obviously there’s the cost of pollution which we know has major impacts on death rates in cities due to asthma & other diseases. Noise pollution is a significant cost, although it’s difficult to measure directly. Direct asthma treatment costs the NHS about a £billion / year. Total economic costs are probably at least double that. Hard to know what portion is caused by the road network, but it must be sizable.
Congestion costs are very significant economically - simply by blocking up the road network drivers cost the UK billions a year. Recent estimates seem to be in the £7billion a year region ( https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/car-news/consumer-news/94871/traffic-jams-costs-in-the-uk ), although I image that’s a crude number - probably just counting lost hours vs incomes. Still, that is almost totally wasted time, so...
So looking at the numbers, based solely on the externalities that can be directly accounted for (accidents, congestion), drivers are barely paying their way - they paid £33billion in return for £29billion of costs. Adding in reasonable estimates for other externalities (eg, asthma costs the NHS £1billion / year, knock on economic costs are probably twice that, maybe the road network is responsible for a third of that? & so on for all the others) suggests that drivers might be just about paying ther way?
The moment we include any accounting for the pain & suffering imposed on people due to road accidents the cost argument is blown out of the water of course. The UK government statistics include estimates for these costs based on standard economic approaches to estimating them based on revealed preferences.
(If I’ve missed any obvious externalities of driving that we can account for do point them out!)
Some of that is ridiculous or out of date.
Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma so looking at the future that is an utterly preposterous thing to include.
But not as preposterous as including "congestion" as a "cost". Congestion isn't a cost, its something the drivers experience themselves. Yes sitting in traffic is wasted time, but so is standing at the station or the bus stop waiting for your train or bus to arrive. Would you include that as a "cost" to the UK in the same way you're trying to pretend that its a cost for drivers? Its not a cost, its a choice as to how people are spending their time.
My wife takes two busses to get work because she doesn't drive, one into the town centre, then one out again to her work, it takes her an hour to get to work. If I drive her route it takes me 12 minutes if the road is clear, or about 15 minutes if the road is congested. Which is the bigger "cost" of wasted time, the potential 3 minutes of me stuck in traffic, or the extra three quarters of an hour her journey takes using public transport?
Electric cars can still cause pollution wherever the electricity is generated.
If you're gaining 45 minutes plus by driving compared to going on a bus, you personally are avoiding a huge "cost" of wasted time. In which case, you should presumably be willing to pay a premium for that option, including in terms of what you pay the government.
Any pollution that electricity is costing us should be charged equitably on all electricity, not just drivers.
If you're gaining 45 minutes + by driving then how can you count "congestion" as a cost because of the wasted time. The time "wasted" is negative 45 minutes, while the time "wasted" for much of the country of travelling by car instead of rail can be an hour or more.
Which suggests that £5billion of the £7billion cost occurs in London, which of course has a (mostly) great public transport network, at least compared to the rest of the country.
They say: “The lost revenue is down to wasted fuel, the extra cost of transporting goods through congested areas, and lost productivity due to workers being sat in jams.”
which instantly demonstrates how hard accounting for this stuff appropriately is: If you want to know the answer to “are drivers paying their way?” then you can’t use that £7bllion figure directly, you have to take off the fuel costs (because drivers are paying those directly). The other costs are externalities of congestion that you want to include, because drivers aren’t paying for those themselves. This figure doesn’t try to include any accounting for the “human cost” of congestion of course.
(It does appear that the authors have considered your point however BR: this number seems to be an estimate of the real economic costs, not intangibles.)
"Workers being sat in jams" has to be equivalent to "workers sat in bus stops/train stations waiting for exchanges" though, in which case again for the overwhelming majority of the country it would be a net negative cost, but that hasn't been calculated, because that's not what the calculation is there for.
The logical thing to do then if you're counting wasted time as a cost to be taxed would be to tax fuel and subsidise public transport in London, but to subsidise fuel and tax public transport in the rest of the nation. It wouldn't be reasonable to tax drivers in the North West due to Londoners wasting time if they use cars now, would it?
Somehow I am sceptical that is what you're suggesting though, is it?
PMQs in half an hour are going to be a nightmare for Boris, and I expect him to make it worse by attacking everything and everyone as it is never his fault
I would like him to see off Boris, but not win, a la Hezza, allowing the good ship Penny to sail to victory.
I'm not the target audience so what the fuck do I know but I fail to see the political appeal of the chunky tory milf. The last three years of her political career have been managed decline. How the fuck do you get to potential PM from there? She flashed her Beetle Bonnet on that diving program but there has to be more to it.
I don't really see anything substantive in your critique to be honest. The other day your main line of attack was that she looked like Boris in a dress. If that's true, perhaps we should ask him to wear one more often. As for her career, being able to serve under Boris, but not being part of his core team, is as good a recommendation as you can make for any of the runners and riders. In Boris's Government, promotion is no longer a sign of ability as you know.
I think she's the best candidate because she's 1. Bright. 2. Has clear vision within the role - ie., doesn't want the job 'because I think I'd be quite good at it' a la Cameron/Boris. Of course it helps that her views seem to be fairly aligned to mine, but not completely - she's way more Atlantacist than I'd be. But at least she wants to do something. 3. As bonuses, she's also a very good commons performer, attractive/telegenic, and seems a very caring person. I don't really see what more we can ask for at this point.
Comments
Electric cars don't produce emissions or cause asthma so looking at the future that is an utterly preposterous thing to include.
But not as preposterous as including "congestion" as a "cost". Congestion isn't a cost, its something the drivers experience themselves. Yes sitting in traffic is wasted time, but so is standing at the station or the bus stop waiting for your train or bus to arrive. Would you include that as a "cost" to the UK in the same way you're trying to pretend that its a cost for drivers? Its not a cost, its a choice as to how people are spending their time.
My wife takes two busses to get work because she doesn't drive, one into the town centre, then one out again to her work, it takes her an hour to get to work. If I drive her route it takes me 12 minutes if the road is clear, or about 15 minutes if the road is congested. Which is the bigger "cost" of wasted time, the potential 3 minutes of me stuck in traffic, or the extra three quarters of an hour her journey takes using public transport?
The actual result was pretty much in the sweet spot of what I'd hoped for to create maximum damage to the Cons, but what I had expected was a narrow defeat for Johnson. Going over it, I have come to the conclusion that the numbers didn't add up for a defeat because there was no alternative candidate running an active campaign to dislodge him. Of course, candidates were being talked up over the weekend and during the hours before the vote, but there was no sign of activity to organise votes to give someone momentum for an actual contest.
There are various possible conclusions:
1. Someone today is kicking themselves for not having the spine to put their head over the parapet and get the anti vote over the finishing line
2. No one can currently muster enough support to make it worthwhile running such a campaign either for the confidence vote or a contest.
3. Someone - singular or plural - wants Johnson to continue in place, taking the blame for more and more disasters in governance, until they can see a period of good news on the horizon and can step forward to take the credit. In other words, they are willing for the country to continue to suffer in the cause of their personal ambition, and would also happily see the Conservative party suffer even more damage if they can become the big fish in a small pond somewhere down the line.
None of these bode well for the Conservatives.
It’s economic short-termism of the worst kind. National systems of any sort (the NHS, the roads, the railways, whatever) are a system. If you don’t consider the entire system then you’re doomed to this kind of stop-start manic depressive expense whenever you try to fix or build anything.
My column for @thetimes.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/every-day-boris-johnson-stays-increases-risk-to-uk-vwnbn55dl
I wish it was that simple
One example - the only way we are going to get fibre broadband to the premises - with all the productivity gains that brings - is to have StateCo build the infrastructure. I don't want them to sell me broadband, leave that to the market. But Openreach and the few private providers simply will not do the job because profit.
Why StateCo? Because its a multi-£billion project. Using cash borrowed at state interest rates. Which will employ whole teams of people on a multi-year project to build the network and lay the cables. Profit isn't the consideration so we get the infrastructure at cost price and into the places where profit would otherwise either say no or make it stupidly expensive and thus kill the economic benefit.
The British did start doing this with central bank governors, in fairness.
I currently have 2 options for 1gigabyte internet - Virgin and Youfibre. Openreach may be along eventually but given the mess that our exchange is I suspect we aren't a priority.
And that is just 1 town - the issue isn't going to be areas with dense populations (although I have a friend in Greeenwich with laughably dire broadband for "reasons") but those in the countryside where the costs don't really work unless everyone chips in (see B4RN for an example).
So there are areas where the approach will work but Broadband and Mobiles isn't 1 of them because it's largely covered.
The total cost of medical and ambulances for all incidents reported to the Police were less than half a billion, with an extra more than a billion added on top as an estimate for events not reported to the Police which seems interesting to say the least.
If you don’t understand how congestion can be a cost, then you’re economically illiterate, but wait you’re a US-style right libertarian so that goes without saying
Sure: electric cars are pretty good on the local pollution front, although you do still need to account for tyre wear & the particulates that produces, so it’s not zero impact.
It’s interesting that you completely ignore the human costs of the road network though. All those broken legs, head injuries, broken lives. If we applied the same economic accounting for those to the road network as we do to the rail network then all these arguments about subsidies disappear on the spot.
https://twitter.com/morgenpost/status/1534463539297001473?s=21&t=6IPRk-rd_qU6wOcbRFFXxA
Ploughed eventually into a shop
Could be terror, could be a terrible accident. Reasons to think it is terror: it’s right next to a church and it is - apparently - the scene of a previous lethal terror attack, by a truck, on the Berlin Christmas Market in 2016
You never hear anyone claim that the almost 2 hours extra needs to be taxed.
You do realise that in almost all the country, driving cars is quicker than public transport don't you? So if you want driving to be taxed due to its wasted time, then presumably you want public transport even heavier taxed due to its wasted time?
Or are you just being a hypocrite? 🤔
Human costs are again a choice that people make, I go on the road network aware that I am at risk of an accident, it is a choice I make knowingly. So yes, that's my choice, my risk. Just as if a footballer break a leg, that's a risk they knowingly took.
(There’s also the obvious question of whether taxation on driving should purely pay for the costs of driving - that’s a political question of course.)
Be careful and all that.
Sorry to be so late; catching up!
Rishi tops poll to replace Boris
https://twitter.com/ElectCalculus/status/1534462985762127872?t=mfqo1aug6WrKOBkQff8KPA&s=19
Last chance saloon Rishbot, do the deed
Morning all
https://twitter.com/MorrisF1/status/1534469059282186242
We do indeed make decisions about human costs, but they are still costs regardless.
(& I may well be a hypocrite - I suspect hypocrisy is the human condition!)
Another new provider (Swish) seems to be about to come online in our village. They haven't been digging up the roads but have been putting in their own cabinets. I guess they may well be using the same tunnels that were put in for Gigaclear. Maybe they had some of sharing agreement?
In any case, the net result is that everyone in our village can now get 1Gbps broadband if they choose to from a selection of providers. As far as I'm aware, no public money was involved.
Personally, I think if you get as far as an arrest or trial, it's appropriate for such a person to step back, or be made to step back, while such matters are ongoing.
Its fine if you live somewhere they are interested in. Less so when they're not. For a decade my 2006 built estate had 4meg because Openreach - who installed our phone lines - said we didn't exist. Exact words quoted to me when referring to their roll-out map of 2005. Eventually Virgin Media came along. Great for the main streets. For the 3 houses so often put in the corners on a mini cul-de-sac? Nothing. And short of hiring a contractor yourself zero way to get connected to the main run a few metres away.
Which is why the state needs to do it. The private sector couldn't give a toss.
It seems really unusual that matters have reached the going to trial stage and he is still leader of the Council and being quoted (without party mentioned) in the BBC on that today, rather than stepping back until the trial is resolved.
Of course this isn't remotely true.
Trams are a good solution to particulate pollution, which causes asthma (among other things). Electric cars, not so good.
There's also a massive cost to having streets everywhere littered with parked cars, as well as the cost of children not being safe to play in the streets where they live.
There are various subsidies in action, I believe. A big issue was - and is - getting cooperation out of BT for access to connect equipment. This held up the fibre-into-your-home installation round where I live for a couple of weeks.
IIRC the target is 85% coverage of Gigabit internet by 2025.
But BR insists he is right of course.
If we're factoring in wasted time, then given that in the overwhelming majority of the nation public transport is the quickest option, by far, then that should be a net negative cost for driving. In which case that's an argument to subsidise driving ahead of public transport.
Is the BBC trying to “generate hate”?
‘Cineworld cancels The Lady of Heaven film screenings after protests’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61729392
If you're gaining 45 minutes plus by driving compared to going on a bus, you personally are avoiding a huge "cost" of wasted time. In which case, you should presumably be willing to pay a premium for that option, including in terms of what you pay the government.
Expect more Sunak-nobbling stories shortly
https://en-gb.facebook.com/tikkihywoodfoundation/videos/pangolin-behavour-4-pulling-a-tongue/911338999330651/
Driving typically "costs" the least amount of time in the overwhelming majority of the country, so it has the least time "cost" not the most.
He’s not ideal and he’s 3 centimetres high, but fuck it. Anyone will do, now.
Come on Rishi. Push Boris over. Save us from this nightmare
What’s he got to lose? 2 years as Chancellor being constantly undermined and menaced by Boris, followed by a bad defeat then his career ends and he fucks off to Santa Barbara?
OR he goes for the kill, and he actually becomes prime minister of the United Kingdom, the ultimate job, everybody breathes a sigh of relief, everyone is deeply thankful, and he has a decent chance of a small majority in 2024
HURRY UP SUNAK
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3CHmg_iS8o
From A View To A Kill.
The big beasts are stirring. BoZo's days are numbered
Which suggests that a total of £17billion was spent on the roads in 2016/17.
The numbers shift fairly radically depending on what you choose to include I presume. You can see what’s included in the DfT data table, but statistica doesn’t offer that to non-paying users.
I would like him to see off Boris, but not win, a la Hezza, allowing the good ship Penny to sail to victory.
So there is little point rushing it at the moment - best to wait until he safely ends up in No 10 when Bozo goes.
OK I do care who wins
But Sunak is the most plausible, probably, and I can see him scratching out a victory over Starmer
When making these kind of economic arguments, it’s important to be clear about what kind of accounting you’re doing & I wasn’t which a) messed up my numbers in the first place & b) led to people making different arguments across each other.
Apologies to all. In summary, economics is hard.
One thing to have lots of moolah and a non-dom spouse when handing out the bread, but quite another when things tighten ... a huge open goal for the opposition.
If you're gaining 45 minutes + by driving then how can you count "congestion" as a cost because of the wasted time. The time "wasted" is negative 45 minutes, while the time "wasted" for much of the country of travelling by car instead of rail can be an hour or more.
Also, who the fuck else?
Javid: so so dull
Wallace: even more dull
Hunt: dull with a hint of psychosis (that eerie marionette smile)
Truss: psychosis with a hint of dullness?
Tudgendhat: who?
Sunak: inch high billionaire, nice suits
Gove: ahahaha
As a supporter of the 148 I will just be content to see Boris leave office
Sunak soon
That gives him a crucial advantage over Hunt
Javid at least made a stab at coherence on that front this morning.
Which suggests that £5billion of the £7billion cost occurs in London, which of course has a (mostly) great public transport network, at least compared to the rest of the country.
They say: “The lost revenue is down to wasted fuel, the extra cost of transporting goods through congested areas, and lost productivity due to workers being sat in jams.”
which instantly demonstrates how hard accounting for this stuff appropriately is: If you want to know the answer to “are drivers paying their way?” then you can’t use that £7bllion figure directly, you have to take off the fuel costs (because drivers are paying those directly). The other costs are externalities of congestion that you want to include, because drivers aren’t paying for those themselves. This figure doesn’t try to include any accounting for the “human cost” of congestion of course.
(It does appear that the authors have considered your point however BR: this number seems to be an estimate of the real economic costs, not intangibles.)
Mr. NorthWales, Dorries' attack on Hunt was intensely stupid.
We joined in 1973. We left in 2016 by vote and de facto in 2020. 43 years
Tent happenin anyroad, as they say in Carnkie
My experience of the 2017 General Election was probably a bit different from Andrew's.
Firstly, it is worth noting just how dramatically the opinion polls changed during the course of the campaign. This isn't how things are supposed to happen.
https://t.co/Gip2GHey1x https://t.co/WsbdoaBYAr
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/06/07/boris-johnsons-economic-pledges-prime-minister-promised-change/ (£££)
The logical thing to do then if you're counting wasted time as a cost to be taxed would be to tax fuel and subsidise public transport in London, but to subsidise fuel and tax public transport in the rest of the nation. It wouldn't be reasonable to tax drivers in the North West due to Londoners wasting time if they use cars now, would it?
Somehow I am sceptical that is what you're suggesting though, is it?
I think she's the best candidate because she's
1. Bright.
2. Has clear vision within the role - ie., doesn't want the job 'because I think I'd be quite good at it' a la Cameron/Boris. Of course it helps that her views seem to be fairly aligned to mine, but not completely - she's way more Atlantacist than I'd be. But at least she wants to do something.
3. As bonuses, she's also a very good commons performer, attractive/telegenic, and seems a very caring person. I don't really see what more we can ask for at this point.