The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That's a very road-oriented argument, though, whatever its merits for that area. Doesn't work for a railway using a whole new level of rolling stock and track, not least because the signalling will almost certainly be modernised at the same time.
Sure it can if you're talking local transportation rather than grand projects.
Want to build Northern Powerhouse Rail? You could start by building the stretch from Liverpool to Warrington, then open that once constructed. And repeat that across the network until its all built.
The instance on doing it as a grand project to London is what's made it take forever.
Trouble with that argument is it's still stuck on C19 decisions. It's very much as if you insisted on making a motorway by widening only the roads existing in the 1930s - including ones goiung through city centres, and so on.
That approach to NPR is itself a very strong indication of a second grade system devised by second grade minds in Whitehall and Westminster.
Eh? I'm talking about a new line.
There's already a rail line between Warrington and Liverpool, indeed between all those places, but as far as I'm aware NPR is planned as a new line.
So break the new line into specific, measurable, achievable and realistic timely steps and open each step when its done while preparing for the next steps.
Sure you won't get all the benefits immediately, but you'll get some benefits sooner and you'll get on with actually just building the bloody thing rather than going back and forth for decades.
Don't wait half a century for it all to be built before opening any of it.
But a new line in bits is useless unless it connects with existing bits. Above all for an inter-city long range line. And you want to be able to have the new line away from the old one to make better use of line layout.
I thought the complaint was a lack of capacity for local transportation? Its not useless for local transportation.
Until its built in full the pre-existing intercity long range line still exists.
But for local transportation that is relieved the moment you open the new bits. And once the new bits are hooked up, then you now have 2 intercity long range routes.
End destination is the same, route is open in full. But along the way, the intermediate steps should be of positive use and if they're actually built and opened then it might not take 50 years to finish the full route. HS2 has taken longer than the main elements of the M6 took to build and hook up into each other.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Exactly, why not a third one?
There's 11 train lines in London's Underground, why not stop at 1? Or 2? Or 10?
Don't stop investing in infrastructure, especially while our population is growing.
But preferable would be new towns or cities built away from overpopulated cities anyway, which can be built with a clean slate and built to whatever standard of welcoming of public transport or anything else you care about is concerned. What's wrong with that?
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Exactly, why not a third one?
There's 11 train lines in London's Underground, why not stop at 1? Or 2? Or 10?
Don't stop investing in infrastructure, especially while our population is growing.
But preferable would be new towns or cities built away from overpopulated cities anyway, which can be built with a clean slate and built to whatever standard of welcoming of public transport or anything else you care about is concerned. What's wrong with that?
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Exactly, why not a third one?
There's 11 train lines in London's Underground, why not stop at 1? Or 2? Or 10?
Don't stop investing in infrastructure, especially while our population is growing.
But preferable would be new towns or cities built away from overpopulated cities anyway, which can be built with a clean slate and built to whatever standard of welcoming of public transport or anything else you care about is concerned. What's wrong with that?
4?
11?
Whatever it takes. Just like the Underground.
And the more you have, the more you can connect places away from a single central point. The whole country should be connected to each other, not just all routes going to Rome/Londinium.
On topic: In the US, wealth is often a negative for Republican candidates, but not for Democratic candidates. Notable examples: FDR, the Kennedys, and, currently, California Governor Gavin Newsom.
There are ways Republicans can lessen that problem. For example, by putting their assets in a blind trust, after they are elected.
Or by showing they are in touch with average people, as George W. Bush did, in a number of ways. For example, by earning his money by providing something popular, a major league baseball team. (From time to time, he sat in the regular seats so he could listen to fans' thoughts about ways to improve their experiences at the ball park.)
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Trump tends if anything to exaggerate his wealth and business acumen for political advantage as a Republican, whereas Bloomberg was seen as an elitist who tried to buy the Democratic nomination.
It's possible those on the economic right find it a bit trickier overall if they are wealthy, however, simply because the type of policies they implement tend to be small state and low tax, and the obvious jibe is that this benefits them personally. A wealthy centre/left politician is less likely to be implementing the type of policies that can easily be portrayed as benefiting themselves and their friends.
In practice, only the wealthy have much chance to get ahead in US politics.
Joe Biden isn't massively wealthy, is he? Or at least he wasn't as VP - he made a lot from books/speaking engagements in his post-VP, pre-President period.
I mean, these things are relative - clearly, he is a lot wealthier than most Americans, and was well paid as a Senator for decades. But he's nowhere near the group of US politicians who can self-fund to a significant degree.
Wealthy populist demagogues often claim it's a virtue because they can't be bought. This is one of Donald Trump's lines and it's quite an effective one. Many of the suckers who follow him buy into it. 'The tough ass businessman beholden to nobody unlike your normal craven corrupt politicians'.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
Is this right. Sunak's current strategy is to go to Manchester parroting "people are wrong to speculate on HS2". He's then going to come back from Manchester and say "actually, the speculation was right. We're axing it". And we're all supposed to say "he's a straight talker"...
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Greater Manchester population is about 2.9m, across ten boroughs.
Metrolink serves 7 of those 10 boroughs showing the commuting patterns of 'Manchester' bare little resemblance to the map of local authorities.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
On topic: In the US, wealth is often a negative for Republican candidates, but not for Democratic candidates. Notable examples: FDR, the Kennedys, and, currently, California Governor Gavin Newsom.
There are ways Republicans can lessen that problem. For example, by putting their assets in a blind trust, after they are elected.
Or by showing they are in touch with average people, as George W. Bush did, in a number of ways. For example, by earning his money by providing something popular, a major league baseball team. (From time to time, he sat in the regular seats so he could listen to fans' thoughts about ways to improve their experiences at the ball park.)
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Trump tends if anything to exaggerate his wealth and business acumen for political advantage as a Republican, whereas Bloomberg was seen as an elitist who tried to buy the Democratic nomination.
It's possible those on the economic right find it a bit trickier overall if they are wealthy, however, simply because the type of policies they implement tend to be small state and low tax, and the obvious jibe is that this benefits them personally. A wealthy centre/left politician is less likely to be implementing the type of policies that can easily be portrayed as benefiting themselves and their friends.
In practice, only the wealthy have much chance to get ahead in US politics.
Joe Biden isn't massively wealthy, is he? Or at least he wasn't as VP - he made a lot from books/speaking engagements in his post-VP, pre-President period.
I mean, these things are relative - clearly, he is a lot wealthier than most Americans, and was well paid as a Senator for decades. But he's nowhere near the group of US politicians who can self-fund to a significant degree.
Wealthy populist demagogues often claim it's a virtue because they can't be bought. This is one of Donald Trump's lines and it's quite an effective one. Many of the suckers who follow him buy into it. 'The tough ass businessman beholden to nobody unlike your normal craven corrupt politicians'.
Obvious bollocks - though fair to say that Trump's price might be higher. See, for example, the $2bn for Jared from Saudi.
As I noted earlier, Trump pardoned Sen Bob Menendez's co-defendant from his previous corruption case - so political ideology, or wealth are pretty irrelevant. What matters is whether or not a politician is a crook.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
Indeed
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
The latest HS2 rumour doing the rounds is a delay rather than scrapping .
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
A delay solely to pretend that Rishi can afford to deliver tax cuts.
No 10 has worked out belatedly that cutting taxes after moaning about a lack of money for HS2 might not be a good look .
God this government makes me sick .
According to Yougov more Northerners oppose HS2 than support it anyway.
Of course, we Northerners drive. If you want to help the North then invest in our long-neglected motorway network that hasn't been touched for fifty years would be a better starting point than yet another bloody trainline to London.
And if you're going to invest in Northern Rail, then invest in Northern Rail. NPR would be a far better levelling up exercise than a trainline to London.
But to actually build HS2 but then not bother with the one link to the North? That's just adding insult to injury, then spitting at us too.
Don't expect gratitude from Northerners for that.
There isn't a special Northern driving gene.
Indeed, people in the north have some of the lowest access to cars outside of London, and some of the shortest commutes.
And that was an argument for NPR rail, and for more roads, to increase the economic capacity of the north by melding it into a larger region where everyone can reach every job, cf London and commuting from the Home Counties, as opposed to Liverpool to Manchester being a major expedition replete with huskies and sleds.
Labour’s loss will be a remarkable event, as it comes three years after they won a historic absolute majority - the only such event of the modern (post-PR) era.
Has the turnaround arisen because of Covid and the response to it? Are there parallels to the UK?
(FWIW I understand that NZ dealt very well in the early stages at keeping Covid out, but at substantial cost (isolating the nation, stopping people coming home for funerals etc)) and then the inevitable need to re-open seeing more deaths than at any other time).
The reason is general ineptitude from Labour. Ardern saw the writing on the wall and scarpered. Covid is not the reason, although some mis-steps (not the early isolation) contribute to the overall narrative.
The read across to the UK is that while National’s Luxon (the presumed next PM) is not considered exciting, visionary, or even especially sympathetic, the voters are going to trounce Labour anyway and by any means they have at their disposal.
Also, they are blaming Labour for inflation etc which in all honesty are global issues.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
Indeed
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
I wouldn't sacrifice my children's quality of life by dumping our garden to go live in a flat, even if it meant a pay rise. Not that you need to in the modern age where people can increasingly work from home anyway, but some things are more important.
People have a choice, people in the NW overwhelmingly do not want to live in cities. Nothing wrong with those who do, I respect their choice, but there's nothing wrong with those who like me choose to have a home and garden instead of flat.
I notice in your prior edit you mentioned Wigan specifically with regards to having access to Manchester's public transport. It does indeed, and that's great, even if most choose not to use it.
Of Wigan's workforce a rather impressive 22% work from home, and of the 78% who commute to work 58/78 do so by driving. So that's three quarters of commuters driving.
I'm not sure of the remaining one quarter how that splits between walking (probably most of the remainder), cycling, or getting public transport.
Anyway, after the recent rape, murder and corruption unpleasantnesses involving the rozzers which even they found impossible to defend, it's nice to see the right returning to reflexive support for the polis. Quite a comforting sense of normality about it.
That's him as Constituency MP as opposed to LOTO or PM.
And before the last eight years' expenditure on the project. In that contact, perfectly reasonable to change his position; it's not as though he's been in power during that period.
There were certainly arguments against HS2 - but given where we now are, it would be nuts not to complete it.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
Indeed
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
I wouldn't sacrifice my children's quality of life by dumping our garden to go live in a flat, even if it meant a pay rise. Not that you need to in the modern age where people can increasingly work from home anyway, but some things are more important.
People have a choice, people in the NW overwhelmingly do not want to live in cities. Nothing wrong with those who do, I respect their choice, but there's nothing wrong with those who like me choose to have a home and garden instead of flat.
I notice in your prior edit you mentioned Wigan specifically with regards to having access to Manchester's public transport. It does indeed, and that's great, even if most choose not to use it.
Of Wigan's workforce a rather impressive 22% work from home, and of the 78% who commute to work 58/78 do so by driving. So that's three quarters of commuters driving.
I'm not sure of the remaining one quarter how that splits between walking (probably most of the remainder), cycling, or getting public transport.
I've been away for a week (Crete near Khania - recommended, sun, sea and mountains galore) so just catching up. I see Labour is now a clear favourite in mid-Beds. There was intense Labour leafleting and canvassing last week as the PVs landed (presumably the other parties too) and the punishing schedule is continuing - 3 canvass sessions and 8 leaflet rounds today.
For my sins I need to be qat both major Con and Lab conferences for the day job and I'm hoping to spend a few days in Tamworth in between helping in the (remarkably under-reported) by-election there - will report back if I do.
NB: there is reportedly an air traffic controller shortage at Gatwick, so planes flying late in the day are reportedly often subject to long delays, because problems accumulate during the day. My flight last night was two hours late (arriving 3am...) for that reason.
Wow. One might think they would exercise a little more caution.
More information about yesterday’s Khalino military airfield incident. As per Main Directorate of Intelligence of Ukraine: At the airfield "Khalino" in the Kursk region, a Ukrainian drone was landed by Russian electronic warfare systems on the runway. When the leadership of the aviation regiment and FSB officers arrived for closer inspection drone exploded. As claimed, the following were killed or injured during the explosion: → commander of the 14th aviation regiment; → one of his deputies; → a group of aviator officers; → a representative of the FSB military counterintelligence; → airport employees. https://x.com/bayraktar_1love/status/1706237220758147200?s=20
Now that’s my favourite Ukraine story of the day.
Did the Russians turn off their electronic countermeasures once it had landed, handing control of the drone back to the Ukranians?
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Ideally though would be motorways and new towns and cities away from London. Why does everyone have to go into London?
Build more Milton Keynes and other new towns across the country, no need for everyone to be going into a single city. And their cars will be nowhere near your M25.
New motorways - the A1M has been built from the M1 to Scotch Corner replacing the A1.
That's him as Constituency MP as opposed to LOTO or PM.
So you are saying that, like our own beloved @HYUFD, he is allowed not to actually believe in anything and supports issues as long as they are expedient and serve his current purpose?
I now understand the HS2 strategy. At the Tory party conference Sunak will be able to announce that he has successfully opposed Keir Starmer's plan to scrap HS2 and that it will definitely be built as planned.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
Indeed
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
I wouldn't sacrifice my children's quality of life by dumping our garden to go live in a flat, even if it meant a pay rise. Not that you need to in the modern age where people can increasingly work from home anyway, but some things are more important.
People have a choice, people in the NW overwhelmingly do not want to live in cities. Nothing wrong with those who do, I respect their choice, but there's nothing wrong with those who like me choose to have a home and garden instead of flat.
I notice in your prior edit you mentioned Wigan specifically with regards to having access to Manchester's public transport. It does indeed, and that's great, even if most choose not to use it.
Of Wigan's workforce a rather impressive 22% work from home, and of the 78% who commute to work 58/78 do so by driving. So that's three quarters of commuters driving.
I'm not sure of the remaining one quarter how that splits between walking (probably most of the remainder), cycling, or getting public transport.
I live in Sale
8km south of St Peters Square
I have a house, a garden and a tram stop three minutes from my front door that gets me into town in less than 20 minutes
That enables me to live a decent quality of life and add to the agglomeration effect around Manchester
Where are am international company going to invest in the future, in a location with access to huge numbers of skilled staff in Munich or Barcelona or a city like Manchester and Birmingham where the infrastructure is so limited the volume of skilled staff available to that company looking at investing is vastly limited?
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
Indeed
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
I wouldn't sacrifice my children's quality of life by dumping our garden to go live in a flat, even if it meant a pay rise. Not that you need to in the modern age where people can increasingly work from home anyway, but some things are more important.
People have a choice, people in the NW overwhelmingly do not want to live in cities. Nothing wrong with those who do, I respect their choice, but there's nothing wrong with those who like me choose to have a home and garden instead of flat.
I notice in your prior edit you mentioned Wigan specifically with regards to having access to Manchester's public transport. It does indeed, and that's great, even if most choose not to use it.
Of Wigan's workforce a rather impressive 22% work from home, and of the 78% who commute to work 58/78 do so by driving. So that's three quarters of commuters driving.
I'm not sure of the remaining one quarter how that splits between walking (probably most of the remainder), cycling, or getting public transport.
So you accept not all northerners are drivers?
I never said they are.
Its a good rule of thumb never to say that all of any group is anything.
Most are, the vast majority are, but there'll always be exceptions. My own wife doesn't drive, she walks to work, but she'll ask me for a lift if she wants to get anywhere driving distance and doesn't want to ride a bus.
If you want to build agglomeration effects for the North don't try to remake the country and force people to live in flats they don't want to live in. Build more motorways to connect the North's towns to each other rather than forcing traffic onto either local roads or our very spare and insufficient motorway network like the M6/M62.
On topic: In the US, wealth is often a negative for Republican candidates, but not for Democratic candidates. Notable examples: FDR, the Kennedys, and, currently, California Governor Gavin Newsom.
There are ways Republicans can lessen that problem. For example, by putting their assets in a blind trust, after they are elected.
Or by showing they are in touch with average people, as George W. Bush did, in a number of ways. For example, by earning his money by providing something popular, a major league baseball team. (From time to time, he sat in the regular seats so he could listen to fans' thoughts about ways to improve their experiences at the ball park.)
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Trump tends if anything to exaggerate his wealth and business acumen for political advantage as a Republican, whereas Bloomberg was seen as an elitist who tried to buy the Democratic nomination.
It's possible those on the economic right find it a bit trickier overall if they are wealthy, however, simply because the type of policies they implement tend to be small state and low tax, and the obvious jibe is that this benefits them personally. A wealthy centre/left politician is less likely to be implementing the type of policies that can easily be portrayed as benefiting themselves and their friends.
In practice, only the wealthy have much chance to get ahead in US politics.
Joe Biden isn't massively wealthy, is he? Or at least he wasn't as VP - he made a lot from books/speaking engagements in his post-VP, pre-President period.
I mean, these things are relative - clearly, he is a lot wealthier than most Americans, and was well paid as a Senator for decades. But he's nowhere near the group of US politicians who can self-fund to a significant degree.
Wealthy populist demagogues often claim it's a virtue because they can't be bought. This is one of Donald Trump's lines and it's quite an effective one. Many of the suckers who follow him buy into it. 'The tough ass businessman beholden to nobody unlike your normal craven corrupt politicians'.
There is at least one point where it counts - Mitt Romney says that not a few of his colleagues were unable to contemplate spending the $5k per day he spends on security, after voting to convict Trump in his impeachment.
And Trump has been able to fund the legal bills of his alleged co-conspirators. Which can't harm his efforts to ensure their silence.
That's him as Constituency MP as opposed to LOTO or PM.
Ah, that's ok then. ?
Back on Planet Earth the question is "Surely Sunak won't cancel HS2 on the eve of the Tory Party conference in Manchester despite 2019 GE pledges to level up the North?" By the time the question reaches PB and posts surpass double figures the narrative becomes "Starmer is failing to support HS2/ the car lobby/ ULEZ/ the EU/ Brexit/ the NHS/ junior doctors (delete as appropriate) and Gordon Brown sold all the gold".
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That's a very road-oriented argument, though, whatever its merits for that area. Doesn't work for a railway using a whole new level of rolling stock and track, not least because the signalling will almost certainly be modernised at the same time.
Sure it can if you're talking local transportation rather than grand projects.
Want to build Northern Powerhouse Rail? You could start by building the stretch from Liverpool to Warrington, then open that once constructed. And repeat that across the network until its all built.
The instance on doing it as a grand project to London is what's made it take forever.
Trouble with that argument is it's still stuck on C19 decisions. It's very much as if you insisted on making a motorway by widening only the roads existing in the 1930s - including ones goiung through city centres, and so on.
That approach to NPR is itself a very strong indication of a second grade system devised by second grade minds in Whitehall and Westminster.
Eh? I'm talking about a new line.
There's already a rail line between Warrington and Liverpool, indeed between all those places, but as far as I'm aware NPR is planned as a new line.
So break the new line into specific, measurable, achievable and realistic timely steps and open each step when its done while preparing for the next steps.
Sure you won't get all the benefits immediately, but you'll get some benefits sooner and you'll get on with actually just building the bloody thing rather than going back and forth for decades.
Don't wait half a century for it all to be built before opening any of it.
But a new line in bits is useless unless it connects with existing bits. Above all for an inter-city long range line. And you want to be able to have the new line away from the old one to make better use of line layout.
I thought the complaint was a lack of capacity for local transportation? Its not useless for local transportation.
Until its built in full the pre-existing intercity long range line still exists.
But for local transportation that is relieved the moment you open the new bits. And once the new bits are hooked up, then you now have 2 intercity long range routes.
End destination is the same, route is open in full. But along the way, the intermediate steps should be of positive use and if they're actually built and opened then it might not take 50 years to finish the full route. HS2 has taken longer than the main elements of the M6 took to build and hook up into each other.
But if you build it with those limitations, it'll be useless for long distance fast trains, with the constraints baked in. No better than the existing line.
Amazon to invest up to $4bn in AI start-up Anthropic.
"The start-up’s new alliance with AWS appeared to be a shift away from Google, which invested $300M in Anthropic last yr. It comes just 7 months after Anthropic said it would use Google's cloud."
Not really, last week's Deltapoll was an outlier with the Tories down 5%.
We're back to the normal range for Deltapoll.
I mean this time last month Deltapoll had the Tories on 30% and a Labour lead of 16% just like today.
That’s not stopping the papers from pushing a different narrative:
“The Conservatives have slashed Labour’s poll lead by eight points in the wake of a bold Downing Street policy push as an election expert said voters remain “wobbly” on Sir Keir Starmer.”
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
Indeed
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
I wouldn't sacrifice my children's quality of life by dumping our garden to go live in a flat, even if it meant a pay rise. Not that you need to in the modern age where people can increasingly work from home anyway, but some things are more important.
People have a choice, people in the NW overwhelmingly do not want to live in cities. Nothing wrong with those who do, I respect their choice, but there's nothing wrong with those who like me choose to have a home and garden instead of flat.
I notice in your prior edit you mentioned Wigan specifically with regards to having access to Manchester's public transport. It does indeed, and that's great, even if most choose not to use it.
Of Wigan's workforce a rather impressive 22% work from home, and of the 78% who commute to work 58/78 do so by driving. So that's three quarters of commuters driving.
I'm not sure of the remaining one quarter how that splits between walking (probably most of the remainder), cycling, or getting public transport.
I live in Sale
8km south of St Peters Square
I have a house, a garden and a tram stop three minutes from my front door that gets me into town in less than 20 minutes
That enables me to live a decent quality of life and add to the agglomeration effect around Manchester
Where are am international company going to invest in the future, in a location with access to huge numbers of skilled staff in Munich or Barcelona or a city like Manchester and Birmingham where the infrastructure is so limited the volume of skilled staff available to that company looking at investing is vastly limited?
Build the infrastructure and people can commute. There are many business parks located outside of cities that people can drive to in case you've missed it, the whole of Warrington is surrounded by them because Warrington is one of the few well connected towns in the North West with Motorways with access to the M6, M62, M56 etc - and you can commute to those business parks from Runcorn, Widnes etc too. Other towns should have the same opportunities. In the same 20 minutes as you I can drive a 17 mile commute.
Besides, its the 2020s, people increasingly work from home anyway. Forcing people into high-rises is such a ridiculous outdated notion.
The latest HS2 rumour doing the rounds is a delay rather than scrapping .
Basically we’re too frightened to cancel it but will just kick it into the long grass. Anyone thinking that this section of HS2 will ever be built is clearly deluded .
A delay solely to pretend that Rishi can afford to deliver tax cuts.
No 10 has worked out belatedly that cutting taxes after moaning about a lack of money for HS2 might not be a good look .
God this government makes me sick .
According to Yougov more Northerners oppose HS2 than support it anyway.
Of course, we Northerners drive. If you want to help the North then invest in our long-neglected motorway network that hasn't been touched for fifty years would be a better starting point than yet another bloody trainline to London.
And if you're going to invest in Northern Rail, then invest in Northern Rail. NPR would be a far better levelling up exercise than a trainline to London.
But to actually build HS2 but then not bother with the one link to the North? That's just adding insult to injury, then spitting at us too.
Don't expect gratitude from Northerners for that.
There isn't a special Northern driving gene.
Indeed, people in the north have some of the lowest access to cars outside of London, and some of the shortest commutes.
And that was an argument for NPR rail, and for more roads, to increase the economic capacity of the north by melding it into a larger region where everyone can reach every job, cf London and commuting from the Home Counties, as opposed to Liverpool to Manchester being a major expedition replete with huskies and sleds.
To be fair, linkages between Manchester and Liverpool are ok. 6 trains per hour, with two of those being sub-40 minute journeys. It’s not astonishingly good, but it’s not poor.
The problem is that relatively few people go from Manchester city centre to Liverpool city centre. Indeed, the reasons why the two cities do not function as one city region – why I in the suburbs of Manchester would be less than keen to take a job in the centre of Liverpool – is that the typical journey would be home suburb – local city centre – other city centre. Possibly with a fourth leg to the other city suburb on the other end. And these legs don’t necessarily connect well (or at all) with the fast trains.
One of the things NPR can give us, which is quite exciting, is the potential to take fast and fast-ish trains off the suburban network. Take the Warrington Central line, for example (or the CLC line, as people in the know insist on calling it to show that they’re in the know). If we could, by using NPR, take all the fast trains off that line, we could run far more suburban services, giving people in places like Allerton in Liverpool or Urmston in suburban Manchester – really good rail markets both – a proper metro-style frequency. Much greater reliability too. And that, as much as fast Liverpool to Manchester services, is the key to making the two cities act as one.
It's the same argument as HS2. It’s a capacity scheme masquerading as a get-there-faster scheme. But unfortunately DfT and treasury don’t really accept any claims for benefits monetisation apart from for journey speeds. Which makes rail schemes very difficult to make a case for.
(That’s all true of Liverpool-Manchester. Manchester-Leeds journeys are slow and unreliable, and if you want to go from Liverpool to Leeds or Sheffield it’s definitely not commutable. For these trips, speed is a definite selling point.)
Not really, last week's Deltapoll was an outlier with the Tories down 5%.
We're back to the normal range for Deltapoll.
I mean this time last month Deltapoll had the Tories on 30% and a Labour lead of 16% just like today.
That’s not stopping the papers from pushing a different narrative:
“The Conservatives have slashed Labour’s poll lead by eight points in the wake of a bold Downing Street policy push as an election expert said voters remain “wobbly” on Sir Keir Starmer.”
Delta poll seems to be particularly jumpy so hard to draw too many conclusions . Best wait for some of the others to report.
I did expect a large bounce initially after Sunaks man of the people speech , it might have duped enough low information voters but the YouGov tracker seemed to pour cold water on that .
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Ideally though would be motorways and new towns and cities away from London. Why does everyone have to go into London?
Build more Milton Keynes and other new towns across the country, no need for everyone to be going into a single city. And their cars will be nowhere near your M25.
New motorways - the A1M has been built from the M1 to Scotch Corner replacing the A1.
True, but this was 18 years ago. I remember when I was working away being stuck in traffic listening to the Ashes.
Not really, last week's Deltapoll was an outlier with the Tories down 5%.
We're back to the normal range for Deltapoll.
I mean this time last month Deltapoll had the Tories on 30% and a Labour lead of 16% just like today.
That’s not stopping the papers from pushing a different narrative:
“The Conservatives have slashed Labour’s poll lead by eight points in the wake of a bold Downing Street policy push as an election expert said voters remain “wobbly” on Sir Keir Starmer.”
Not really, last week's Deltapoll was an outlier with the Tories down 5%.
We're back to the normal range for Deltapoll.
I mean this time last month Deltapoll had the Tories on 30% and a Labour lead of 16% just like today.
That’s not stopping the papers from pushing a different narrative:
“The Conservatives have slashed Labour’s poll lead by eight points in the wake of a bold Downing Street policy push as an election expert said voters remain “wobbly” on Sir Keir Starmer.”
The Conservatives are going to go down some pretty unpleasant rabbit holes for the win if their client media reporting remains so positive over last week's bizarre U-turns.
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That's a very road-oriented argument, though, whatever its merits for that area. Doesn't work for a railway using a whole new level of rolling stock and track, not least because the signalling will almost certainly be modernised at the same time.
Sure it can if you're talking local transportation rather than grand projects.
Want to build Northern Powerhouse Rail? You could start by building the stretch from Liverpool to Warrington, then open that once constructed. And repeat that across the network until its all built.
The instance on doing it as a grand project to London is what's made it take forever.
Trouble with that argument is it's still stuck on C19 decisions. It's very much as if you insisted on making a motorway by widening only the roads existing in the 1930s - including ones goiung through city centres, and so on.
That approach to NPR is itself a very strong indication of a second grade system devised by second grade minds in Whitehall and Westminster.
Eh? I'm talking about a new line.
There's already a rail line between Warrington and Liverpool, indeed between all those places, but as far as I'm aware NPR is planned as a new line.
So break the new line into specific, measurable, achievable and realistic timely steps and open each step when its done while preparing for the next steps.
Sure you won't get all the benefits immediately, but you'll get some benefits sooner and you'll get on with actually just building the bloody thing rather than going back and forth for decades.
Don't wait half a century for it all to be built before opening any of it.
But a new line in bits is useless unless it connects with existing bits. Above all for an inter-city long range line. And you want to be able to have the new line away from the old one to make better use of line layout.
I thought the complaint was a lack of capacity for local transportation? Its not useless for local transportation.
Until its built in full the pre-existing intercity long range line still exists.
But for local transportation that is relieved the moment you open the new bits. And once the new bits are hooked up, then you now have 2 intercity long range routes.
End destination is the same, route is open in full. But along the way, the intermediate steps should be of positive use and if they're actually built and opened then it might not take 50 years to finish the full route. HS2 has taken longer than the main elements of the M6 took to build and hook up into each other.
But if you build it with those limitations, it'll be useless for long distance fast trains, with the constraints baked in. No better than the existing line.
What limitations?
Besides I thought the limitation was capacity?
And not running express fast trains on one line, while slow local trains on the other?
Once the line is finished you can switch one to express/fast online.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
Indeed
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
I wouldn't sacrifice my children's quality of life by dumping our garden to go live in a flat, even if it meant a pay rise. Not that you need to in the modern age where people can increasingly work from home anyway, but some things are more important.
People have a choice, people in the NW overwhelmingly do not want to live in cities. Nothing wrong with those who do, I respect their choice, but there's nothing wrong with those who like me choose to have a home and garden instead of flat.
I notice in your prior edit you mentioned Wigan specifically with regards to having access to Manchester's public transport. It does indeed, and that's great, even if most choose not to use it.
Of Wigan's workforce a rather impressive 22% work from home, and of the 78% who commute to work 58/78 do so by driving. So that's three quarters of commuters driving.
I'm not sure of the remaining one quarter how that splits between walking (probably most of the remainder), cycling, or getting public transport.
I live in Sale
8km south of St Peters Square
I have a house, a garden and a tram stop three minutes from my front door that gets me into town in less than 20 minutes
That enables me to live a decent quality of life and add to the agglomeration effect around Manchester
Where are am international company going to invest in the future, in a location with access to huge numbers of skilled staff in Munich or Barcelona or a city like Manchester and Birmingham where the infrastructure is so limited the volume of skilled staff available to that company looking at investing is vastly limited?
Build the infrastructure and people can commute. There are many business parks located outside of cities that people can drive to in case you've missed it, the whole of Warrington is surrounded by them because Warrington is one of the few well connected towns in the North West with Motorways with access to the M6, M62, M56 etc - and you can commute to those business parks from Runcorn, Widnes etc too. Other towns should have the same opportunities. In the same 20 minutes as you I can drive a 17 mile commute.
Besides, its the 2020s, people increasingly work from home anyway. Forcing people into high-rises is such a ridiculous outdated notion.
You ignored the point about why would am international company invest in Manchester compared to Munich
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Ideally though would be motorways and new towns and cities away from London. Why does everyone have to go into London?
Build more Milton Keynes and other new towns across the country, no need for everyone to be going into a single city. And their cars will be nowhere near your M25.
New motorways - the A1M has been built from the M1 to Scotch Corner replacing the A1.
True, but this was 18 years ago. I remember when I was working away being stuck in traffic listening to the Ashes.
Don’t we all remember exactly where we were 18 years ago listening to the Ashes? 🏏
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
Indeed
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
I wouldn't sacrifice my children's quality of life by dumping our garden to go live in a flat, even if it meant a pay rise. Not that you need to in the modern age where people can increasingly work from home anyway, but some things are more important.
People have a choice, people in the NW overwhelmingly do not want to live in cities. Nothing wrong with those who do, I respect their choice, but there's nothing wrong with those who like me choose to have a home and garden instead of flat.
I notice in your prior edit you mentioned Wigan specifically with regards to having access to Manchester's public transport. It does indeed, and that's great, even if most choose not to use it.
Of Wigan's workforce a rather impressive 22% work from home, and of the 78% who commute to work 58/78 do so by driving. So that's three quarters of commuters driving.
I'm not sure of the remaining one quarter how that splits between walking (probably most of the remainder), cycling, or getting public transport.
So you accept not all northerners are drivers?
I never said they are.
Its a good rule of thumb never to say that all of any group is anything.
Most are, the vast majority are, but there'll always be exceptions. My own wife doesn't drive, she walks to work, but she'll ask me for a lift if she wants to get anywhere driving distance and doesn't want to ride a bus.
If you want to build agglomeration effects for the North don't try to remake the country and force people to live in flats they don't want to live in. Build more motorways to connect the North's towns to each other rather than forcing traffic onto either local roads or our very spare and insufficient motorway network like the M6/M62.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
Indeed
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
I wouldn't sacrifice my children's quality of life by dumping our garden to go live in a flat, even if it meant a pay rise. Not that you need to in the modern age where people can increasingly work from home anyway, but some things are more important.
People have a choice, people in the NW overwhelmingly do not want to live in cities. Nothing wrong with those who do, I respect their choice, but there's nothing wrong with those who like me choose to have a home and garden instead of flat.
I notice in your prior edit you mentioned Wigan specifically with regards to having access to Manchester's public transport. It does indeed, and that's great, even if most choose not to use it.
Of Wigan's workforce a rather impressive 22% work from home, and of the 78% who commute to work 58/78 do so by driving. So that's three quarters of commuters driving.
I'm not sure of the remaining one quarter how that splits between walking (probably most of the remainder), cycling, or getting public transport.
So you accept not all northerners are drivers?
I never said they are.
Its a good rule of thumb never to say that all of any group is anything.
Most are, the vast majority are, but there'll always be exceptions. My own wife doesn't drive, she walks to work, but she'll ask me for a lift if she wants to get anywhere driving distance and doesn't want to ride a bus.
If you want to build agglomeration effects for the North don't try to remake the country and force people to live in flats they don't want to live in. Build more motorways to connect the North's towns to each other rather than forcing traffic onto either local roads or our very spare and insufficient motorway network like the M6/M62.
You should take your own advice.
Of course, we Northerners drive
I'm missing the word all in that sentence, can you highlight it?
On average that's absolutely and categorically true, I never said all. You inserted the claim of all, not me.
Delta poll seems to be particularly jumpy so hard to draw too many conclusions . Best wait for some of the others to report.
I did expect a large bounce initially after Sunaks man of the people speech , it might have duped enough low information voters but the YouGov tracker seemed to pour cold water on that .
Sunak seized the agenda with his remarkable by-pass of Parliament speech. There was no right of reply and initially the client media fawned over it and promoted the false elements of the narrative. Same with IHT this week. But as these items fall out of the news cycle we will need a proper confected black swan.
A capital punishment speech in Downing Street to correspond with next summer's Lucy Letby trial has to be the cherry on the cake. Floated a day after Parliament recesses for summer. It's going to happen isn't it?
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
Indeed
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
I wouldn't sacrifice my children's quality of life by dumping our garden to go live in a flat, even if it meant a pay rise. Not that you need to in the modern age where people can increasingly work from home anyway, but some things are more important.
People have a choice, people in the NW overwhelmingly do not want to live in cities. Nothing wrong with those who do, I respect their choice, but there's nothing wrong with those who like me choose to have a home and garden instead of flat.
I notice in your prior edit you mentioned Wigan specifically with regards to having access to Manchester's public transport. It does indeed, and that's great, even if most choose not to use it.
Of Wigan's workforce a rather impressive 22% work from home, and of the 78% who commute to work 58/78 do so by driving. So that's three quarters of commuters driving.
I'm not sure of the remaining one quarter how that splits between walking (probably most of the remainder), cycling, or getting public transport.
So you accept not all northerners are drivers?
I never said they are.
Its a good rule of thumb never to say that all of any group is anything.
Most are, the vast majority are, but there'll always be exceptions. My own wife doesn't drive, she walks to work, but she'll ask me for a lift if she wants to get anywhere driving distance and doesn't want to ride a bus.
If you want to build agglomeration effects for the North don't try to remake the country and force people to live in flats they don't want to live in. Build more motorways to connect the North's towns to each other rather than forcing traffic onto either local roads or our very spare and insufficient motorway network like the M6/M62.
But the idea that Northerner's drive more - is that a chicken or egg issue; is it a product of under investment in public transport rather than the cause? I, would suggest that the high usage of cars is indicative of an area poor public transport that should be improved, not that public transport investment isn't needed.
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That's a very road-oriented argument, though, whatever its merits for that area. Doesn't work for a railway using a whole new level of rolling stock and track, not least because the signalling will almost certainly be modernised at the same time.
Sure it can if you're talking local transportation rather than grand projects.
Want to build Northern Powerhouse Rail? You could start by building the stretch from Liverpool to Warrington, then open that once constructed. And repeat that across the network until its all built.
The instance on doing it as a grand project to London is what's made it take forever.
Trouble with that argument is it's still stuck on C19 decisions. It's very much as if you insisted on making a motorway by widening only the roads existing in the 1930s - including ones goiung through city centres, and so on.
That approach to NPR is itself a very strong indication of a second grade system devised by second grade minds in Whitehall and Westminster.
Eh? I'm talking about a new line.
There's already a rail line between Warrington and Liverpool, indeed between all those places, but as far as I'm aware NPR is planned as a new line.
So break the new line into specific, measurable, achievable and realistic timely steps and open each step when its done while preparing for the next steps.
Sure you won't get all the benefits immediately, but you'll get some benefits sooner and you'll get on with actually just building the bloody thing rather than going back and forth for decades.
Don't wait half a century for it all to be built before opening any of it.
But a new line in bits is useless unless it connects with existing bits. Above all for an inter-city long range line. And you want to be able to have the new line away from the old one to make better use of line layout.
I thought the complaint was a lack of capacity for local transportation? Its not useless for local transportation.
Until its built in full the pre-existing intercity long range line still exists.
But for local transportation that is relieved the moment you open the new bits. And once the new bits are hooked up, then you now have 2 intercity long range routes.
End destination is the same, route is open in full. But along the way, the intermediate steps should be of positive use and if they're actually built and opened then it might not take 50 years to finish the full route. HS2 has taken longer than the main elements of the M6 took to build and hook up into each other.
But if you build it with those limitations, it'll be useless for long distance fast trains, with the constraints baked in. No better than the existing line.
What limitations?
Besides I thought the limitation was capacity?
And not running express fast trains on one line, while slow local trains on the other?
Once the line is finished you can switch one to express/fast online.
In principle, yes. Indeed, that's pretty much the plan - Phase 1 from London to Birmingham; phase 2a from Birmingham to Crewe; phase 2b from Crewe to Manchester. Possible future phases bypassing bits of the West Coast Main Line north of Wigan. But perhaps you mean shorter sections? Again, in principle, I agree with you. It quickly gets very complicated though. For example, if you started in Manchester and built the section from Manchester to Manchester Airport, great - but then you have to get back to the WCML, and you couldn't, say, put 4tph down the Manchester Airport - Crewe section (at present this only supports 1 Manchester-London tph, the others going via Stoke). And you spend a lot on connections to the network - network outages are phenomenally expensive (which is another reason why new alignments are often cheaper than four-tracking). You end up with a lot of short connections between the high speed and classic network - not necessarily a bad thing, but not necessarily a good thing either, and certainly an expensive thing.
But overall, yes, that's the way to do it where you can.
Again, it is this attitude of cops being above the law that is part of the problem with the narrative at the moment. We're not hearing "your job is too important to the public safety for you to strike" - which is what has been argued for other sectors. Armed police are a luxury we don't need, perhaps?
The Met armed officers going on some sort of strike action only to be supported by government ministers is a significant moment. Police in Britain aren't allowed to form unions or take industrial action. Even if they were, this would constitute illegal industrial action.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
Indeed
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
I wouldn't sacrifice my children's quality of life by dumping our garden to go live in a flat, even if it meant a pay rise. Not that you need to in the modern age where people can increasingly work from home anyway, but some things are more important.
People have a choice, people in the NW overwhelmingly do not want to live in cities. Nothing wrong with those who do, I respect their choice, but there's nothing wrong with those who like me choose to have a home and garden instead of flat.
I notice in your prior edit you mentioned Wigan specifically with regards to having access to Manchester's public transport. It does indeed, and that's great, even if most choose not to use it.
Of Wigan's workforce a rather impressive 22% work from home, and of the 78% who commute to work 58/78 do so by driving. So that's three quarters of commuters driving.
I'm not sure of the remaining one quarter how that splits between walking (probably most of the remainder), cycling, or getting public transport.
So you accept not all northerners are drivers?
I never said they are.
Its a good rule of thumb never to say that all of any group is anything.
Most are, the vast majority are, but there'll always be exceptions. My own wife doesn't drive, she walks to work, but she'll ask me for a lift if she wants to get anywhere driving distance and doesn't want to ride a bus.
If you want to build agglomeration effects for the North don't try to remake the country and force people to live in flats they don't want to live in. Build more motorways to connect the North's towns to each other rather than forcing traffic onto either local roads or our very spare and insufficient motorway network like the M6/M62.
But the idea that Northerner's drive more - is that a chicken or egg issue; is it a product of under investment in public transport rather than the cause? I, would suggest that the high usage of cars is indicative of an area poor public transport that should be improved, not that public transport investment isn't needed.
No.
There are public transport options, a great many of them, but most people choose not to use them. Direct door-to-door transportation works better than public transport does if you're spread out.
Indeed to address the question of why Liverpool doesn't have a tramline for instance - well it used to. 100 years ago it had one, but then people stopped using it so eventually it shut down and now its not there anymore.
Not everyone wants to live in or get to a high rise in London or any other city. From my house I can get onto the motorway in 3 minutes and then within quarter of an hour not just be in my town but depending upon which route I take one of multiple other towns instead. I'd quite like others to have the same opportunities I'm fortunate to have.
If you want to get thousands of people into high rises then public transport works best for that. If that's not where they want to go though, door to door direct transportation works better.
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That's a very road-oriented argument, though, whatever its merits for that area. Doesn't work for a railway using a whole new level of rolling stock and track, not least because the signalling will almost certainly be modernised at the same time.
Sure it can if you're talking local transportation rather than grand projects.
Want to build Northern Powerhouse Rail? You could start by building the stretch from Liverpool to Warrington, then open that once constructed. And repeat that across the network until its all built.
The instance on doing it as a grand project to London is what's made it take forever.
Trouble with that argument is it's still stuck on C19 decisions. It's very much as if you insisted on making a motorway by widening only the roads existing in the 1930s - including ones goiung through city centres, and so on.
That approach to NPR is itself a very strong indication of a second grade system devised by second grade minds in Whitehall and Westminster.
Eh? I'm talking about a new line.
There's already a rail line between Warrington and Liverpool, indeed between all those places, but as far as I'm aware NPR is planned as a new line.
So break the new line into specific, measurable, achievable and realistic timely steps and open each step when its done while preparing for the next steps.
Sure you won't get all the benefits immediately, but you'll get some benefits sooner and you'll get on with actually just building the bloody thing rather than going back and forth for decades.
Don't wait half a century for it all to be built before opening any of it.
But a new line in bits is useless unless it connects with existing bits. Above all for an inter-city long range line. And you want to be able to have the new line away from the old one to make better use of line layout.
I thought the complaint was a lack of capacity for local transportation? Its not useless for local transportation.
Until its built in full the pre-existing intercity long range line still exists.
But for local transportation that is relieved the moment you open the new bits. And once the new bits are hooked up, then you now have 2 intercity long range routes.
End destination is the same, route is open in full. But along the way, the intermediate steps should be of positive use and if they're actually built and opened then it might not take 50 years to finish the full route. HS2 has taken longer than the main elements of the M6 took to build and hook up into each other.
But if you build it with those limitations, it'll be useless for long distance fast trains, with the constraints baked in. No better than the existing line.
What limitations?
Besides I thought the limitation was capacity?
And not running express fast trains on one line, while slow local trains on the other?
Once the line is finished you can switch one to express/fast online.
In principle, yes. Indeed, that's pretty much the plan - Phase 1 from London to Birmingham; phase 2a from Birmingham to Crewe; phase 2b from Crewe to Manchester. Possible future phases bypassing bits of the West Coast Main Line north of Wigan. But perhaps you mean shorter sections? Again, in principle, I agree with you. It quickly gets very complicated though. For example, if you started in Manchester and built the section from Manchester to Manchester Airport, great - but then you have to get back to the WCML, and you couldn't, say, put 4tph down the Manchester Airport - Crewe section (at present this only supports 1 Manchester-London tph, the others going via Stoke). And you spend a lot on connections to the network - network outages are phenomenally expensive (which is another reason why new alignments are often cheaper than four-tracking). You end up with a lot of short connections between the high speed and classic network - not necessarily a bad thing, but not necessarily a good thing either, and certainly an expensive thing.
But overall, yes, that's the way to do it where you can.
Why would you need to connect to the WCML?
Manchester Airport is already connected to the pre-existing rail network. If you want to transfer from one line to another, why couldn't passengers get out and walk from one connection to another? In fact they pretty much have to anyway depending upon what their destination is.
But for many people the Airport is the destination.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Ideally though would be motorways and new towns and cities away from London. Why does everyone have to go into London?
Build more Milton Keynes and other new towns across the country, no need for everyone to be going into a single city. And their cars will be nowhere near your M25.
New motorways - the A1M has been built from the M1 to Scotch Corner replacing the A1.
True, but this was 18 years ago. I remember when I was working away being stuck in traffic listening to the Ashes.
Don’t we all remember exactly where we were 18 years ago listening to the Ashes? 🏏
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
Indeed
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
I wouldn't sacrifice my children's quality of life by dumping our garden to go live in a flat, even if it meant a pay rise. Not that you need to in the modern age where people can increasingly work from home anyway, but some things are more important.
People have a choice, people in the NW overwhelmingly do not want to live in cities. Nothing wrong with those who do, I respect their choice, but there's nothing wrong with those who like me choose to have a home and garden instead of flat.
I notice in your prior edit you mentioned Wigan specifically with regards to having access to Manchester's public transport. It does indeed, and that's great, even if most choose not to use it.
Of Wigan's workforce a rather impressive 22% work from home, and of the 78% who commute to work 58/78 do so by driving. So that's three quarters of commuters driving.
I'm not sure of the remaining one quarter how that splits between walking (probably most of the remainder), cycling, or getting public transport.
So you accept not all northerners are drivers?
I never said they are.
Its a good rule of thumb never to say that all of any group is anything.
Most are, the vast majority are, but there'll always be exceptions. My own wife doesn't drive, she walks to work, but she'll ask me for a lift if she wants to get anywhere driving distance and doesn't want to ride a bus.
If you want to build agglomeration effects for the North don't try to remake the country and force people to live in flats they don't want to live in. Build more motorways to connect the North's towns to each other rather than forcing traffic onto either local roads or our very spare and insufficient motorway network like the M6/M62.
But the idea that Northerner's drive more - is that a chicken or egg issue; is it a product of under investment in public transport rather than the cause? I, would suggest that the high usage of cars is indicative of an area poor public transport that should be improved, not that public transport investment isn't needed.
No.
There are public transport options, a great many of them, but most people choose not to use them. Direct door-to-door transportation works better than public transport does if you're spread out.
Indeed to address the question of why Liverpool doesn't have a tramline for instance - well it used to. 100 years ago it had one, but then people stopped using it so eventually it shut down and now its not there anymore.
Not everyone wants to live in or get to a high rise in London or any other city. From my house I can get onto the motorway in 3 minutes and then within quarter of an hour not just be in my town but depending upon which route I take one of multiple other towns instead. I'd quite like others to have the same opportunities I'm fortunate to have.
If you want to get thousands of people into high rises then public transport works best for that. If that's not where they want to go though, door to door direct transportation works better.
Let people choose what works for them.
I don't know the history of Liverpool's tram system specifically - although I have experienced Manchester's and Birmingham's and they seem well used.
And currently people can't choose what works for them, because lots of public transport in the North is crap - so they can only choose driving.
Delta poll seems to be particularly jumpy so hard to draw too many conclusions . Best wait for some of the others to report.
I did expect a large bounce initially after Sunaks man of the people speech , it might have duped enough low information voters but the YouGov tracker seemed to pour cold water on that .
Sunak seized the agenda with his remarkable by-pass of Parliament speech. There was no right of reply and initially the client media fawned over it and promoted the false elements of the narrative. Same with IHT this week. But as these items fall out of the news cycle we will need a proper confected black swan.
A capital punishment speech in Downing Street to correspond with next summer's Lucy Letby trial has to be the cherry on the cake. Floated a day after Parliament recesses for summer. It's going to happen isn't it?
The thing about capital punishment is nobody is a single issue voter in support of it, and those that oppose it really oppose it. So I could see proposing bringing it back being a poll tax like event - mass disruption in the streets where lots of people just come out and say "no, that's too far".
The delay is utterly meaningless frankly. It means the Northern leg will be determined by the incoming Labour government next year unless the polls change dramatically.
Over to you Starmer.
Is it meaningless ? Presumably a policy change will have costs related to changes in contracts, even if it's looking several years ahead ( @Casino_Royale ?) ?
Only to change again in 12-18 months' time.
Yes.
Also, and this isn't widely known, almost all the construction contracts at HS2 were let on a cost-plus basis (which means contractors are rewarded at their cost, plus their overhead, plus a - decent - profit) for any work they do, and compensated for any change or delay on top, which essentially means they take little to no risk.
This can happen when the scope and risk allocation isn't clear, such that the supply chain simply won't take on the works without it, which is exactly what has happened with HS2: the business case kept changing, and so did the core scope (which was overengineered to the original spec of speed, and then never revised to reflect the modified capacity argument) all the while as the network was meddled with on a CapEx basis whilst the line was porked out to deal with political challenges and objections. And, they still haven't made a decision on Euston.
It's a case study of poor sponsorship and client control.
Ah, apologies - I mentioned that there was something unusual with the risk allocation on HS2 earlier in the previous thread, but managed to get the specifics exactly inverted.
What sort of mitigations can we put in place in order to avoid this sort of situation with future projects? Perhaps some sort of independent delivery authority, which would take charge once the initial political decision to proceed has been taken?
Yes. Keep the civil service beaks out of it. Like the vaccines. Imagine they'd been tasked with vaccine delivery?
I had Bank of England independence in mind when I said that, but that's a model which I suspect you might feel is a little creaky at best!
But the Vaccine Taskforce is a good comparison. The government sets the end goal, together with some broad priorities within that, and defines the funding envelope. And then it it's handed off to an Infrastructure Taskforce who are charged with getting the work done.
The work of the taskforce would be funded to cover the bare minimum of costs, with a bigger chunk on top which would be paid according to results. They'd still be responsible to parliament, with a select ctte to scrutinise their work - but government wouldn't be able to change the goal or funding without passing further legislation.
That'd shield it from short-term politicking (which Sunak would claim to appreciate!), in-fighting SpAds, and civil servants with misaligned priorities. And it'd also be similar enough to the late C19th way of doing things that traditionalists would be kept happy.
We certainly need to do something. As things stand, projects that run for longer than one parliament risk becoming almost undeliverable, and that's going to have huge costs for us in the future.
There's something in that, but there's also a problem that politicians go for major projects that are all or nothing essentially, which results in this HS2 madness.
Take a leaf out of the motorways book when they were built. The M6 is the longest motorway in England and the first to begin construction, but it wasn't all opened at once. In 1958 it began life as simply the Preston Bypass and cost in the tens of millions in modern money, not tens of billions.
Year by year then from 1958 to the end of the 70s roughly we had patches built across the country which were individually usable from when they were built, and eventually over time joined up into something grander.
There's no need to go all in from day one. Design some new routes and build them piecemeal, opening each one as soon as its built, rather than spending decades on white elephants because they're more impressive sounding projects.
Its a shame we've wasted fifty years and not continued doing what we were doing then, all parties bear responsibility. If we'd continued investing in our infrastructure at the rate we were then, how much better off would we be now?
That's a very road-oriented argument, though, whatever its merits for that area. Doesn't work for a railway using a whole new level of rolling stock and track, not least because the signalling will almost certainly be modernised at the same time.
Sure it can if you're talking local transportation rather than grand projects.
Want to build Northern Powerhouse Rail? You could start by building the stretch from Liverpool to Warrington, then open that once constructed. And repeat that across the network until its all built.
The instance on doing it as a grand project to London is what's made it take forever.
Trouble with that argument is it's still stuck on C19 decisions. It's very much as if you insisted on making a motorway by widening only the roads existing in the 1930s - including ones goiung through city centres, and so on.
That approach to NPR is itself a very strong indication of a second grade system devised by second grade minds in Whitehall and Westminster.
Eh? I'm talking about a new line.
There's already a rail line between Warrington and Liverpool, indeed between all those places, but as far as I'm aware NPR is planned as a new line.
So break the new line into specific, measurable, achievable and realistic timely steps and open each step when its done while preparing for the next steps.
Sure you won't get all the benefits immediately, but you'll get some benefits sooner and you'll get on with actually just building the bloody thing rather than going back and forth for decades.
Don't wait half a century for it all to be built before opening any of it.
But a new line in bits is useless unless it connects with existing bits. Above all for an inter-city long range line. And you want to be able to have the new line away from the old one to make better use of line layout.
I thought the complaint was a lack of capacity for local transportation? Its not useless for local transportation.
Until its built in full the pre-existing intercity long range line still exists.
But for local transportation that is relieved the moment you open the new bits. And once the new bits are hooked up, then you now have 2 intercity long range routes.
End destination is the same, route is open in full. But along the way, the intermediate steps should be of positive use and if they're actually built and opened then it might not take 50 years to finish the full route. HS2 has taken longer than the main elements of the M6 took to build and hook up into each other.
But if you build it with those limitations, it'll be useless for long distance fast trains, with the constraints baked in. No better than the existing line.
What limitations?
Besides I thought the limitation was capacity?
And not running express fast trains on one line, while slow local trains on the other?
Once the line is finished you can switch one to express/fast online.
In principle, yes. Indeed, that's pretty much the plan - Phase 1 from London to Birmingham; phase 2a from Birmingham to Crewe; phase 2b from Crewe to Manchester. Possible future phases bypassing bits of the West Coast Main Line north of Wigan. But perhaps you mean shorter sections? Again, in principle, I agree with you. It quickly gets very complicated though. For example, if you started in Manchester and built the section from Manchester to Manchester Airport, great - but then you have to get back to the WCML, and you couldn't, say, put 4tph down the Manchester Airport - Crewe section (at present this only supports 1 Manchester-London tph, the others going via Stoke). And you spend a lot on connections to the network - network outages are phenomenally expensive (which is another reason why new alignments are often cheaper than four-tracking). You end up with a lot of short connections between the high speed and classic network - not necessarily a bad thing, but not necessarily a good thing either, and certainly an expensive thing.
But overall, yes, that's the way to do it where you can.
Why would you need to connect to the WCML?
Manchester Airport is already connected to the pre-existing rail network. If you want to transfer from one line to another, why couldn't passengers get out and walk from one connection to another? In fact they pretty much have to anyway depending upon what their destination is.
But for many people the Airport is the destination.
I think we might be at cross purposes here. I thought you were talking about building a new high speed line (like HS2) in lots of short sections (in the same way that you might get a long distance high speed road built). And you'd run your fast trains on the new sections, relieving the old ones and allowing you to do more with them, in the same way that you'd take through traffic off congested sections of the road network where there are lots of local journeys. Which is a perfectly reasonable analog, but harder (though not impossible) to do on rail due to the need to get your fast trains from the new section back to the existing section. But perhaps I am misunderstanding what you are proposing.
Delta poll seems to be particularly jumpy so hard to draw too many conclusions . Best wait for some of the others to report.
I did expect a large bounce initially after Sunaks man of the people speech , it might have duped enough low information voters but the YouGov tracker seemed to pour cold water on that .
Sunak seized the agenda with his remarkable by-pass of Parliament speech. There was no right of reply and initially the client media fawned over it and promoted the false elements of the narrative. Same with IHT this week. But as these items fall out of the news cycle we will need a proper confected black swan.
A capital punishment speech in Downing Street to correspond with next summer's Lucy Letby trial has to be the cherry on the cake. Floated a day after Parliament recesses for summer. It's going to happen isn't it?
The thing about capital punishment is nobody is a single issue voter in support of it, and those that oppose it really oppose it. So I could see proposing bringing it back being a poll tax like event - mass disruption in the streets where lots of people just come out and say "no, that's too far".
I think it's a category error to compare it to the poll tax. The poll tax hit some people disproportionately in their pockets - in fact the kind of people who are most likely to support bringing back the death penalty.
I think HS2 will likely follow the Edinburgh Trams and Crossrail "journey".
Political cowardice, incompetence, increased costs, lots of whining from the motoring lobby. Years or decades late.
And yet significantly higher patronage than expected. Over capacity immediately. Benefits not included in the business case appear out of nowhere.
Commuters jump out of their cars en masse. Increased footfall in local businesses. Huge economies of scale - the original line has seen a doubling of passengers itself, and Lothian Bus passenger numbers grew too.
BUILD IT
TLDR: HS2 is going to be a disaster but still worth doing, in the end.
Our pessimism on the benefits of public transport investment is a sort of cultural cringe.
Our pessimism on the benefits of investment is cringe.
We stopped building our motorway network in the 1970s too. Fifty wasted years while our population has grown 25%
We need to get going on investment. Roads, rails, trams, paths - we've neglected them all and we need to invest in all of them sadly.
You can only neglect your infrastructure so long before it creaks.
You will be SHOCKED when you hear about Mr Beeching.
Let me see if I can put it in a way you may understand.
Abandoning investment in our road infrastructure fifty long years ago and leaving things to be neglected while our population has grown by a quarter in that time, has been as damaging as the Beeching cuts to rail at a time while our population was stable.
You wonder why I say its not either/or, we need both? That's why. Maybe that will help you come around to understanding the stunning neglect our infrastructure has suffered for half a century.
I am not sure you are correct. More roads just mean more congestion.
I remember my enthusiasm in the late eighties when I could get off the North and South Circular roads and onto the shiny new M25.
The M25 is now a car park. Or are you planning on a series of concentric motorways every 5 miles out from the current motorway. If you do that there will only be room for motorways and nothing else in Southern England and the Home Counties. Building motorways is not the answer. Sh*t public transport on the other hand is a disaster.
More roads don't mean more congestion, more people do. Our population has grown 25% in that timeline.
What new motorways were built in that time? None?
If you have a motorway network designed for our current population, then add 17 million people while not building a single other motorway (not counting the M6 Toll here, what a joke that is) then what did you expect?
Yes a second M25 would be a fantastic idea, a lot of vehicles travelling into that one have no need to be there. And if our population is stable then that might be all you need, but if our population keeps growing we'll keep needing more and more infrastructure.
Why not a third one?
FYI: 40% of households in Liverpool do not have access to a car. 53% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute less than 10km.
Not sure what you want me to take away from the fact that 47% of people in Middlesbrough have a commute over 10km? That's more than I expected to be honest.
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
But 2m people live in the urban area around Manchester, irrespective of where the local authority boundaries may start and end.
Yes. And those of us who live in places like Warrington, Wigan, Widnes and places that don't even begin with a W like Runcorn* overwhelmingly choose to live in homes where we can park our cars rather than city centres.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
Indeed
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
I wouldn't sacrifice my children's quality of life by dumping our garden to go live in a flat, even if it meant a pay rise. Not that you need to in the modern age where people can increasingly work from home anyway, but some things are more important.
People have a choice, people in the NW overwhelmingly do not want to live in cities. Nothing wrong with those who do, I respect their choice, but there's nothing wrong with those who like me choose to have a home and garden instead of flat.
I notice in your prior edit you mentioned Wigan specifically with regards to having access to Manchester's public transport. It does indeed, and that's great, even if most choose not to use it.
Of Wigan's workforce a rather impressive 22% work from home, and of the 78% who commute to work 58/78 do so by driving. So that's three quarters of commuters driving.
I'm not sure of the remaining one quarter how that splits between walking (probably most of the remainder), cycling, or getting public transport.
So you accept not all northerners are drivers?
I never said they are.
Its a good rule of thumb never to say that all of any group is anything.
Most are, the vast majority are, but there'll always be exceptions. My own wife doesn't drive, she walks to work, but she'll ask me for a lift if she wants to get anywhere driving distance and doesn't want to ride a bus.
If you want to build agglomeration effects for the North don't try to remake the country and force people to live in flats they don't want to live in. Build more motorways to connect the North's towns to each other rather than forcing traffic onto either local roads or our very spare and insufficient motorway network like the M6/M62.
But the idea that Northerner's drive more - is that a chicken or egg issue; is it a product of under investment in public transport rather than the cause? I, would suggest that the high usage of cars is indicative of an area poor public transport that should be improved, not that public transport investment isn't needed.
No.
There are public transport options, a great many of them, but most people choose not to use them. Direct door-to-door transportation works better than public transport does if you're spread out.
Indeed to address the question of why Liverpool doesn't have a tramline for instance - well it used to. 100 years ago it had one, but then people stopped using it so eventually it shut down and now its not there anymore.
Not everyone wants to live in or get to a high rise in London or any other city. From my house I can get onto the motorway in 3 minutes and then within quarter of an hour not just be in my town but depending upon which route I take one of multiple other towns instead. I'd quite like others to have the same opportunities I'm fortunate to have.
If you want to get thousands of people into high rises then public transport works best for that. If that's not where they want to go though, door to door direct transportation works better.
Let people choose what works for them.
I don't know the history of Liverpool's tram system specifically - although I have experienced Manchester's and Birmingham's and they seem well used.
And currently people can't choose what works for them, because lots of public transport in the North is crap - so they can only choose driving.
The reason why Liverpool’s (and everyone else’s) tram system closed down are because they were replaced by buses, which were much more flexible and infrastructure-light. And actually buses offered a more pleasant journey than trams in those days, which clanked along roughly. Bus journeys in the 50s and 60s were brilliant. Car ownership was low, so lots of people used them, so high frequencies were viable; and because car ownership was low, congestion was low by today’s standards, so buses offered reasonably quick journeys. Indeed, they were viable enough to run a bus with a conductor, which sped journeys up. But as car ownership increased, fewer people got buses, which led to worse services, and buses entered a death spiral. Meanwhile congestion increased. What modern light rail offers – usually – is a system segregated or given priority over that congestion. People get Metrolink into Manchester from its suburbs because it is quicker and more reliable than driving. But that would not be true any more of an old fashioned on-street tram, which was basically just a fixed track bus.
Delta poll seems to be particularly jumpy so hard to draw too many conclusions . Best wait for some of the others to report.
I did expect a large bounce initially after Sunaks man of the people speech , it might have duped enough low information voters but the YouGov tracker seemed to pour cold water on that .
Sunak seized the agenda with his remarkable by-pass of Parliament speech. There was no right of reply and initially the client media fawned over it and promoted the false elements of the narrative. Same with IHT this week. But as these items fall out of the news cycle we will need a proper confected black swan.
A capital punishment speech in Downing Street to correspond with next summer's Lucy Letby trial has to be the cherry on the cake. Floated a day after Parliament recesses for summer. It's going to happen isn't it?
The thing about capital punishment is nobody is a single issue voter in support of it, and those that oppose it really oppose it. So I could see proposing bringing it back being a poll tax like event - mass disruption in the streets where lots of people just come out and say "no, that's too far".
I think it's a category error to compare it to the poll tax. The poll tax hit some people disproportionately in their pockets - in fact the kind of people who are most likely to support bringing back the death penalty.
Potentially, but I think even a load of wet libs will be up in arms about it and willing to protest. It is just something that, once you've decided is bad, is hard to bring back (because the arguments for it are bad). It isn't a deterrent, it isn't a fitting punishment, and innocent people will be killed by the state and those people will be disproportionately poor and from minority backgrounds. People just won't stand for it.
Delta poll seems to be particularly jumpy so hard to draw too many conclusions . Best wait for some of the others to report.
I did expect a large bounce initially after Sunaks man of the people speech , it might have duped enough low information voters but the YouGov tracker seemed to pour cold water on that .
Sunak seized the agenda with his remarkable by-pass of Parliament speech. There was no right of reply and initially the client media fawned over it and promoted the false elements of the narrative. Same with IHT this week. But as these items fall out of the news cycle we will need a proper confected black swan.
A capital punishment speech in Downing Street to correspond with next summer's Lucy Letby trial has to be the cherry on the cake. Floated a day after Parliament recesses for summer. It's going to happen isn't it?
The thing about capital punishment is nobody is a single issue voter in support of it, and those that oppose it really oppose it. So I could see proposing bringing it back being a poll tax like event - mass disruption in the streets where lots of people just come out and say "no, that's too far".
I think it's a category error to compare it to the poll tax. The poll tax hit some people disproportionately in their pockets - in fact the kind of people who are most likely to support bringing back the death penalty.
Potentially, but I think even a load of wet libs will be up in arms about it and willing to protest. It is just something that, once you've decided is bad, is hard to bring back (because the arguments for it are bad). It isn't a deterrent, it isn't a fitting punishment, and innocent people will be killed by the state and those people will be disproportionately poor and from minority backgrounds. People just won't stand for it.
Perhaps it should be put to a referendum so that we can decide it democratically?
Again, it is this attitude of cops being above the law that is part of the problem with the narrative at the moment. We're not hearing "your job is too important to the public safety for you to strike" - which is what has been argued for other sectors. Armed police are a luxury we don't need, perhaps?
The Met armed officers going on some sort of strike action only to be supported by government ministers is a significant moment. Police in Britain aren't allowed to form unions or take industrial action. Even if they were, this would constitute illegal industrial action.
What consequences will there be for those officers who went on strike? I mean, it's not like there was a proper ballot, so this was effectively wildcat action and would therefore have been illegal even if the police did ordinarily have the right to strike.
We probably can't afford to sack the 300 in one go - that's more than 10% of the total number of armed officers in the Met. But equally, it can't be right that they merely lose a day's pay - they've shown that they're prepared to break the law, which is pretty fucking serious given that they're entrusted with such a great responsibility.
Delta poll seems to be particularly jumpy so hard to draw too many conclusions . Best wait for some of the others to report.
I did expect a large bounce initially after Sunaks man of the people speech , it might have duped enough low information voters but the YouGov tracker seemed to pour cold water on that .
Sunak seized the agenda with his remarkable by-pass of Parliament speech. There was no right of reply and initially the client media fawned over it and promoted the false elements of the narrative. Same with IHT this week. But as these items fall out of the news cycle we will need a proper confected black swan.
A capital punishment speech in Downing Street to correspond with next summer's Lucy Letby trial has to be the cherry on the cake. Floated a day after Parliament recesses for summer. It's going to happen isn't it?
The thing about capital punishment is nobody is a single issue voter in support of it, and those that oppose it really oppose it. So I could see proposing bringing it back being a poll tax like event - mass disruption in the streets where lots of people just come out and say "no, that's too far".
I think it's a category error to compare it to the poll tax. The poll tax hit some people disproportionately in their pockets - in fact the kind of people who are most likely to support bringing back the death penalty.
Potentially, but I think even a load of wet libs will be up in arms about it and willing to protest. It is just something that, once you've decided is bad, is hard to bring back (because the arguments for it are bad). It isn't a deterrent, it isn't a fitting punishment, and innocent people will be killed by the state and those people will be disproportionately poor and from minority backgrounds. People just won't stand for it.
Perhaps it should be put to a referendum so that we can decide it democratically?
What does the latest incarnation of 'William Glenn' think about capital punishment?
Again, it is this attitude of cops being above the law that is part of the problem with the narrative at the moment. We're not hearing "your job is too important to the public safety for you to strike" - which is what has been argued for other sectors. Armed police are a luxury we don't need, perhaps?
The Met armed officers going on some sort of strike action only to be supported by government ministers is a significant moment. Police in Britain aren't allowed to form unions or take industrial action. Even if they were, this would constitute illegal industrial action.
What consequences will there be for those officers who went on strike? I mean, it's not like there was a proper ballot, so this was effectively wildcat action and would therefore have been illegal even if the police did ordinarily have the right to strike.
We probably can't afford to sack the 300 in one go - that's more than 10% of the total number of armed officers in the Met. But equally, it can't be right that they merely lose a day's pay - they've shown that they're prepared to break the law, which is pretty fucking serious given that they're entrusted with such a great responsibility.
I mean, I don't see why they can't be sacked - or at least demoted from the armed forces unit and put on desk duty for the rest of their career.
Again, it is this attitude of cops being above the law that is part of the problem with the narrative at the moment. We're not hearing "your job is too important to the public safety for you to strike" - which is what has been argued for other sectors. Armed police are a luxury we don't need, perhaps?
The Met armed officers going on some sort of strike action only to be supported by government ministers is a significant moment. Police in Britain aren't allowed to form unions or take industrial action. Even if they were, this would constitute illegal industrial action.
What consequences will there be for those officers who went on strike? I mean, it's not like there was a proper ballot, so this was effectively wildcat action and would therefore have been illegal even if the police did ordinarily have the right to strike.
We probably can't afford to sack the 300 in one go - that's more than 10% of the total number of armed officers in the Met. But equally, it can't be right that they merely lose a day's pay - they've shown that they're prepared to break the law, which is pretty fucking serious given that they're entrusted with such a great responsibility.
I mean, I don't see why they can't be sacked - or at least demoted from the armed forces unit and put on desk duty for the rest of their career.
They didn't go on strike the unvolunteered for something they'd volunteered for.
But now they are back at work, so all is well, in terms of AFOs, it appears.
I find it amazing that the GOP are constantly given a free pass at being able to govern. This is a no brainer - something could pass the House easily if they just worked with Democrats. But it is somehow more important for McCarthy to keep his job? Insanity. If this was a Democrat all the talk would be about how they aren't negotiating well enough with Republicans, whereas for the GOP the sentiment is really "well, what do you expect?"...
Again, it is this attitude of cops being above the law that is part of the problem with the narrative at the moment. We're not hearing "your job is too important to the public safety for you to strike" - which is what has been argued for other sectors. Armed police are a luxury we don't need, perhaps?
The Met armed officers going on some sort of strike action only to be supported by government ministers is a significant moment. Police in Britain aren't allowed to form unions or take industrial action. Even if they were, this would constitute illegal industrial action.
What consequences will there be for those officers who went on strike? I mean, it's not like there was a proper ballot, so this was effectively wildcat action and would therefore have been illegal even if the police did ordinarily have the right to strike.
We probably can't afford to sack the 300 in one go - that's more than 10% of the total number of armed officers in the Met. But equally, it can't be right that they merely lose a day's pay - they've shown that they're prepared to break the law, which is pretty fucking serious given that they're entrusted with such a great responsibility.
They're not on strike, they're just not prepared to carry a firearm. It's an entirely voluntary decision for officers. They'll police as the 99% of non firearm officers do.
Meanwhile, all this talk of Bully XLs I bet a fair few on here, perhaps even moi, thought all very well with a South London schoolgirl but you could surely punch its lights out if it tried anything on our fair goodselves.
I bumped into one over the weekend. Well, it was out for a walk and the owners (charming, very much PLU) scrambled to put its lead on when they saw us (there were four of us, mounted, as it happens). It stood there on its lead looking at us. And it was jesusandmaryandtheweedonkeymotherfucking huge. Built just extraordinarily solidly. Like hewn from granite. There is no way on earth that anyone has any business owning a dog like that.
Meanwhile, all this talk of Bully XLs I bet a fair few on here, perhaps even moi, thought all very well with a South London schoolgirl but you could surely punch its lights out if it tried anything on our fair goodselves.
I bumped into one over the weekend. Well, it was out for a walk and the owners (charming, very much PLU) scrambled to put its lead on when they saw us (there were four of us, mounted, as it happens). It stood there on its lead looking at us. And it was jesusandmaryandtheweedonkeymotherfucking huge. Built just extraordinarily solidly. Like hewn from granite. There is no way on earth that anyone has any business owning a dog like that.
Indeed. A friend of mine got menaced by one the other day
Walking around with one of those is like walking around with a flamethrower. With a rusty trigger. That might go off any minute. And the owner/carrier of the flamethrower is a known psycho
There is no way on earth that anyone has any business owning a dog like that.
Which appears to be the prime attraction to owning one
The funny thing is the owners were terribly charming, Schoffel-types the other dog out with them was a working cocker and they were hugely apologetic, it seemed for even owning the big dog. I would have loved to ask them...."why?"
Again, it is this attitude of cops being above the law that is part of the problem with the narrative at the moment. We're not hearing "your job is too important to the public safety for you to strike" - which is what has been argued for other sectors. Armed police are a luxury we don't need, perhaps?
The Met armed officers going on some sort of strike action only to be supported by government ministers is a significant moment. Police in Britain aren't allowed to form unions or take industrial action. Even if they were, this would constitute illegal industrial action.
What consequences will there be for those officers who went on strike? I mean, it's not like there was a proper ballot, so this was effectively wildcat action and would therefore have been illegal even if the police did ordinarily have the right to strike.
We probably can't afford to sack the 300 in one go - that's more than 10% of the total number of armed officers in the Met. But equally, it can't be right that they merely lose a day's pay - they've shown that they're prepared to break the law, which is pretty fucking serious given that they're entrusted with such a great responsibility.
They're not on strike, they're just not prepared to carry a firearm. It's an entirely voluntary decision for officers. They'll police as the 99% of non firearm officers do.
It was suggested previously that opting out should be non-voluntary. As in you couldn’t just turn in your ticket because reasons.
But then someone pointed out that it was fairly trivial to fail the re-qualification tests they have to do regularly for firearms. Miss the target, lose your ticket….
Again, it is this attitude of cops being above the law that is part of the problem with the narrative at the moment. We're not hearing "your job is too important to the public safety for you to strike" - which is what has been argued for other sectors. Armed police are a luxury we don't need, perhaps?
The Met armed officers going on some sort of strike action only to be supported by government ministers is a significant moment. Police in Britain aren't allowed to form unions or take industrial action. Even if they were, this would constitute illegal industrial action.
What consequences will there be for those officers who went on strike? I mean, it's not like there was a proper ballot, so this was effectively wildcat action and would therefore have been illegal even if the police did ordinarily have the right to strike.
We probably can't afford to sack the 300 in one go - that's more than 10% of the total number of armed officers in the Met. But equally, it can't be right that they merely lose a day's pay - they've shown that they're prepared to break the law, which is pretty fucking serious given that they're entrusted with such a great responsibility.
They're not on strike, they're just not prepared to carry a firearm. It's an entirely voluntary decision for officers. They'll police as the 99% of non firearm officers do.
But the job they're paid to do is to be a firearms officer - so by not being prepared to carry a firearm, they made themselves unavailable for work. If they wanted to work in a different role, they should have negotiated that in the normal way with their line management.
Sure, we can't force someone to do their job - but if they choose not to do it, then they should face the consequences.
I find it amazing that the GOP are constantly given a free pass at being able to govern. This is a no brainer - something could pass the House easily if they just worked with Democrats. But it is somehow more important for McCarthy to keep his job? Insanity. If this was a Democrat all the talk would be about how they aren't negotiating well enough with Republicans, whereas for the GOP the sentiment is really "well, what do you expect?"...
Again, it is this attitude of cops being above the law that is part of the problem with the narrative at the moment. We're not hearing "your job is too important to the public safety for you to strike" - which is what has been argued for other sectors. Armed police are a luxury we don't need, perhaps?
The Met armed officers going on some sort of strike action only to be supported by government ministers is a significant moment. Police in Britain aren't allowed to form unions or take industrial action. Even if they were, this would constitute illegal industrial action.
What consequences will there be for those officers who went on strike? I mean, it's not like there was a proper ballot, so this was effectively wildcat action and would therefore have been illegal even if the police did ordinarily have the right to strike.
We probably can't afford to sack the 300 in one go - that's more than 10% of the total number of armed officers in the Met. But equally, it can't be right that they merely lose a day's pay - they've shown that they're prepared to break the law, which is pretty fucking serious given that they're entrusted with such a great responsibility.
They're not on strike, they're just not prepared to carry a firearm. It's an entirely voluntary decision for officers. They'll police as the 99% of non firearm officers do.
But the job they're paid to do is to be a firearms officer - so by not being prepared to carry a firearm, they made themselves unavailable for work. If they wanted to work in a different role, they should have negotiated that in the normal way with their line management.
Sure, we can't force someone to do their job - but if they choose not to do it, then they should face the consequences.
I'm sure they will be docked 2/24 x 1/365 of their wages during which time they will have been regular police officers available to be assigned for duty.
Again, it is this attitude of cops being above the law that is part of the problem with the narrative at the moment. We're not hearing "your job is too important to the public safety for you to strike" - which is what has been argued for other sectors. Armed police are a luxury we don't need, perhaps?
The Met armed officers going on some sort of strike action only to be supported by government ministers is a significant moment. Police in Britain aren't allowed to form unions or take industrial action. Even if they were, this would constitute illegal industrial action.
What consequences will there be for those officers who went on strike? I mean, it's not like there was a proper ballot, so this was effectively wildcat action and would therefore have been illegal even if the police did ordinarily have the right to strike.
We probably can't afford to sack the 300 in one go - that's more than 10% of the total number of armed officers in the Met. But equally, it can't be right that they merely lose a day's pay - they've shown that they're prepared to break the law, which is pretty fucking serious given that they're entrusted with such a great responsibility.
They're not on strike, they're just not prepared to carry a firearm. It's an entirely voluntary decision for officers. They'll police as the 99% of non firearm officers do.
But the job they're paid to do is to be a firearms officer - so by not being prepared to carry a firearm, they made themselves unavailable for work. If they wanted to work in a different role, they should have negotiated that in the normal way with their line management.
Sure, we can't force someone to do their job - but if they choose not to do it, then they should face the consequences.
Again; it's one rule for them and another rule for others. If I suddenly refused to do a part of my job, even a part I had volunteered for, at short notice and no discussion with my line manager - I would be reprimanded. And it's clear that this action was just throwing their toys out of the pram, a "they'll miss me when I'm gone" cry.
I find it amazing that the GOP are constantly given a free pass at being able to govern. This is a no brainer - something could pass the House easily if they just worked with Democrats. But it is somehow more important for McCarthy to keep his job? Insanity. If this was a Democrat all the talk would be about how they aren't negotiating well enough with Republicans, whereas for the GOP the sentiment is really "well, what do you expect?"...
On which subject, I was idly wondering last week: what happened to Krist Novoselic, the bassist from Nirvana? Kurt shot himself, Dave went on to become the biggest rock star in the world, Krist ... became leader of the Forward Party, a third party (note the indefinite article - I understand there are others) which exists purely to argue for a less polarised polity (which actually seems the most important issue facing the Americans face right now). There is a future, albeit a sadly implausible one, in which the voters of America look in despair at the crazies in both parties and elect the bassist from Nirvana as the leader of the free world. If nothing else, the Foo Fighters would definitely play the inauguration.
Again, it is this attitude of cops being above the law that is part of the problem with the narrative at the moment. We're not hearing "your job is too important to the public safety for you to strike" - which is what has been argued for other sectors. Armed police are a luxury we don't need, perhaps?
The Met armed officers going on some sort of strike action only to be supported by government ministers is a significant moment. Police in Britain aren't allowed to form unions or take industrial action. Even if they were, this would constitute illegal industrial action.
What consequences will there be for those officers who went on strike? I mean, it's not like there was a proper ballot, so this was effectively wildcat action and would therefore have been illegal even if the police did ordinarily have the right to strike.
We probably can't afford to sack the 300 in one go - that's more than 10% of the total number of armed officers in the Met. But equally, it can't be right that they merely lose a day's pay - they've shown that they're prepared to break the law, which is pretty fucking serious given that they're entrusted with such a great responsibility.
They're not on strike, they're just not prepared to carry a firearm. It's an entirely voluntary decision for officers. They'll police as the 99% of non firearm officers do.
But the job they're paid to do is to be a firearms officer - so by not being prepared to carry a firearm, they made themselves unavailable for work. If they wanted to work in a different role, they should have negotiated that in the normal way with their line management.
Sure, we can't force someone to do their job - but if they choose not to do it, then they should face the consequences.
Again; it's one rule for them and another rule for others. If I suddenly refused to do a part of my job, even a part I had volunteered for, at short notice and no discussion with my line manager - I would be reprimanded. And it's clear that this action was just throwing their toys out of the pram, a "they'll miss me when I'm gone" cry.
I mean yes, I get it. If they had all done this then there would be an issue.
I think they were bringing to peoples' attention the difficulties of working in a job where you can kill people and then being able to be penalised for doing that job, ie killing people. I think the action has done that quite well.
Not to say that the Met, along with other police forces is not a stinking den of corrupt, inept, and disingenuous coppers.
Comments
Until its built in full the pre-existing intercity long range line still exists.
But for local transportation that is relieved the moment you open the new bits. And once the new bits are hooked up, then you now have 2 intercity long range routes.
End destination is the same, route is open in full. But along the way, the intermediate steps should be of positive use and if they're actually built and opened then it might not take 50 years to finish the full route. HS2 has taken longer than the main elements of the M6 took to build and hook up into each other.
There's 11 train lines in London's Underground, why not stop at 1? Or 2? Or 10?
Don't stop investing in infrastructure, especially while our population is growing.
But preferable would be new towns or cities built away from overpopulated cities anyway, which can be built with a clean slate and built to whatever standard of welcoming of public transport or anything else you care about is concerned. What's wrong with that?
Whatever it takes. Just like the Underground.
And the more you have, the more you can connect places away from a single central point. The whole country should be connected to each other, not just all routes going to Rome/Londinium.
Handing over petitions against HS2 in Parliament today with my neighbouring MP @TulipSiddiq @CamdenLabour
https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/657539020533145600?s=20
FYI: 6 million of the North West's 7 million people live in neither Liverpool nor Manchester.
@DPJHodges
Is this right. Sunak's current strategy is to go to Manchester parroting "people are wrong to speculate on HS2". He's then going to come back from Manchester and say "actually, the speculation was right. We're axing it". And we're all supposed to say "he's a straight talker"...
@KevinASchofield
Replying to
@DPJHodges
No10 explained at lobby that he didn't mean the speculation was wrong, he meant it was wrong to speculate.
Seriously.
Greater Manchester population is about 2.9m, across ten boroughs.
Metrolink serves 7 of those 10 boroughs showing the commuting patterns of 'Manchester' bare little resemblance to the map of local authorities.
We could move into a city centre if we wanted to, we don't want to.
Free choice should enable those who want to live in a city centre flat and get about with mass transit to do so, and those who want to live in a redbrick semidetached home with a garden our kids can run around in and get around by driving can do so.
Free choice is a good thing.
* That line might read funnier if you read it with a speech impediment.
See, for example, the $2bn for Jared from Saudi.
As I noted earlier, Trump pardoned Sen Bob Menendez's co-defendant from his previous corruption case - so political ideology, or wealth are pretty irrelevant.
What matters is whether or not a politician is a crook.
But the vast majority of people in the 2m people around Manchester live in houses as you describe.
But by having larger cities you create larger economies, the agglomeration impact becomes greater and greater.
The UK lacks large second and third cities that you see across the world, Manchester and Brum probably should be about 4m people, yet they are half that size.
One of the major reasons our non London economy is so weak in this country is that lack of agglomeration due to the dispersed population we have leading to poor agglomeration effects away from the capital.
Live scenes from the HS2 just north of Watford:
The read across to the UK is that while National’s Luxon (the presumed next PM) is not considered exciting, visionary, or even especially sympathetic, the voters are going to trounce Labour anyway and by any means they have at their disposal.
Also, they are blaming Labour for inflation etc which in all honesty are global issues.
People have a choice, people in the NW overwhelmingly do not want to live in cities. Nothing wrong with those who do, I respect their choice, but there's nothing wrong with those who like me choose to have a home and garden instead of flat.
I notice in your prior edit you mentioned Wigan specifically with regards to having access to Manchester's public transport. It does indeed, and that's great, even if most choose not to use it.
Of Wigan's workforce a rather impressive 22% work from home, and of the 78% who commute to work 58/78 do so by driving. So that's three quarters of commuters driving.
I'm not sure of the remaining one quarter how that splits between walking (probably most of the remainder), cycling, or getting public transport.
Labour -3%
Conservative +5%
https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1706300183481332205?t=6hO5Zwa-4Vbk61WR7Y071Q&s=19
In that contact, perfectly reasonable to change his position; it's not as though he's been in power during that period.
There were certainly arguments against HS2 - but given where we now are, it would be nuts not to complete it.
For my sins I need to be qat both major Con and Lab conferences for the day job and I'm hoping to spend a few days in Tamworth in between helping in the (remarkably under-reported) by-election there - will report back if I do.
NB: there is reportedly an air traffic controller shortage at Gatwick, so planes flying late in the day are reportedly often subject to long delays, because problems accumulate during the day. My flight last night was two hours late (arriving 3am...) for that reason.
Did the Russians turn off their electronic countermeasures once it had landed, handing control of the drone back to the Ukranians?
Not a surprise for me lol!
Fair enough.
8km south of St Peters Square
I have a house, a garden and a tram stop three minutes from my front door that gets me into town in less than 20 minutes
That enables me to live a decent quality of life and add to the agglomeration effect around Manchester
Where are am international company going to invest in the future, in a location with access to huge numbers of skilled staff in Munich or Barcelona or a city like Manchester and Birmingham where the infrastructure is so limited the volume of skilled staff available to that company looking at investing is vastly limited?
Its a good rule of thumb never to say that all of any group is anything.
Most are, the vast majority are, but there'll always be exceptions. My own wife doesn't drive, she walks to work, but she'll ask me for a lift if she wants to get anywhere driving distance and doesn't want to ride a bus.
If you want to build agglomeration effects for the North don't try to remake the country and force people to live in flats they don't want to live in. Build more motorways to connect the North's towns to each other rather than forcing traffic onto either local roads or our very spare and insufficient motorway network like the M6/M62.
We're back to the normal range for Deltapoll.
I mean this time last month Deltapoll had the Tories on 30% and a Labour lead of 16% just like today.
And Trump has been able to fund the legal bills of his alleged co-conspirators. Which can't harm his efforts to ensure their silence.
https://x.com/electionmapsuk/status/1706300183481332205?s=61&t=s0ae0IFncdLS1Dc7J0P_TQ
"The start-up’s new alliance with AWS appeared to be a shift away from Google, which invested $300M in Anthropic last yr. It comes just 7 months after Anthropic said it would use Google's cloud."
The #AI war has become the #cloud war.
https://twitter.com/drrichjlaw/status/1706244894786756902
“The Conservatives have slashed Labour’s poll lead by eight points in the wake of a bold Downing Street policy push as an election expert said voters remain “wobbly” on Sir Keir Starmer.”
Top story on the DT front page at the moment.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/09/25/rishi-sunak-latest-news-live-hs2-osborne-heseltine-shapps/
Besides, its the 2020s, people increasingly work from home anyway. Forcing people into high-rises is such a ridiculous outdated notion.
The problem is that relatively few people go from Manchester city centre to Liverpool city centre. Indeed, the reasons why the two cities do not function as one city region – why I in the suburbs of Manchester would be less than keen to take a job in the centre of Liverpool – is that the typical journey would be home suburb – local city centre – other city centre. Possibly with a fourth leg to the other city suburb on the other end. And these legs don’t necessarily connect well (or at all) with the fast trains.
One of the things NPR can give us, which is quite exciting, is the potential to take fast and fast-ish trains off the suburban network. Take the Warrington Central line, for example (or the CLC line, as people in the know insist on calling it to show that they’re in the know). If we could, by using NPR, take all the fast trains off that line, we could run far more suburban services, giving people in places like Allerton in Liverpool or Urmston in suburban Manchester – really good rail markets both – a proper metro-style frequency. Much greater reliability too. And that, as much as fast Liverpool to Manchester services, is the key to making the two cities act as one.
It's the same argument as HS2. It’s a capacity scheme masquerading as a get-there-faster scheme. But unfortunately DfT and treasury don’t really accept any claims for benefits monetisation apart from for journey speeds. Which makes rail schemes very difficult to make a case for.
(That’s all true of Liverpool-Manchester. Manchester-Leeds journeys are slow and unreliable, and if you want to go from Liverpool to Leeds or Sheffield it’s definitely not commutable. For these trips, speed is a definite selling point.)
I did expect a large bounce initially after Sunaks man of the people speech , it might have duped enough low information voters but the YouGov tracker seemed to pour cold water on that .
They want it to be true, for many reasons.
It's the line about using statistics like a drunkard using a lamppost.
https://twitter.com/jasoncrawford/status/1706048684964679917
Besides I thought the limitation was capacity?
And not running express fast trains on one line, while slow local trains on the other?
Once the line is finished you can switch one to express/fast online.
Anyway, back to work, I'm too busy for this
Of course, we Northerners drive
On average that's absolutely and categorically true, I never said all. You inserted the claim of all, not me.
A capital punishment speech in Downing Street to correspond with next summer's Lucy Letby trial has to be the cherry on the cake. Floated a day after Parliament recesses for summer. It's going to happen isn't it?
But perhaps you mean shorter sections?
Again, in principle, I agree with you. It quickly gets very complicated though. For example, if you started in Manchester and built the section from Manchester to Manchester Airport, great - but then you have to get back to the WCML, and you couldn't, say, put 4tph down the Manchester Airport - Crewe section (at present this only supports 1 Manchester-London tph, the others going via Stoke). And you spend a lot on connections to the network - network outages are phenomenally expensive (which is another reason why new alignments are often cheaper than four-tracking). You end up with a lot of short connections between the high speed and classic network - not necessarily a bad thing, but not necessarily a good thing either, and certainly an expensive thing.
But overall, yes, that's the way to do it where you can.
https://twitter.com/ewangibbs/status/1706289542733385963
The Met armed officers going on some sort of strike action only to be supported by government ministers is a significant moment. Police in Britain aren't allowed to form unions or take industrial action. Even if they were, this would constitute illegal industrial action.
There are public transport options, a great many of them, but most people choose not to use them. Direct door-to-door transportation works better than public transport does if you're spread out.
Indeed to address the question of why Liverpool doesn't have a tramline for instance - well it used to. 100 years ago it had one, but then people stopped using it so eventually it shut down and now its not there anymore.
Not everyone wants to live in or get to a high rise in London or any other city. From my house I can get onto the motorway in 3 minutes and then within quarter of an hour not just be in my town but depending upon which route I take one of multiple other towns instead. I'd quite like others to have the same opportunities I'm fortunate to have.
If you want to get thousands of people into high rises then public transport works best for that. If that's not where they want to go though, door to door direct transportation works better.
Let people choose what works for them.
Manchester Airport is already connected to the pre-existing rail network. If you want to transfer from one line to another, why couldn't passengers get out and walk from one connection to another? In fact they pretty much have to anyway depending upon what their destination is.
But for many people the Airport is the destination.
And currently people can't choose what works for them, because lots of public transport in the North is crap - so they can only choose driving.
You're saying we're AIs who don't realise it ?
Mind (possibly circuits) blown.
I thought you were talking about building a new high speed line (like HS2) in lots of short sections (in the same way that you might get a long distance high speed road built). And you'd run your fast trains on the new sections, relieving the old ones and allowing you to do more with them, in the same way that you'd take through traffic off congested sections of the road network where there are lots of local journeys. Which is a perfectly reasonable analog, but harder (though not impossible) to do on rail due to the need to get your fast trains from the new section back to the existing section.
But perhaps I am misunderstanding what you are proposing.
I think I've posted twice in the last year.
Oh my fucking god this dude is a senator
https://twitter.com/reshetz/status/1706202096058413184
Bus journeys in the 50s and 60s were brilliant. Car ownership was low, so lots of people used them, so high frequencies were viable; and because car ownership was low, congestion was low by today’s standards, so buses offered reasonably quick journeys. Indeed, they were viable enough to run a bus with a conductor, which sped journeys up. But as car ownership increased, fewer people got buses, which led to worse services, and buses entered a death spiral. Meanwhile congestion increased.
What modern light rail offers – usually – is a system segregated or given priority over that congestion. People get Metrolink into Manchester from its suburbs because it is quicker and more reliable than driving. But that would not be true any more of an old fashioned on-street tram, which was basically just a fixed track bus.
We probably can't afford to sack the 300 in one go - that's more than 10% of the total number of armed officers in the Met. But equally, it can't be right that they merely lose a day's pay - they've shown that they're prepared to break the law, which is pretty fucking serious given that they're entrusted with such a great responsibility.
But now they are back at work, so all is well, in terms of AFOs, it appears.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/25/kevin-mccarthys-shutdown-matt-gaetz-00117896
I bumped into one over the weekend. Well, it was out for a walk and the owners (charming, very much PLU) scrambled to put its lead on when they saw us (there were four of us, mounted, as it happens). It stood there on its lead looking at us. And it was jesusandmaryandtheweedonkeymotherfucking huge. Built just extraordinarily solidly. Like hewn from granite. There is no way on earth that anyone has any business owning a dog like that.
Walking around with one of those is like walking around with a flamethrower. With a rusty trigger. That might go off any minute. And the owner/carrier of the flamethrower is a known psycho
But then someone pointed out that it was fairly trivial to fail the re-qualification tests they have to do regularly for firearms. Miss the target, lose your ticket….
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ive-abandoned-my-useless-british-passport/
Sure, we can't force someone to do their job - but if they choose not to do it, then they should face the consequences.
If you mean getting me to actually read the article, then nice try.
There is a future, albeit a sadly implausible one, in which the voters of America look in despair at the crazies in both parties and elect the bassist from Nirvana as the leader of the free world.
If nothing else, the Foo Fighters would definitely play the inauguration.
I think they were bringing to peoples' attention the difficulties of working in a job where you can kill people and then being able to be penalised for doing that job, ie killing people. I think the action has done that quite well.
Not to say that the Met, along with other police forces is not a stinking den of corrupt, inept, and disingenuous coppers.