Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
And yet railway services across the world are being automated. Also the idea that the public sector is ahead of anywhere on automation is a joke unless you mean automated by hiring contractors at huge day rates to do the work.
Starmer in hiding and some of his mps are trying to hide their RMT connections while other PPS stand in open defiance of the leadership
Yesterday afternoon Labour York MP Rachael Maskell stood up to ask a point of order, after Grant Shapps had spent an hour having fun pointing out all the Labour MPs who stood up to ask questions in defence of the strikes, without declaring their interests after pocketing thousands from the RMT Union. Following the question session Maskell stood up to complain to the deputy speaker that this was very unfair:
“You will know, Madam Deputy Speaker, that many members of the Labour party have a relationship with the trade unions that we are incredibly proud of, including with the RMT. The advice that I received from the Standards Commissioner ahead of that debate, and therefore ahead of today, stated under the requirements for declaration:
“Members are required, subject to the paragraphs below, to declare any financial interests which satisfy the test of relevance, including:
a) past financial interests (normally limited to those active within the last twelve months)”.
It is my recollection that the general election was two and a half years ago, so can you advise, Madam Deputy Speaker, on whether a declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests should keep being raised two and a half years after it has been made?”
To paraphrase Eleanor Laing’s no-nonsense response, she told MPs to present the whole truth when representing their union paymasters, not just try and get away without a declaration because of a small technicality in the members’ rule book.
If only Sebastian Fox and the Tory shills weren't lying when they said the RMT and Labour are in cahoots! Are the RMT affiliated to the party? No! Is Grant Shapps the one person that could have stopped the strike? Yes!
Have you seen the various clips of that idiot minister on TV last night? Embarrassing - for people like your good self who still parrots the Tory lie as a kind of muscle memory.
The RMT are funding some labour mps and what should embarrass labour is they are all over the place even trying to hide their sponsorship
Frankly I agree with Shapp's that HMG sets the parameters but it is upto the unions and employers to come to agreement on pay and modernisation including redundancies that are inevitable
Given that all rail companies have been nationalised and can't even fart let alone spend a single £ without Shapp's prior approval - Mr Shapp is playing games here.
I'm reminded of that day earlier on this year when Shapps announced his big integrated rail plan and Big G lapped it all up whereas those of us who use the railways a lot realised it was a load of bollocks.
A load of bollocks in what sense? I'm no fan of Grant Shapps / Michael Green but at least he has had the cojones to abolish the moronic franchising system – an international laughing stock – after decades of fiasco and farce.
They announced a series of exciting rail projects which were physically impossible (with the journey times quoted) and operationally impossible thanks to the huge gaps in the previously announced plans actually reducing instead of increasing capacity.
Not a single bit of work has been carried out by NR or outside consultants to flesh out the announced plans as actual proposals. Because the announcement was laughable bollocks. Same as when Chris Grayling was in the chair and used to propose that a "digital railway" was the non-building solution to the Castlefield Corridor bottleneck.
As for franchises, lets await what happens. Remember that the "nationalised" operators are operated by the private sector by direct edict from the DfT. Which is the same as when they were "privatised". Only when the entire framework is proposed for abolition can we consider awarding any credit. Which means Great British Railways being enacted. Spoiler alert - no work is being carried on on that either.
The abolition of franchising is not sufficient to sort out the railway, but it's a necessary first step. Regardless of the myriad holes in Shapps' strategy, at least he has had the cojones to rid of us of the Virgins, the Midland Mainlines, the Southerns and all the rest of the chiselling franchisees who embarrass the nation.
Just having one backside to kick – Great British Railways – will stop the pathetic blame game where everyone points the finger at each other for their daily cockups. And the absurd spectacle of regular renationalisations when it emerges that various franchisees can't cut it.
I'm confused.
PB Tories:
"Nicola" nationalised the Scottish railways! Baaad SNP, bunch of commies, etc. "Boris" nationalising the rUK railways! ... embarrassed silence.
Indeed – last time I counted at least four rUK franchises were nationalised...
I'll have a listen to that debate later.
Rachell Maskell sounds as if she needs to come into (say) the 2nd half of the 20th century.
I had a look for payments from the RMT to MPs, but the information is published with maximum obfuscation - downloadable PDFs every fortnight so it can't be read mechanically and there are about 15-20 docs a year to download and read and summarise.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
2 would muck around with lots of other pay definitions in law.
3 is not a thing you could legislate for. How can you stop one person/organisation giving another cash?
That excuse for point 2 is why we have this idiotic disconnect and I'm not sure it would anyway, it's a one line change from 1/365 to 1/232.
3. Of course you can, in the UK primary legislation rules all.
You’re showing your ignorance. Go on then - how would you draft 3 without preventing anyone other than state sanctioned entities transferring cash to each other? It’s not possible.
Edit - not possible in an enforceable way.
There is already serious legislation about who can pay whom and for what, in order to prevent fraud, tax evasion etc
So long as they pay tax on it, you can pay anyone anything you want, for whatever you want. It’s a free country.
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
2 would muck around with lots of other pay definitions in law.
3 is not a thing you could legislate for. How can you stop one person/organisation giving another cash?
That excuse for point 2 is why we have this idiotic disconnect and I'm not sure it would anyway, it's a one line change from 1/365 to 1/232.
3. Of course you can, in the UK primary legislation rules all.
You’re showing your ignorance. Go on then - how would you draft 3 without preventing anyone other than state sanctioned entities transferring cash to each other? It’s not possible.
"Strike pay must not exceed lost salaried income" it's really not that difficult.
You’re missing the point…
They would get another chunk of cash as a random gift to make up the difference. You can’t stop one person or entity giving another cash easily in a free society. You’ve never had to think about drafting enforceable legislation or rules have you? Nothing to be ashamed of, you just need to understand it’s not trivial.
HMRC already does have many serious rules about giving cash "gifts" to people in exchange for things.
Managed to visit Reading, Twyford and Maidenhead yesterday, completing visits to the full set of Elizabeth line stations over the last six weeks or so.
None of the three stations above have any Elizabeth line "bullseye" logos or other marketing, just the route maps. Same is true at Slough, the Heathrow stations, Stratford, and Shenfield. Furthest station west with bullseye signs is Taplow, furthest east is Brentwood.
Bond Street is still closed, as are the connections from Stratford to Whitechapel, and Paddington low level to the GWR main line. Changing at Paddington isn't too bad, but at Liverpool Street it's a five minute walk!
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
2 would muck around with lots of other pay definitions in law.
3 is not a thing you could legislate for. How can you stop one person/organisation giving another cash?
That excuse for point 2 is why we have this idiotic disconnect and I'm not sure it would anyway, it's a one line change from 1/365 to 1/232.
3. Of course you can, in the UK primary legislation rules all.
You’re showing your ignorance. Go on then - how would you draft 3 without preventing anyone other than state sanctioned entities transferring cash to each other? It’s not possible.
"Strike pay must not exceed lost salaried income" it's really not that difficult.
You’re missing the point…
They would get another chunk of cash as a random gift to make up the difference. You can’t stop one person or entity giving another cash easily in a free society. You’ve never had to think about drafting enforceable legislation or rules have you? Nothing to be ashamed of, you just need to understand it’s not trivial.
HMRC already does have many serious rules about giving cash "gifts" to people in exchange for things.
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
2 would muck around with lots of other pay definitions in law.
3 is not a thing you could legislate for. How can you stop one person/organisation giving another cash?
That excuse for point 2 is why we have this idiotic disconnect and I'm not sure it would anyway, it's a one line change from 1/365 to 1/232.
3. Of course you can, in the UK primary legislation rules all.
You’re showing your ignorance. Go on then - how would you draft 3 without preventing anyone other than state sanctioned entities transferring cash to each other? It’s not possible.
"Strike pay must not exceed lost salaried income" it's really not that difficult.
You’re missing the point…
They would get another chunk of cash as a random gift to make up the difference. You can’t stop one person or entity giving another cash easily in a free society. You’ve never had to think about drafting enforceable legislation or rules have you? Nothing to be ashamed of, you just need to understand it’s not trivial.
That's frankly idiotic, the union later transferring money from a monitored account to another monitored account is trivially easy to trace. You are looking for excuses to not take any action, it's a classic public sector/civil service attitude, everything is too difficult so let's not do it. Nothing to be ashamed of, but you need to understand that outside of the public sector people actually like to action ideas quickly.
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
2 would muck around with lots of other pay definitions in law.
3 is not a thing you could legislate for. How can you stop one person/organisation giving another cash?
That excuse for point 2 is why we have this idiotic disconnect and I'm not sure it would anyway, it's a one line change from 1/365 to 1/232.
3. Of course you can, in the UK primary legislation rules all.
You’re showing your ignorance. Go on then - how would you draft 3 without preventing anyone other than state sanctioned entities transferring cash to each other? It’s not possible.
"Strike pay must not exceed lost salaried income" it's really not that difficult.
You’re missing the point…
They would get another chunk of cash as a random gift to make up the difference. You can’t stop one person or entity giving another cash easily in a free society. You’ve never had to think about drafting enforceable legislation or rules have you? Nothing to be ashamed of, you just need to understand it’s not trivial.
HMRC already does have many serious rules about giving cash "gifts" to people in exchange for things.
Tangle with HMRC at your own risk.
We’re not talking about avoiding tax.
You are.
There's also bribery laws already existing and more besides.
The idea you can just give money to anyone, for anything, has never been true.
The rebound in gross fixed capital formation looks more positive.
Driven by government spending and housing, much of which is welcome but is unlikely to deliver long term economic growth and better paid jobs like business investment does. The Brexit vote impact on business investment is unfortunately undeniable and is a warning sign of the low growth trajectory we are now on.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
Something very strange and troubling seems to have happened in 2016 according to this FT graph:
Have they demonstrated that the assumed trend happened everywhere else? Otherwise not really relevant.
The UK business investment performance since the Brexit vote has been the weakest of the G7. Pre Brexit it was growing more strongly than most other G7 countries, having fallen the most after the GFC. The performance since 2016 been really bad, both compared to our peers and our prior performance.
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
2 would muck around with lots of other pay definitions in law.
3 is not a thing you could legislate for. How can you stop one person/organisation giving another cash?
That excuse for point 2 is why we have this idiotic disconnect and I'm not sure it would anyway, it's a one line change from 1/365 to 1/232.
3. Of course you can, in the UK primary legislation rules all.
You’re showing your ignorance. Go on then - how would you draft 3 without preventing anyone other than state sanctioned entities transferring cash to each other? It’s not possible.
"Strike pay must not exceed lost salaried income" it's really not that difficult.
You’re missing the point…
They would get another chunk of cash as a random gift to make up the difference. You can’t stop one person or entity giving another cash easily in a free society. You’ve never had to think about drafting enforceable legislation or rules have you? Nothing to be ashamed of, you just need to understand it’s not trivial.
That's frankly idiotic, the union later transferring money from a monitored account to another monitored account is trivially easy to trace. You are looking for excuses to not take any action, it's a classic public sector/civil service attitude, everything is too difficult so let's not do it. Nothing to be ashamed of, but you need to understand that outside of the public sector people actually like to action ideas quickly.
So the answer is yes, you want to live in a fascist world where the Government controls all payments made between individuals.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
And with that attitude NIMBYism should have killed HS2 too. Why didn't it, considering the economic demand for HS2 is considerably less than M1-2 and M6-2 or whatever you want to call them would bring.
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
And yet railway services across the world are being automated. Also the idea that the public sector is ahead of anywhere on automation is a joke unless you mean automated by hiring contractors at huge day rates to do the work.
Take HMRC as an example - they on getting towards the last stages of Making Tax Digital.
Now here is a photo from the canteen of the IRS office in Austin
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
2 would muck around with lots of other pay definitions in law.
3 is not a thing you could legislate for. How can you stop one person/organisation giving another cash?
That excuse for point 2 is why we have this idiotic disconnect and I'm not sure it would anyway, it's a one line change from 1/365 to 1/232.
3. Of course you can, in the UK primary legislation rules all.
You’re showing your ignorance. Go on then - how would you draft 3 without preventing anyone other than state sanctioned entities transferring cash to each other? It’s not possible.
"Strike pay must not exceed lost salaried income" it's really not that difficult.
You’re missing the point…
They would get another chunk of cash as a random gift to make up the difference. You can’t stop one person or entity giving another cash easily in a free society. You’ve never had to think about drafting enforceable legislation or rules have you? Nothing to be ashamed of, you just need to understand it’s not trivial.
HMRC already does have many serious rules about giving cash "gifts" to people in exchange for things.
Tangle with HMRC at your own risk.
We’re not talking about avoiding tax.
But strike pay is taxable, so now the people being incentivised are being told to not declare these "gifts" by the union potentially opening themselves up for tax evasion prosecutions. Honestly, you've come up with this objection in your head but it isn't me that hasn't thought this through, it's you. Implementing a "no over and above" rule on strike pay is extremely easy and big fines for unions who break the rules and criminal prosecutions for union heads who try and do it cash in hand etc... would be more than enough.
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
2 would muck around with lots of other pay definitions in law.
3 is not a thing you could legislate for. How can you stop one person/organisation giving another cash?
That excuse for point 2 is why we have this idiotic disconnect and I'm not sure it would anyway, it's a one line change from 1/365 to 1/232.
3. Of course you can, in the UK primary legislation rules all.
You’re showing your ignorance. Go on then - how would you draft 3 without preventing anyone other than state sanctioned entities transferring cash to each other? It’s not possible.
"Strike pay must not exceed lost salaried income" it's really not that difficult.
You’re missing the point…
They would get another chunk of cash as a random gift to make up the difference. You can’t stop one person or entity giving another cash easily in a free society. You’ve never had to think about drafting enforceable legislation or rules have you? Nothing to be ashamed of, you just need to understand it’s not trivial.
That's frankly idiotic, the union later transferring money from a monitored account to another monitored account is trivially easy to trace. You are looking for excuses to not take any action, it's a classic public sector/civil service attitude, everything is too difficult so let's not do it. Nothing to be ashamed of, but you need to understand that outside of the public sector people actually like to action ideas quickly.
So the answer is yes, you want to live in a fascist world where the Government controls all payments made between individuals.
Fine. You just need to own it.
No. We already live in a world where HMRC etc can trace payments in lieu of things and where fraud and tax etc are already electronically traced and banks have to report dodgy transactions.
Something very strange and troubling seems to have happened in 2016 according to this FT graph:
Have they demonstrated that the assumed trend happened everywhere else? Otherwise not really relevant.
The UK business investment performance since the Brexit vote has been the weakest of the G7. Pre Brexit it was growing more strongly than most other G7 countries, having fallen the most after the GFC. The performance since 2016 been really bad, both compared to our peers and our prior performance.
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
2 would muck around with lots of other pay definitions in law.
3 is not a thing you could legislate for. How can you stop one person/organisation giving another cash?
That excuse for point 2 is why we have this idiotic disconnect and I'm not sure it would anyway, it's a one line change from 1/365 to 1/232.
3. Of course you can, in the UK primary legislation rules all.
You’re showing your ignorance. Go on then - how would you draft 3 without preventing anyone other than state sanctioned entities transferring cash to each other? It’s not possible.
"Strike pay must not exceed lost salaried income" it's really not that difficult.
You’re missing the point…
They would get another chunk of cash as a random gift to make up the difference. You can’t stop one person or entity giving another cash easily in a free society. You’ve never had to think about drafting enforceable legislation or rules have you? Nothing to be ashamed of, you just need to understand it’s not trivial.
HMRC already does have many serious rules about giving cash "gifts" to people in exchange for things.
Tangle with HMRC at your own risk.
We’re not talking about avoiding tax.
You are.
There's also bribery laws already existing and more besides.
The idea you can just give money to anyone, for anything, has never been true.
Citation needed, because I’m really not. You’d pay tax on it where applicable as with any other gift/payment.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
Lets use an M62 example but over the Pennines instead. The M67 was supposed to connect to the Manchester Inner Ring motorway near the Apollo. Cancelled. The other end was supposed to extend over the Pennines to meet the M1 north of Meadowhall and was further proposed to reach the A1 at Barnsdale Bar. Cancelled.
Entertainingly even the piddly Mottram / Tintwistle bypass can't get built because of the risk that it makes Woodhead more attractive as a crossing. Because the M67 / M60 junction can't cope with more traffic nor would the M60 to either side.
So we get stuck with the M62. Which takes all its own traffic. Plus from the cancelled M67 and M64 further south. Plus from the lack of a high quality road any further north (like a dualled A66)
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
2 would muck around with lots of other pay definitions in law.
3 is not a thing you could legislate for. How can you stop one person/organisation giving another cash?
That excuse for point 2 is why we have this idiotic disconnect and I'm not sure it would anyway, it's a one line change from 1/365 to 1/232.
3. Of course you can, in the UK primary legislation rules all.
You’re showing your ignorance. Go on then - how would you draft 3 without preventing anyone other than state sanctioned entities transferring cash to each other? It’s not possible.
"Strike pay must not exceed lost salaried income" it's really not that difficult.
You’re missing the point…
They would get another chunk of cash as a random gift to make up the difference. You can’t stop one person or entity giving another cash easily in a free society. You’ve never had to think about drafting enforceable legislation or rules have you? Nothing to be ashamed of, you just need to understand it’s not trivial.
That's frankly idiotic, the union later transferring money from a monitored account to another monitored account is trivially easy to trace. You are looking for excuses to not take any action, it's a classic public sector/civil service attitude, everything is too difficult so let's not do it. Nothing to be ashamed of, but you need to understand that outside of the public sector people actually like to action ideas quickly.
So the answer is yes, you want to live in a fascist world where the Government controls all payments made between individuals.
Fine. You just need to own it.
But it's not individuals is it? This is a taxable transfer from a public organisation to an individual. It's not as if Mike Lynch is personally giving them their strike pay.
It's fine, you're digging a deeper hole because you can't admit that it is in fact trivially easy to prevent incentivising strikes. Better to just get ahead and admit that you were wrong rather than come up with this stupid scenarios.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
Everyone knew the Brynglas tunnels were going to be a choke point the minute the second Severn crossing opened - in 1996. That’s 26 years ago, and they’re still talking about it.
Maybe they’ll build the A303 Stonehenge tunnel first!
Something very strange and troubling seems to have happened in 2016 according to this FT graph:
Have they demonstrated that the assumed trend happened everywhere else? Otherwise not really relevant.
The UK business investment performance since the Brexit vote has been the weakest of the G7. Pre Brexit it was growing more strongly than most other G7 countries, having fallen the most after the GFC. The performance since 2016 been really bad, both compared to our peers and our prior performance.
You have data for say 2016-2021?
Yes.
Pre-Brexit it was growing more strongly from what baseline?
The FT dodgy chart is dodgy because it chooses 2009 as the baseline, multiple people have already pointed that out. Picking 1997 as the baseline the chart looks completely different unsurprisingly and it becomes clear than 2009 was the aberration and not 2016.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
And with that attitude NIMBYism should have killed HS2 too. Why didn't it, considering the economic demand for HS2 is considerably less than M1-2 and M6-2 or whatever you want to call them would bring.
Because on some level people like trains and don't like Motorways.
Also HS2 started in a different era - by the time the current focus on NIMBYism had arrived most of the bits of HS2 that are being built had been bought up and at the very least budgeted for.
On an unrelated topic I was trying to get a Pension estimate for next year
You can only get this Online if you have a current UK Passport unless you live in NI where a driving licence will suffice.
I waited for over an hour to speak to someone who is sending it out by post as cant send electonically.
The Govt Gateway requires 2 forms of ID to do anything one can be a P60 the other has to be a current passport for everyone in England Scotland and Wales.
Madness
Because we don't have ID cards passports have become the defacto form of proof of residency / right to work.
As I pointed out earlier this week that means come October if you haven't got a passport there will be whole sectors of work where people without passports just won't be able to get work because company's will insist on 3rd party online right to work checks.
I was told yesterday HMRC have "now been granted access to the driving license database and will be able to use that as a Government Gateway validation soon"
When i aske them to define soon she said hopefully by October.
Which October i didnt ask foolishly
I applied for Child Benefit a few weeks back. Haven't received the original birth certificate back. I'd have preferred to send a copy but they did ask for the original.. Wonder how long it'll take to come along. You'd have thought it could be automated from the registry office..
Poor Politics from Starmer banning Shadow Ministers and PPS's from RMT picket lines.
Labour are either on the side of the workers or the bosses (Tory Govt) in this Trade dispute.
If its not the former whats the point of Labour
Voters who are siding with the bosses are predominantly not going to vote Labour anyway.
Labour voters who are with the workers will see SKS as a weak boring sit on the fence merchant* and see Labour as abandoning workers even more.
*Which of course he is.
Sensible politics. Only idiots, Marxists and closet Marxists support this strike.
Have you seen a Poll?
Even GB News reporter on the ground had to admit most people were sympathetic
I see at least one idiot opposes the strike and thinks that the 89% of railway workers are Marxists. or closet Marxists.
35 in support 49 against per YouGov, however Strongly support 12 vs Strongly oppose 26. Marginal plurality against the strikes, 2 to 1 with strong opinion against. Feelings very split
Split on party lines, 74% of Conservative voters oppose the strikes, 59% of Labour voters back the strikes.
LD voters marginally opposed, 49% against to 38% for
On an unrelated topic I was trying to get a Pension estimate for next year
You can only get this Online if you have a current UK Passport unless you live in NI where a driving licence will suffice.
I waited for over an hour to speak to someone who is sending it out by post as cant send electonically.
The Govt Gateway requires 2 forms of ID to do anything one can be a P60 the other has to be a current passport for everyone in England Scotland and Wales.
Madness
Because we don't have ID cards passports have become the defacto form of proof of residency / right to work.
As I pointed out earlier this week that means come October if you haven't got a passport there will be whole sectors of work where people without passports just won't be able to get work because company's will insist on 3rd party online right to work checks.
I was told yesterday HMRC have "now been granted access to the driving license database and will be able to use that as a Government Gateway validation soon"
When i aske them to define soon she said hopefully by October.
Which October i didnt ask foolishly
I applied for Child Benefit a few weeks back. Haven't received the original birth certificate back. I'd have preferred to send a copy but they did ask for the original.. Wonder how long it'll take to come along. You'd have thought it could be automated from the registry office..
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
2 would muck around with lots of other pay definitions in law.
3 is not a thing you could legislate for. How can you stop one person/organisation giving another cash?
That excuse for point 2 is why we have this idiotic disconnect and I'm not sure it would anyway, it's a one line change from 1/365 to 1/232.
3. Of course you can, in the UK primary legislation rules all.
You’re showing your ignorance. Go on then - how would you draft 3 without preventing anyone other than state sanctioned entities transferring cash to each other? It’s not possible.
"Strike pay must not exceed lost salaried income" it's really not that difficult.
You’re missing the point…
They would get another chunk of cash as a random gift to make up the difference. You can’t stop one person or entity giving another cash easily in a free society. You’ve never had to think about drafting enforceable legislation or rules have you? Nothing to be ashamed of, you just need to understand it’s not trivial.
That's frankly idiotic, the union later transferring money from a monitored account to another monitored account is trivially easy to trace. You are looking for excuses to not take any action, it's a classic public sector/civil service attitude, everything is too difficult so let's not do it. Nothing to be ashamed of, but you need to understand that outside of the public sector people actually like to action ideas quickly.
So the answer is yes, you want to live in a fascist world where the Government controls all payments made between individuals.
Fine. You just need to own it.
But it's not individuals is it? This is a taxable transfer from a public organisation to an individual. It's not as if Mike Lynch is personally giving them their strike pay.
It's fine, you're digging a deeper hole because you can't admit that it is in fact trivially easy to prevent incentivising strikes. Better to just get ahead and admit that you were wrong rather than come up with this stupid scenarios.
Not very bright are you? Never looked at regulations have you? If you want to give people money you will always be able to, directly or indirectly to avoid a rule, unless you pass laws no sane person would allow.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
Lets use an M62 example but over the Pennines instead. The M67 was supposed to connect to the Manchester Inner Ring motorway near the Apollo. Cancelled. The other end was supposed to extend over the Pennines to meet the M1 north of Meadowhall and was further proposed to reach the A1 at Barnsdale Bar. Cancelled.
Entertainingly even the piddly Mottram / Tintwistle bypass can't get built because of the risk that it makes Woodhead more attractive as a crossing. Because the M67 / M60 junction can't cope with more traffic nor would the M60 to either side.
So we get stuck with the M62. Which takes all its own traffic. Plus from the cancelled M67 and M64 further south. Plus from the lack of a high quality road any further north (like a dualled A66)
Bingo.
We need routes to be finished, and we need entire routes to be built.
The M60 and the M62, like the M1 and the M6, both carry a lot of traffic that don't even want to be on the M60 M62 or go anywhere on the M60 or M62, its just that its the only route available.
Just as new routes add capacity on the WCML, new routes would add capacity on the M60 or M62 etc too as well as their own capacity. At present as 'all roads lead to' Manchester at the minute for a lot of routes, meeting at the M60 at the intersection, lots of journeys require taking you into Manchester even if you don't want to go into Manchester. Its utter madness to add congestion into a very congested city because there's no alternative route around at the minute.
That's why if it were up to me, we wouldn't be talking just a few small routes, though they should be built, I'd be talking entire new arteries running the length of the country.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
Lets use an M62 example but over the Pennines instead. The M67 was supposed to connect to the Manchester Inner Ring motorway near the Apollo. Cancelled. The other end was supposed to extend over the Pennines to meet the M1 north of Meadowhall and was further proposed to reach the A1 at Barnsdale Bar. Cancelled.
Entertainingly even the piddly Mottram / Tintwistle bypass can't get built because of the risk that it makes Woodhead more attractive as a crossing. Because the M67 / M60 junction can't cope with more traffic nor would the M60 to either side.
So we get stuck with the M62. Which takes all its own traffic. Plus from the cancelled M67 and M64 further south. Plus from the lack of a high quality road any further north (like a dualled A66)
They should dig a dual-carriageway tunnel under the Snake Pass - and leave that twisty piece of road as a private English Nurburgring for the petrol heads, once everyone else has crappy electric appliances on their driveways.
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
2 would muck around with lots of other pay definitions in law.
3 is not a thing you could legislate for. How can you stop one person/organisation giving another cash?
That excuse for point 2 is why we have this idiotic disconnect and I'm not sure it would anyway, it's a one line change from 1/365 to 1/232.
3. Of course you can, in the UK primary legislation rules all.
You’re showing your ignorance. Go on then - how would you draft 3 without preventing anyone other than state sanctioned entities transferring cash to each other? It’s not possible.
"Strike pay must not exceed lost salaried income" it's really not that difficult.
You’re missing the point…
They would get another chunk of cash as a random gift to make up the difference. You can’t stop one person or entity giving another cash easily in a free society. You’ve never had to think about drafting enforceable legislation or rules have you? Nothing to be ashamed of, you just need to understand it’s not trivial.
HMRC already does have many serious rules about giving cash "gifts" to people in exchange for things.
Tangle with HMRC at your own risk.
We’re not talking about avoiding tax.
You are.
There's also bribery laws already existing and more besides.
The idea you can just give money to anyone, for anything, has never been true.
Citation needed, because I’m really not. You’d pay tax on it where applicable as with any other gift/payment.
Try and read all the words.
Lol so suddenly this "gift" becomes declared taxable income. What for, the government might ask, oh it's from the union to incentivise that strike. Yeah.
You want to come across as this all knowing sage of wisdom about how things work but you don't know. Every single transaction in the UK is monitored for fraud other than cash. Unless you're suggesting that the union is suddenly going to withdraw tens of thousands on cash to then hand out for incentives (even that's not difficult to spot because of the cash withdrawal) then you're onto a loser.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
Lets use an M62 example but over the Pennines instead. The M67 was supposed to connect to the Manchester Inner Ring motorway near the Apollo. Cancelled. The other end was supposed to extend over the Pennines to meet the M1 north of Meadowhall and was further proposed to reach the A1 at Barnsdale Bar. Cancelled.
Entertainingly even the piddly Mottram / Tintwistle bypass can't get built because of the risk that it makes Woodhead more attractive as a crossing. Because the M67 / M60 junction can't cope with more traffic nor would the M60 to either side.
So we get stuck with the M62. Which takes all its own traffic. Plus from the cancelled M67 and M64 further south. Plus from the lack of a high quality road any further north (like a dualled A66)
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
And yet railway services across the world are being automated. Also the idea that the public sector is ahead of anywhere on automation is a joke unless you mean automated by hiring contractors at huge day rates to do the work.
You *cannot* automate any railway service unless it is entirely self-contained. DLR? Of course - only DLR trains run on DLR metals and there are no level crossings or interfaces with any other system. But could you do the same for any of the underground lines? Possibly the Victoria with some modifications. But the others? No. Heavy rail? Hell no.
It isn't just a fallacy to say "these networks have done it so we could too". Its wilful ignorance of the technology being advocated.
The French senate bans consultants working with the government from using "their Anglo-Saxon expressions like benchmark, lean management or key learning".
Strangely they also want to ban "propale" which is a French neologism meaning "proposition commerciale". They probably looked it up and found a Scots word with the same spelling so it went on the blacklist.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
And with that attitude NIMBYism should have killed HS2 too. Why didn't it, considering the economic demand for HS2 is considerably less than M1-2 and M6-2 or whatever you want to call them would bring.
Because on some level people like trains and don't like Motorways.
Also HS2 started in a different era - by the time the current focus on NIMBYism had arrived most of the bits of HS2 that are being built had been bought up and at the very least budgeted for.
We've got to the nub of it, what I said at the start. This is ideology not economy.
Some decision makers like trains and don't like Motorways. Primarily out of touch civil servants and politicians who live or work in London, commute via train, and don't use the Motorways. They don't like roads.
For the 80%+ of the country who do travel by road not rail, they actually do like roads a bit more. But they're not in charge of the DfT.
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
2 would muck around with lots of other pay definitions in law.
3 is not a thing you could legislate for. How can you stop one person/organisation giving another cash?
That excuse for point 2 is why we have this idiotic disconnect and I'm not sure it would anyway, it's a one line change from 1/365 to 1/232.
3. Of course you can, in the UK primary legislation rules all.
You’re showing your ignorance. Go on then - how would you draft 3 without preventing anyone other than state sanctioned entities transferring cash to each other? It’s not possible.
"Strike pay must not exceed lost salaried income" it's really not that difficult.
You’re missing the point…
They would get another chunk of cash as a random gift to make up the difference. You can’t stop one person or entity giving another cash easily in a free society. You’ve never had to think about drafting enforceable legislation or rules have you? Nothing to be ashamed of, you just need to understand it’s not trivial.
That's frankly idiotic, the union later transferring money from a monitored account to another monitored account is trivially easy to trace. You are looking for excuses to not take any action, it's a classic public sector/civil service attitude, everything is too difficult so let's not do it. Nothing to be ashamed of, but you need to understand that outside of the public sector people actually like to action ideas quickly.
So the answer is yes, you want to live in a fascist world where the Government controls all payments made between individuals.
Fine. You just need to own it.
But it's not individuals is it? This is a taxable transfer from a public organisation to an individual. It's not as if Mike Lynch is personally giving them their strike pay.
It's fine, you're digging a deeper hole because you can't admit that it is in fact trivially easy to prevent incentivising strikes. Better to just get ahead and admit that you were wrong rather than come up with this stupid scenarios.
Not very bright are you? Never looked at regulations have you? If you want to give people money you will always be able to, directly or indirectly to avoid a rule, unless you pass laws no sane person would allow.
But this is (taxable) money for services rendered (the strike). Honestly, just admit you were wrong and let's be done with it. If you disagree with the idea then say so but objecting to it as technically impossible is just a loser for you. I guess you want to find a technical way to oppose it because it would hurt your ability to strike and further leech from the taxpayer.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
And with that attitude NIMBYism should have killed HS2 too. Why didn't it, considering the economic demand for HS2 is considerably less than M1-2 and M6-2 or whatever you want to call them would bring.
Because on some level people like trains and don't like Motorways.
Also HS2 started in a different era - by the time the current focus on NIMBYism had arrived most of the bits of HS2 that are being built had been bought up and at the very least budgeted for.
We've got to the nub of it, what I said at the start. This is ideology not economy.
Some decision makers like trains and don't like Motorways. Primarily out of touch civil servants and politicians who live or work in London, commute via train, and don't use the Motorways. They don't like roads.
For the 80%+ of the country who do travel by road not rail, they actually do like roads a bit more. But they're not in charge of the DfT.
You are also missing the Treasury's business models which just can't cope with network effects. So it can add a value for saving 10 minutes on a journey time but not much more than that.
And it requires a lot of 10 minutes to justify building a motorway at £50m per mile.
Something very strange and troubling seems to have happened in 2016 according to this FT graph:
Have they demonstrated that the assumed trend happened everywhere else? Otherwise not really relevant.
The UK business investment performance since the Brexit vote has been the weakest of the G7. Pre Brexit it was growing more strongly than most other G7 countries, having fallen the most after the GFC. The performance since 2016 been really bad, both compared to our peers and our prior performance.
You have data for say 2016-2021?
Yes.
Pre-Brexit it was growing more strongly from what baseline?
The FT dodgy chart is dodgy because it chooses 2009 as the baseline, multiple people have already pointed that out. Picking 1997 as the baseline the chart looks completely different unsurprisingly and it becomes clear than 2009 was the aberration and not 2016.
Not really. 2009 is a reasonable point to start because it is the start of the recovery, and the point of the chart is to contrast pre 2016 with post 2016, so going back a full 20 years pre 2016 obscures the point the chart is making. If you go back and read what I said, I pointed out that UK business investment fell more than its peers after the GFC, and so was growing back more strongly from a lower base. It continued to grow during 2012-15 when the Eurozone crisis caused it to fall in Italy and stagnate in France and Germany. Then after the Brexit vote it suddenly stopped growing in the UK while it kept rising everywhere else. It fell further after Covid in the UK, Japan and Canada but has recovered to pre Covid levels or above elsewhere else in the G7. The UK's performance since the Brexit vote has been bad, you cannot spin it away
Talking about roads, there are so many part built schemes out there, where the unbuilt section renders the built / upgraded sections partially pointless. An example:
A494 North Wales Expressway. They extended the M56 and then rebuilt to motorway standard the section north of the Dee. Where it loses half its lanes to squeeze onto the existing Dee bridge and along the 1970s Ewloe bypass which is now busier than ever thanks to the main route being flipped from the Chester bypass thanks to the bits built north of the river.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
And with that attitude NIMBYism should have killed HS2 too. Why didn't it, considering the economic demand for HS2 is considerably less than M1-2 and M6-2 or whatever you want to call them would bring.
Because on some level people like trains and don't like Motorways.
Also HS2 started in a different era - by the time the current focus on NIMBYism had arrived most of the bits of HS2 that are being built had been bought up and at the very least budgeted for.
We've got to the nub of it, what I said at the start. This is ideology not economy.
Some decision makers like trains and don't like Motorways. Primarily out of touch civil servants and politicians who live or work in London, commute via train, and don't use the Motorways. They don't like roads.
For the 80%+ of the country who do travel by road not rail, they actually do like roads a bit more. But they're not in charge of the DfT.
You are also missing the Treasury's business models which just can't cope with network effects. So it can add a value for saving 10 minutes on a journey time but not much more than that.
And it requires a lot of 10 minutes to justify building a motorway at £50m per mile.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
And with that attitude NIMBYism should have killed HS2 too. Why didn't it, considering the economic demand for HS2 is considerably less than M1-2 and M6-2 or whatever you want to call them would bring.
Because on some level people like trains and don't like Motorways.
Also HS2 started in a different era - by the time the current focus on NIMBYism had arrived most of the bits of HS2 that are being built had been bought up and at the very least budgeted for.
I would argue NIMBYism has been around since at least the 1970s.
"The Greater London Council's policy for the shape of London went to public inquiry in 1970, and its monolithic motorway plans came under detailed scrutiny for the first time. The Greater London Development Plan Inquiry was to become the longest planning inquiry in British history - and marked the start of the end for urban motorways in the capital.
"The inquiry had been fully expected for some years. GLC publicity from the mid-1960s had reassured Londoners that it meant anybody could raise an objection and that "nothing can just slip through". It was convened in July 1970 under Frank Layfield QC, a leading expert on planning law.
"Among the objections to high-rise buildings, open space policy and waste disposal, one subject took up more time than any other, accounting for more heated debate, disagreement and animosity than anything else. 30,000 objections to the GLDP were received, and three quarters of them related to the GLC's motorway plans. Everyone, it seemed, had something to say about the Ringways."
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
And yet railway services across the world are being automated. Also the idea that the public sector is ahead of anywhere on automation is a joke unless you mean automated by hiring contractors at huge day rates to do the work.
Where - I'm not aware of any existing network being automated past about GoA2 because it's not worth the hassle...
Plenty of completely new networks are however GoA3 / 4 because it's only then that full automation makes sense.
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
And yet railway services across the world are being automated. Also the idea that the public sector is ahead of anywhere on automation is a joke unless you mean automated by hiring contractors at huge day rates to do the work.
You *cannot* automate any railway service unless it is entirely self-contained. DLR? Of course - only DLR trains run on DLR metals and there are no level crossings or interfaces with any other system. But could you do the same for any of the underground lines? Possibly the Victoria with some modifications. But the others? No. Heavy rail? Hell no.
It isn't just a fallacy to say "these networks have done it so we could too". Its wilful ignorance of the technology being advocated.
I didn't suggest automating the whole thing anyway, just more of the infrastructure should be. I understand that a system as complex as the railways will always need some level of human intelligence to run it, yet there's lots of scope for automation, especially in signalling.
On an unrelated topic I was trying to get a Pension estimate for next year
You can only get this Online if you have a current UK Passport unless you live in NI where a driving licence will suffice.
I waited for over an hour to speak to someone who is sending it out by post as cant send electonically.
The Govt Gateway requires 2 forms of ID to do anything one can be a P60 the other has to be a current passport for everyone in England Scotland and Wales.
Madness
Because we don't have ID cards passports have become the defacto form of proof of residency / right to work.
As I pointed out earlier this week that means come October if you haven't got a passport there will be whole sectors of work where people without passports just won't be able to get work because company's will insist on 3rd party online right to work checks.
I was told yesterday HMRC have "now been granted access to the driving license database and will be able to use that as a Government Gateway validation soon"
When i aske them to define soon she said hopefully by October.
Which October i didnt ask foolishly
I applied for Child Benefit a few weeks back. Haven't received the original birth certificate back. I'd have preferred to send a copy but they did ask for the original.. Wonder how long it'll take to come along. You'd have thought it could be automated from the registry office..
Shocking red tape and inefficiency in HMRC/DWP/National Savings/CSA
Something very strange and troubling seems to have happened in 2016 according to this FT graph:
Have they demonstrated that the assumed trend happened everywhere else? Otherwise not really relevant.
The UK business investment performance since the Brexit vote has been the weakest of the G7. Pre Brexit it was growing more strongly than most other G7 countries, having fallen the most after the GFC. The performance since 2016 been really bad, both compared to our peers and our prior performance.
You have data for say 2016-2021?
Yes.
Pre-Brexit it was growing more strongly from what baseline?
The FT dodgy chart is dodgy because it chooses 2009 as the baseline, multiple people have already pointed that out. Picking 1997 as the baseline the chart looks completely different unsurprisingly and it becomes clear than 2009 was the aberration and not 2016.
Not really. 2009 is a reasonable point to start because it is the start of the recovery, and the point of the chart is to contrast pre 2016 with post 2016, so going back a full 20 years pre 2016 obscures the point the chart is making. If you go back and read what I said, I pointed out that UK business investment fell more than its peers after the GFC, and so was growing back more strongly from a lower base. It continued to grow during 2012-15 when the Eurozone crisis caused it to fall in Italy and stagnate in France and Germany. Then after the Brexit vote it suddenly stopped growing in the UK while it kept rising everywhere else. It fell further after Covid in the UK, Japan and Canada but has recovered to pre Covid levels or above elsewhere else in the G7. The UK's performance since the Brexit vote has been bad, you cannot spin it away
2009 is not a reasonable point to start because all you're measuring is how much it fell during the crash (which is subsequently recovered), as opposed to how much its actually grown.
From 1997 shows a clear trend of growth outside of recessions (eg 2009 and 2020) and you can draw a trend line from 1997 to 2016-19 being back at trend. But if you start the trendline at 2009 then obviously the trendline should expect the recovery to keep going to infinity and beyond which isn't possible.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
Everyone knew the Brynglas tunnels were going to be a choke point the minute the second Severn crossing opened - in 1996. That’s 26 years ago, and they’re still talking about it.
Maybe they’ll build the A303 Stonehenge tunnel first!
They'll build a new monument at Stonehenge before they build either of those.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
Lets use an M62 example but over the Pennines instead. The M67 was supposed to connect to the Manchester Inner Ring motorway near the Apollo. Cancelled. The other end was supposed to extend over the Pennines to meet the M1 north of Meadowhall and was further proposed to reach the A1 at Barnsdale Bar. Cancelled.
Entertainingly even the piddly Mottram / Tintwistle bypass can't get built because of the risk that it makes Woodhead more attractive as a crossing. Because the M67 / M60 junction can't cope with more traffic nor would the M60 to either side.
So we get stuck with the M62. Which takes all its own traffic. Plus from the cancelled M67 and M64 further south. Plus from the lack of a high quality road any further north (like a dualled A66)
They should dig a dual-carriageway tunnel under the Snake Pass - and leave that twisty piece of road as a private English Nurburgring for the petrol heads, once everyone else has crappy electric appliances on their driveways.
They can't - and this is in answer to @BartholomewRoberts as well. There is nowhere for the traffic to go having crossed the Pennines. Already said that the western end won't work if it tips its traffic onto Denton island. Even slips to bypass this just move the bottlenecks south to the Stockport section or north to Simister Island. Eastern end not much better with the M1 overloaded and no ability to do much more than they have to add capacity there.
Better is to look at the traffic crossing the Pennines here and wonder where it is going and from where. Had the M64 connected the M1 at Derby and the M6 at Stoke or the A66 been done properly much of this traffic would go nowhere near Manchester.
This is the stupidity of the M6 Toll. The right idea - a West Midlands bypass. But one that actively tries to deter traffic from using it to reduce maintenance costs. Because so much of the network is still to be built it is impossible to even start. Because even if a government said "lets do this" by the time it has got through the detailed design work and the planning enquiries to actually start construction there has been a change of government and work stops.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
Lets use an M62 example but over the Pennines instead. The M67 was supposed to connect to the Manchester Inner Ring motorway near the Apollo. Cancelled. The other end was supposed to extend over the Pennines to meet the M1 north of Meadowhall and was further proposed to reach the A1 at Barnsdale Bar. Cancelled.
Entertainingly even the piddly Mottram / Tintwistle bypass can't get built because of the risk that it makes Woodhead more attractive as a crossing. Because the M67 / M60 junction can't cope with more traffic nor would the M60 to either side.
So we get stuck with the M62. Which takes all its own traffic. Plus from the cancelled M67 and M64 further south. Plus from the lack of a high quality road any further north (like a dualled A66)
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
Lets use an M62 example but over the Pennines instead. The M67 was supposed to connect to the Manchester Inner Ring motorway near the Apollo. Cancelled. The other end was supposed to extend over the Pennines to meet the M1 north of Meadowhall and was further proposed to reach the A1 at Barnsdale Bar. Cancelled.
Entertainingly even the piddly Mottram / Tintwistle bypass can't get built because of the risk that it makes Woodhead more attractive as a crossing. Because the M67 / M60 junction can't cope with more traffic nor would the M60 to either side.
So we get stuck with the M62. Which takes all its own traffic. Plus from the cancelled M67 and M64 further south. Plus from the lack of a high quality road any further north (like a dualled A66)
Oy, that Tintwistle backlog. I don't care to think of it for too long.
Manchester-Sheffield connections are a bit rubbish in general, back to the rail debate. A 'crossrail for the north' connecting the cities from Liverpool to Hull remains a compelling idea, but it'll never happen.
Checking in to say the government are wankers and don't know how to run the country
Emergency legislation against strikers - 1. Strike days must be consecutive, none of this five days of disruption for three days of strikes. 2. Strike pay loss to be calculated as 1/232 not 1/365. Also reduce employer pension contributions by 1/232. 3. Make incentivising strikes with pay over and above lost income illegal. 4. Accelerate automation of key infrastructure and dilute the pool of eligible workers by simplifying the remaining jobs.
1-3 can be done immediately with primary legislation, if that means the whole public sector goes on strike then so be it, they are doing it anyway so it won't make any difference. If the wankers want to strike then make it hurt.
Notwithstanding the legitimacy of these strikes, should you be allowed to withdraw your labour in the event of what you considered to be substantially bad, but nonetheless legal behaviour by your employer?
Surely the right to withdraw one's labour is a fundamental civil right, certainly for libertarian conservatives.
Something very strange and troubling seems to have happened in 2016 according to this FT graph:
Have they demonstrated that the assumed trend happened everywhere else? Otherwise not really relevant.
The UK business investment performance since the Brexit vote has been the weakest of the G7. Pre Brexit it was growing more strongly than most other G7 countries, having fallen the most after the GFC. The performance since 2016 been really bad, both compared to our peers and our prior performance.
You have data for say 2016-2021?
Yes.
Pre-Brexit it was growing more strongly from what baseline?
The FT dodgy chart is dodgy because it chooses 2009 as the baseline, multiple people have already pointed that out. Picking 1997 as the baseline the chart looks completely different unsurprisingly and it becomes clear than 2009 was the aberration and not 2016.
Not really. 2009 is a reasonable point to start because it is the start of the recovery, and the point of the chart is to contrast pre 2016 with post 2016, so going back a full 20 years pre 2016 obscures the point the chart is making. If you go back and read what I said, I pointed out that UK business investment fell more than its peers after the GFC, and so was growing back more strongly from a lower base. It continued to grow during 2012-15 when the Eurozone crisis caused it to fall in Italy and stagnate in France and Germany. Then after the Brexit vote it suddenly stopped growing in the UK while it kept rising everywhere else. It fell further after Covid in the UK, Japan and Canada but has recovered to pre Covid levels or above elsewhere else in the G7. The UK's performance since the Brexit vote has been bad, you cannot spin it away
2009 is not a reasonable point to start because all you're measuring is how much it fell during the crash (which is subsequently recovered), as opposed to how much its actually grown.
From 1997 shows a clear trend of growth outside of recessions (eg 2009 and 2020) and you can draw a trend line from 1997 to 2016-19 being back at trend. But if you start the trendline at 2009 then obviously the trendline should expect the recovery to keep going to infinity and beyond which isn't possible.
Wherever you draw the line from it will show positive trend growth pre Brexit vote followed by flat post 2016 with a fall after Covid. And that looks different to every other country in the G7. Something happened in mid 2016 that caused businesses in the UK suddenly to stop investing while businesses in the rest of the G7 kept investing. It's not hard to figure out what that something was.
Poor Politics from Starmer banning Shadow Ministers and PPS's from RMT picket lines.
Labour are either on the side of the workers or the bosses (Tory Govt) in this Trade dispute.
If its not the former whats the point of Labour
Voters who are siding with the bosses are predominantly not going to vote Labour anyway.
Labour voters who are with the workers will see SKS as a weak boring sit on the fence merchant* and see Labour as abandoning workers even more.
*Which of course he is.
Starmer also going to make a speech at which he will rule out a Labour government bringing back free movement with the EU as he further shifts to reassure 2019 Tory voters thinking of making the move to Labour next time
Hmmm. EEA and even a CU are going to be closed off by the main parties over the next few years then. Will be interesting to see if the LibDems can have any joy doubling down on being the “reverse UKIP”
Ruling out EEA membership is stupid. Ruling out CU membership is very sensible.
It seems like a strategic error from Starmer (unless he is lying - highly possible)
He may or may not bring back the Red Wall but he is giving up on all of Remainia
There is a huge opportunity here for the Lib Dems. For millions of people Brexit is still THE issue especially FoM. Remainers want it back
Strategically to get elected it is vital for him.
He cannot become PM without winning back the redwall and he will not win back the redwall without ruling out free movement/EEA.
The LDs might make some extra gains in Remain seats if they become the only main UK wide party backing EEA but the LDs would back Starmer over Johnson as PM anyway
But this could lose Labour a bunch of seats in big cities. Especially london
Yes but LD MPs in Remain seats would still back Starmer over Johnson as PM. Tory MPs in redwall seats wouldn't.
This policy confirms Starmer has given up on a Labour majority, he is just focused on becoming PM in a hung parliament with LD as well as Labour support
Though without Scotland, that was always pretty likely.
As for the Eurostuff, it was always likely that 2024-9 was going to be about (try to) "make Brexit work by diluting it a bit". And then a bit more and a bit more.
I know it's awfully bad manners for the government to try to launch another Brexit war and the rest of us not turn up, but sometimes the best thing to do is sit and wait.
Except, if Starmer wants the support of the LDs and SNP to become PM with NOM, the price will probably be SM and CU, so STFU*
*I don’t really mean that, I just carried away with all the acronyms. My main point is good, tho
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
And with that attitude NIMBYism should have killed HS2 too. Why didn't it, considering the economic demand for HS2 is considerably less than M1-2 and M6-2 or whatever you want to call them would bring.
Because on some level people like trains and don't like Motorways.
Also HS2 started in a different era - by the time the current focus on NIMBYism had arrived most of the bits of HS2 that are being built had been bought up and at the very least budgeted for.
I would argue NIMBYism has been around since at least the 1970s.
"The Greater London Council's policy for the shape of London went to public inquiry in 1970, and its monolithic motorway plans came under detailed scrutiny for the first time. The Greater London Development Plan Inquiry was to become the longest planning inquiry in British history - and marked the start of the end for urban motorways in the capital.
"The inquiry had been fully expected for some years. GLC publicity from the mid-1960s had reassured Londoners that it meant anybody could raise an objection and that "nothing can just slip through". It was convened in July 1970 under Frank Layfield QC, a leading expert on planning law.
"Among the objections to high-rise buildings, open space policy and waste disposal, one subject took up more time than any other, accounting for more heated debate, disagreement and animosity than anything else. 30,000 objections to the GLDP were received, and three quarters of them related to the GLC's motorway plans. Everyone, it seemed, had something to say about the Ringways."
Where they went wrong was building the Westway before the rest of the network had the go-ahead. Not actually part of the Ringways plan, the Westway was so appalling both in terms of what it did to those communities and the way the GLC told the people who were now breathing in fumes from the motorway 10 ft from their bedroom window to do one.
What they should have done: assemble Road Construction Units and start building all 4 flanks of Ringway One simultaneously. That way by the time people realised just how catastrophic this would be it was both too late to stop R1 but required Ringway 2 and the various arterial links for the roads already built to have any purpose...
Poor Politics from Starmer banning Shadow Ministers and PPS's from RMT picket lines.
Labour are either on the side of the workers or the bosses (Tory Govt) in this Trade dispute.
If its not the former whats the point of Labour
Voters who are siding with the bosses are predominantly not going to vote Labour anyway.
Labour voters who are with the workers will see SKS as a weak boring sit on the fence merchant* and see Labour as abandoning workers even more.
*Which of course he is.
Starmer also going to make a speech at which he will rule out a Labour government bringing back free movement with the EU as he further shifts to reassure 2019 Tory voters thinking of making the move to Labour next time
Hmmm. EEA and even a CU are going to be closed off by the main parties over the next few years then. Will be interesting to see if the LibDems can have any joy doubling down on being the “reverse UKIP”
Ruling out EEA membership is stupid. Ruling out CU membership is very sensible.
It seems like a strategic error from Starmer (unless he is lying - highly possible)
He may or may not bring back the Red Wall but he is giving up on all of Remainia
There is a huge opportunity here for the Lib Dems. For millions of people Brexit is still THE issue especially FoM. Remainers want it back
Strategically to get elected it is vital for him.
He cannot become PM without winning back the redwall and he will not win back the redwall without ruling out free movement/EEA.
The LDs might make some extra gains in Remain seats if they become the only main UK wide party backing EEA but the LDs would back Starmer over Johnson as PM anyway
But this could lose Labour a bunch of seats in big cities. Especially london
Yes but LD MPs in Remain seats would still back Starmer over Johnson as PM. Tory MPs in redwall seats wouldn't.
This policy confirms Starmer has given up on a Labour majority, he is just focused on becoming PM in a hung parliament with LD as well as Labour support
Though without Scotland, that was always pretty likely.
As for the Eurostuff, it was always likely that 2024-9 was going to be about (try to) "make Brexit work by diluting it a bit". And then a bit more and a bit more.
I know it's awfully bad manners for the government to try to launch another Brexit war and the rest of us not turn up, but sometimes the best thing to do is sit and wait.
Except, if Starmer wants the support of the LDs and SNP to become PM with NOM, the price will probably be SM and CU, so STFU*
*I don’t really mean that, I just carried away with all the acronyms. My main point is good, tho
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
Lets use an M62 example but over the Pennines instead. The M67 was supposed to connect to the Manchester Inner Ring motorway near the Apollo. Cancelled. The other end was supposed to extend over the Pennines to meet the M1 north of Meadowhall and was further proposed to reach the A1 at Barnsdale Bar. Cancelled.
Entertainingly even the piddly Mottram / Tintwistle bypass can't get built because of the risk that it makes Woodhead more attractive as a crossing. Because the M67 / M60 junction can't cope with more traffic nor would the M60 to either side.
So we get stuck with the M62. Which takes all its own traffic. Plus from the cancelled M67 and M64 further south. Plus from the lack of a high quality road any further north (like a dualled A66)
They should dig a dual-carriageway tunnel under the Snake Pass - and leave that twisty piece of road as a private English Nurburgring for the petrol heads, once everyone else has crappy electric appliances on their driveways.
Driving round Sicily I was stunned by the road engineering (viaducts and tunnels). I'm guessing that's what EU membership gets you
Poor Politics from Starmer banning Shadow Ministers and PPS's from RMT picket lines.
Labour are either on the side of the workers or the bosses (Tory Govt) in this Trade dispute.
If its not the former whats the point of Labour
Voters who are siding with the bosses are predominantly not going to vote Labour anyway.
Labour voters who are with the workers will see SKS as a weak boring sit on the fence merchant* and see Labour as abandoning workers even more.
*Which of course he is.
Starmer also going to make a speech at which he will rule out a Labour government bringing back free movement with the EU as he further shifts to reassure 2019 Tory voters thinking of making the move to Labour next time
Hmmm. EEA and even a CU are going to be closed off by the main parties over the next few years then. Will be interesting to see if the LibDems can have any joy doubling down on being the “reverse UKIP”
Ruling out EEA membership is stupid. Ruling out CU membership is very sensible.
It seems like a strategic error from Starmer (unless he is lying - highly possible)
He may or may not bring back the Red Wall but he is giving up on all of Remainia
There is a huge opportunity here for the Lib Dems. For millions of people Brexit is still THE issue especially FoM. Remainers want it back
Strategically to get elected it is vital for him.
He cannot become PM without winning back the redwall and he will not win back the redwall without ruling out free movement/EEA.
The LDs might make some extra gains in Remain seats if they become the only main UK wide party backing EEA but the LDs would back Starmer over Johnson as PM anyway
But this could lose Labour a bunch of seats in big cities. Especially london
Yes but LD MPs in Remain seats would still back Starmer over Johnson as PM. Tory MPs in redwall seats wouldn't.
This policy confirms Starmer has given up on a Labour majority, he is just focused on becoming PM in a hung parliament with LD as well as Labour support
Though without Scotland, that was always pretty likely.
As for the Eurostuff, it was always likely that 2024-9 was going to be about (try to) "make Brexit work by diluting it a bit". And then a bit more and a bit more.
I know it's awfully bad manners for the government to try to launch another Brexit war and the rest of us not turn up, but sometimes the best thing to do is sit and wait.
Except, if Starmer wants the support of the LDs and SNP to become PM with NOM, the price will probably be SM and CU, so STFU*
*I don’t really mean that, I just carried away with all the acronyms. My main point is good, tho
Yet by all comment consent, SM and CU is what we need to stem the blood from our legs given the number of other wounds we are already carrying.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
Lets use an M62 example but over the Pennines instead. The M67 was supposed to connect to the Manchester Inner Ring motorway near the Apollo. Cancelled. The other end was supposed to extend over the Pennines to meet the M1 north of Meadowhall and was further proposed to reach the A1 at Barnsdale Bar. Cancelled.
Entertainingly even the piddly Mottram / Tintwistle bypass can't get built because of the risk that it makes Woodhead more attractive as a crossing. Because the M67 / M60 junction can't cope with more traffic nor would the M60 to either side.
So we get stuck with the M62. Which takes all its own traffic. Plus from the cancelled M67 and M64 further south. Plus from the lack of a high quality road any further north (like a dualled A66)
They should dig a dual-carriageway tunnel under the Snake Pass - and leave that twisty piece of road as a private English Nurburgring for the petrol heads, once everyone else has crappy electric appliances on their driveways.
Driving round Sicily I was stunned by the road engineering (viaducts and tunnels). I'm guessing that's what EU membership gets you
Yep, the poorer parts of the EU have got awesome shiny new infrastructure. That’s what the £350m a week was paying for.
Keep VAT where it is but remove it entirely from all food, non and low alcohol drink, fuel and clothing Scrap fuel duty Raise personal allowance to 20k Flat tax 35% above that, completely scrap NI
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
Lets use an M62 example but over the Pennines instead. The M67 was supposed to connect to the Manchester Inner Ring motorway near the Apollo. Cancelled. The other end was supposed to extend over the Pennines to meet the M1 north of Meadowhall and was further proposed to reach the A1 at Barnsdale Bar. Cancelled.
Entertainingly even the piddly Mottram / Tintwistle bypass can't get built because of the risk that it makes Woodhead more attractive as a crossing. Because the M67 / M60 junction can't cope with more traffic nor would the M60 to either side.
So we get stuck with the M62. Which takes all its own traffic. Plus from the cancelled M67 and M64 further south. Plus from the lack of a high quality road any further north (like a dualled A66)
They should dig a dual-carriageway tunnel under the Snake Pass - and leave that twisty piece of road as a private English Nurburgring for the petrol heads, once everyone else has crappy electric appliances on their driveways.
Driving round Sicily I was stunned by the road engineering (viaducts and tunnels). I'm guessing that's what EU membership gets you
Yep, the poorer parts of the EU have got awesome shiny new infrastructure. That’s what the £350m a week was paying for.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
Lets use an M62 example but over the Pennines instead. The M67 was supposed to connect to the Manchester Inner Ring motorway near the Apollo. Cancelled. The other end was supposed to extend over the Pennines to meet the M1 north of Meadowhall and was further proposed to reach the A1 at Barnsdale Bar. Cancelled.
Entertainingly even the piddly Mottram / Tintwistle bypass can't get built because of the risk that it makes Woodhead more attractive as a crossing. Because the M67 / M60 junction can't cope with more traffic nor would the M60 to either side.
So we get stuck with the M62. Which takes all its own traffic. Plus from the cancelled M67 and M64 further south. Plus from the lack of a high quality road any further north (like a dualled A66)
They should dig a dual-carriageway tunnel under the Snake Pass - and leave that twisty piece of road as a private English Nurburgring for the petrol heads, once everyone else has crappy electric appliances on their driveways.
Driving round Sicily I was stunned by the road engineering (viaducts and tunnels). I'm guessing that's what EU membership gets you
Yep, the poorer parts of the EU have got awesome shiny new infrastructure. That’s what the £350m a week was paying for.
The lack of up to date infrastructure in the UK is not the fault of the EU - it's due to successive governments' inability to invest for the long-term, coupled with the rampant nimbyism that pervades the UK.
Anyway, never mind the pay element, lets focus on the maintenance reason they are on strike. The government requires that Network Rail cut track maintenance budgets, staff and thus inspections, in half. They are claiming that we no longer need visual inspections as we can use inspection trains. Note that they are not proposing the construction of any additional inspection trains and the existing ones are heavily used.
The last time the network did this was in the early Railtrack era. Contracts for maintenance cut, farmed out to external for-profit contractors. Who didn't do enough maintenance. And so we had crash after crash after crash. Followed by Railtrack having to admit they hadn't done contracted sufficient maintenance to actually know the condition of its assets. Hence the need for mass temporary speed restrictions whilst visual inspections and emergency repairs were carries out.
But the DfT doesn't want to talk about this. So instead lies about train drivers who aren't on strike. And says its all about pay which it isn't and that they earn £lots which they don't.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
And with that attitude NIMBYism should have killed HS2 too. Why didn't it, considering the economic demand for HS2 is considerably less than M1-2 and M6-2 or whatever you want to call them would bring.
Because on some level people like trains and don't like Motorways.
Also HS2 started in a different era - by the time the current focus on NIMBYism had arrived most of the bits of HS2 that are being built had been bought up and at the very least budgeted for.
I would argue NIMBYism has been around since at least the 1970s.
"The Greater London Council's policy for the shape of London went to public inquiry in 1970, and its monolithic motorway plans came under detailed scrutiny for the first time. The Greater London Development Plan Inquiry was to become the longest planning inquiry in British history - and marked the start of the end for urban motorways in the capital.
"The inquiry had been fully expected for some years. GLC publicity from the mid-1960s had reassured Londoners that it meant anybody could raise an objection and that "nothing can just slip through". It was convened in July 1970 under Frank Layfield QC, a leading expert on planning law.
"Among the objections to high-rise buildings, open space policy and waste disposal, one subject took up more time than any other, accounting for more heated debate, disagreement and animosity than anything else. 30,000 objections to the GLDP were received, and three quarters of them related to the GLC's motorway plans. Everyone, it seemed, had something to say about the Ringways."
Where they went wrong was building the Westway before the rest of the network had the go-ahead. Not actually part of the Ringways plan, the Westway was so appalling both in terms of what it did to those communities and the way the GLC told the people who were now breathing in fumes from the motorway 10 ft from their bedroom window to do one.
What they should have done: assemble Road Construction Units and start building all 4 flanks of Ringway One simultaneously. That way by the time people realised just how catastrophic this would be it was both too late to stop R1 but required Ringway 2 and the various arterial links for the roads already built to have any purpose...
Indeed. Yet somehow, the M1 was built all the way in to Staples Corner with scarcely an objection raised!
And in the 1990s swathes of Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead were flattened to make way for the A12 "M11 Link Road". Which begs the question, if it was OK to build that particular road at that particular time, why not the others?
Tee hee! A friend just sent me a postcode from Barnard Castle. It says 'Cummings and Goings in Barnard Castle' and features a picture of the great man. How many other 'Westminster Bubble' scandals feature on comic postcards years after the event? As I said at the time: the most resonant political story ever.
Keep VAT where it is but remove it entirely from all food, non and low alcohol drink, fuel and clothing Scrap fuel duty Raise personal allowance to 20k Flat tax 35% above that, completely scrap NI
Fuel duty scrap temporary, invest in newer, more sensible and functional lightweight electric vehicles for local use that do not require road tax and csn be used much more flexibly
North Shropshire was a 23k con Maj, almost entirely before partygate. Honiton is 24k. Why is there any doubt it goes lib dem on Thursday?
Because Lib Dems love a 'look how awesome we little guys are' David vs Goliath bullshit story so they make up crap about it being close and then a magical tidal wave of support over the last 48 hours as the little people flock to them and blue wall orange hammer miracles spontaneously occur nationwide. Having said that, North Salop was cos of out and out corruption , this is just a sad old boy having a tug at some boobies
On the green cushioned seats?! No wonder the ladies next to him complained. Or is that just metaphorical?
North Shropshire was a 23k con Maj, almost entirely before partygate. Honiton is 24k. Why is there any doubt it goes lib dem on Thursday?
Because Lib Dems love a 'look how awesome we little guys are' David vs Goliath bullshit story so they make up crap about it being close and then a magical tidal wave of support over the last 48 hours as the little people flock to them and blue wall orange hammer miracles spontaneously occur nationwide. Having said that, North Salop was cos of out and out corruption , this is just a sad old boy having a tug at some boobies
On the green cushioned seats?! No wonder the ladies next to him complained. Or is that just metaphorical?
Metaphorical. I mean tug as in 'illicitly enjoying' rather than 'wanking like a monkey and spraying his porridge about the place'
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
And with that attitude NIMBYism should have killed HS2 too. Why didn't it, considering the economic demand for HS2 is considerably less than M1-2 and M6-2 or whatever you want to call them would bring.
Because on some level people like trains and don't like Motorways.
Also HS2 started in a different era - by the time the current focus on NIMBYism had arrived most of the bits of HS2 that are being built had been bought up and at the very least budgeted for.
I would argue NIMBYism has been around since at least the 1970s.
"The Greater London Council's policy for the shape of London went to public inquiry in 1970, and its monolithic motorway plans came under detailed scrutiny for the first time. The Greater London Development Plan Inquiry was to become the longest planning inquiry in British history - and marked the start of the end for urban motorways in the capital.
"The inquiry had been fully expected for some years. GLC publicity from the mid-1960s had reassured Londoners that it meant anybody could raise an objection and that "nothing can just slip through". It was convened in July 1970 under Frank Layfield QC, a leading expert on planning law.
"Among the objections to high-rise buildings, open space policy and waste disposal, one subject took up more time than any other, accounting for more heated debate, disagreement and animosity than anything else. 30,000 objections to the GLDP were received, and three quarters of them related to the GLC's motorway plans. Everyone, it seemed, had something to say about the Ringways."
Where they went wrong was building the Westway before the rest of the network had the go-ahead. Not actually part of the Ringways plan, the Westway was so appalling both in terms of what it did to those communities and the way the GLC told the people who were now breathing in fumes from the motorway 10 ft from their bedroom window to do one.
What they should have done: assemble Road Construction Units and start building all 4 flanks of Ringway One simultaneously. That way by the time people realised just how catastrophic this would be it was both too late to stop R1 but required Ringway 2 and the various arterial links for the roads already built to have any purpose...
Indeed. Yet somehow, the M1 was built all the way in to Staples Corner with scarcely an objection raised!
And in the 1990s swathes of Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead were flattened to make way for the A12 "M11 Link Road". Which begs the question, if it was OK to build that particular road at that particular time, why not the others?
Poor Politics from Starmer banning Shadow Ministers and PPS's from RMT picket lines.
Labour are either on the side of the workers or the bosses (Tory Govt) in this Trade dispute.
If its not the former whats the point of Labour
Voters who are siding with the bosses are predominantly not going to vote Labour anyway.
Labour voters who are with the workers will see SKS as a weak boring sit on the fence merchant* and see Labour as abandoning workers even more.
*Which of course he is.
Starmer also going to make a speech at which he will rule out a Labour government bringing back free movement with the EU as he further shifts to reassure 2019 Tory voters thinking of making the move to Labour next time
Hmmm. EEA and even a CU are going to be closed off by the main parties over the next few years then. Will be interesting to see if the LibDems can have any joy doubling down on being the “reverse UKIP”
Ruling out EEA membership is stupid. Ruling out CU membership is very sensible.
It seems like a strategic error from Starmer (unless he is lying - highly possible)
He may or may not bring back the Red Wall but he is giving up on all of Remainia
There is a huge opportunity here for the Lib Dems. For millions of people Brexit is still THE issue especially FoM. Remainers want it back
Strategically to get elected it is vital for him.
He cannot become PM without winning back the redwall and he will not win back the redwall without ruling out free movement/EEA.
The LDs might make some extra gains in Remain seats if they become the only main UK wide party backing EEA but the LDs would back Starmer over Johnson as PM anyway
But this could lose Labour a bunch of seats in big cities. Especially london
Yes but LD MPs in Remain seats would still back Starmer over Johnson as PM. Tory MPs in redwall seats wouldn't.
This policy confirms Starmer has given up on a Labour majority, he is just focused on becoming PM in a hung parliament with LD as well as Labour support
Though without Scotland, that was always pretty likely.
As for the Eurostuff, it was always likely that 2024-9 was going to be about (try to) "make Brexit work by diluting it a bit". And then a bit more and a bit more.
I know it's awfully bad manners for the government to try to launch another Brexit war and the rest of us not turn up, but sometimes the best thing to do is sit and wait.
Except, if Starmer wants the support of the LDs and SNP to become PM with NOM, the price will probably be SM and CU, so STFU*
*I don’t really mean that, I just carried away with all the acronyms. My main point is good, tho
Do you know the Acronym for the Customs Union No Thanks Supporters Sean
North Shropshire was a 23k con Maj, almost entirely before partygate. Honiton is 24k. Why is there any doubt it goes lib dem on Thursday?
Because Lib Dems love a 'look how awesome we little guys are' David vs Goliath bullshit story so they make up crap about it being close and then a magical tidal wave of support over the last 48 hours as the little people flock to them and blue wall orange hammer miracles spontaneously occur nationwide. Having said that, North Salop was cos of out and out corruption , this is just a sad old boy having a tug at some boobies
On the green cushioned seats?! No wonder the ladies next to him complained. Or is that just metaphorical?
Metaphorical. I mean tug as in 'illicitly enjoying' rather than 'wanking like a monkey and spraying his porridge about the place'
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
And with that attitude NIMBYism should have killed HS2 too. Why didn't it, considering the economic demand for HS2 is considerably less than M1-2 and M6-2 or whatever you want to call them would bring.
Because on some level people like trains and don't like Motorways.
Also HS2 started in a different era - by the time the current focus on NIMBYism had arrived most of the bits of HS2 that are being built had been bought up and at the very least budgeted for.
I would argue NIMBYism has been around since at least the 1970s.
"The Greater London Council's policy for the shape of London went to public inquiry in 1970, and its monolithic motorway plans came under detailed scrutiny for the first time. The Greater London Development Plan Inquiry was to become the longest planning inquiry in British history - and marked the start of the end for urban motorways in the capital.
"The inquiry had been fully expected for some years. GLC publicity from the mid-1960s had reassured Londoners that it meant anybody could raise an objection and that "nothing can just slip through". It was convened in July 1970 under Frank Layfield QC, a leading expert on planning law.
"Among the objections to high-rise buildings, open space policy and waste disposal, one subject took up more time than any other, accounting for more heated debate, disagreement and animosity than anything else. 30,000 objections to the GLDP were received, and three quarters of them related to the GLC's motorway plans. Everyone, it seemed, had something to say about the Ringways."
Where they went wrong was building the Westway before the rest of the network had the go-ahead. Not actually part of the Ringways plan, the Westway was so appalling both in terms of what it did to those communities and the way the GLC told the people who were now breathing in fumes from the motorway 10 ft from their bedroom window to do one.
What they should have done: assemble Road Construction Units and start building all 4 flanks of Ringway One simultaneously. That way by the time people realised just how catastrophic this would be it was both too late to stop R1 but required Ringway 2 and the various arterial links for the roads already built to have any purpose...
Indeed. Yet somehow, the M1 was built all the way in to Staples Corner with scarcely an objection raised!
And in the 1990s swathes of Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead were flattened to make way for the A12 "M11 Link Road". Which begs the question, if it was OK to build that particular road at that particular time, why not the others?
Did different kinds of people live in the different areas? E.g. middle class articulate Nimbiers versus fringe types?
Hmmm.... well, the cynic in me thinks the M11's original planned route through Snaresbrook (ie. a direct line from M11 J4 through to Leytonstone) was avoided because it was Tory-voting back then, whereas Leyton and Leytonstone were and still are Labour...
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
And with that attitude NIMBYism should have killed HS2 too. Why didn't it, considering the economic demand for HS2 is considerably less than M1-2 and M6-2 or whatever you want to call them would bring.
Because on some level people like trains and don't like Motorways.
Also HS2 started in a different era - by the time the current focus on NIMBYism had arrived most of the bits of HS2 that are being built had been bought up and at the very least budgeted for.
I would argue NIMBYism has been around since at least the 1970s.
"The Greater London Council's policy for the shape of London went to public inquiry in 1970, and its monolithic motorway plans came under detailed scrutiny for the first time. The Greater London Development Plan Inquiry was to become the longest planning inquiry in British history - and marked the start of the end for urban motorways in the capital.
"The inquiry had been fully expected for some years. GLC publicity from the mid-1960s had reassured Londoners that it meant anybody could raise an objection and that "nothing can just slip through". It was convened in July 1970 under Frank Layfield QC, a leading expert on planning law.
"Among the objections to high-rise buildings, open space policy and waste disposal, one subject took up more time than any other, accounting for more heated debate, disagreement and animosity than anything else. 30,000 objections to the GLDP were received, and three quarters of them related to the GLC's motorway plans. Everyone, it seemed, had something to say about the Ringways."
Where they went wrong was building the Westway before the rest of the network had the go-ahead. Not actually part of the Ringways plan, the Westway was so appalling both in terms of what it did to those communities and the way the GLC told the people who were now breathing in fumes from the motorway 10 ft from their bedroom window to do one.
What they should have done: assemble Road Construction Units and start building all 4 flanks of Ringway One simultaneously. That way by the time people realised just how catastrophic this would be it was both too late to stop R1 but required Ringway 2 and the various arterial links for the roads already built to have any purpose...
Indeed. Yet somehow, the M1 was built all the way in to Staples Corner with scarcely an objection raised!
And in the 1990s swathes of Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead were flattened to make way for the A12 "M11 Link Road". Which begs the question, if it was OK to build that particular road at that particular time, why not the others?
You and I know (but others don't) that Staples Corner is not supposed to be where the M1 starts. It would have gone over the top of that roundabout and alongside the railway until it met Ringway 2 at a spectacular rooftop junction in Kilburn. Cancelled when R2 disappeared.
As for the A12 through Leyton, that was less destructive that the cancelled M11 route would have been (effectively the same corridor but a different alignment) until it met Ringway 1 at the laughingly part-built junction with the East Cross Route.
A number of Labour MPs have shown support for this week's rail strikes by appearing at picket lines outside stations, despite warnings from Sir Keir Starmer's office.
Senior Labour MPs were told not to show support for the strikes.
However, frontbenchers Kate Osborne, Paula Barker and Navendu Mishra are among those to have tweeted pictures of themselves at picket lines.
North Shropshire was a 23k con Maj, almost entirely before partygate. Honiton is 24k. Why is there any doubt it goes lib dem on Thursday?
Because Lib Dems love a 'look how awesome we little guys are' David vs Goliath bullshit story so they make up crap about it being close and then a magical tidal wave of support over the last 48 hours as the little people flock to them and blue wall orange hammer miracles spontaneously occur nationwide. Having said that, North Salop was cos of out and out corruption , this is just a sad old boy having a tug at some boobies
On the green cushioned seats?! No wonder the ladies next to him complained. Or is that just metaphorical?
Metaphorical. I mean tug as in 'illicitly enjoying' rather than 'wanking like a monkey and spraying his porridge about the place'
Thank goodness. There are still some standards.
What do you do if you see 15 MPs from the SW coming over the hill? Swim.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
And with that attitude NIMBYism should have killed HS2 too. Why didn't it, considering the economic demand for HS2 is considerably less than M1-2 and M6-2 or whatever you want to call them would bring.
Because on some level people like trains and don't like Motorways.
Also HS2 started in a different era - by the time the current focus on NIMBYism had arrived most of the bits of HS2 that are being built had been bought up and at the very least budgeted for.
I would argue NIMBYism has been around since at least the 1970s.
"The Greater London Council's policy for the shape of London went to public inquiry in 1970, and its monolithic motorway plans came under detailed scrutiny for the first time. The Greater London Development Plan Inquiry was to become the longest planning inquiry in British history - and marked the start of the end for urban motorways in the capital.
"The inquiry had been fully expected for some years. GLC publicity from the mid-1960s had reassured Londoners that it meant anybody could raise an objection and that "nothing can just slip through". It was convened in July 1970 under Frank Layfield QC, a leading expert on planning law.
"Among the objections to high-rise buildings, open space policy and waste disposal, one subject took up more time than any other, accounting for more heated debate, disagreement and animosity than anything else. 30,000 objections to the GLDP were received, and three quarters of them related to the GLC's motorway plans. Everyone, it seemed, had something to say about the Ringways."
Where they went wrong was building the Westway before the rest of the network had the go-ahead. Not actually part of the Ringways plan, the Westway was so appalling both in terms of what it did to those communities and the way the GLC told the people who were now breathing in fumes from the motorway 10 ft from their bedroom window to do one.
What they should have done: assemble Road Construction Units and start building all 4 flanks of Ringway One simultaneously. That way by the time people realised just how catastrophic this would be it was both too late to stop R1 but required Ringway 2 and the various arterial links for the roads already built to have any purpose...
Indeed. Yet somehow, the M1 was built all the way in to Staples Corner with scarcely an objection raised!
And in the 1990s swathes of Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead were flattened to make way for the A12 "M11 Link Road". Which begs the question, if it was OK to build that particular road at that particular time, why not the others?
Did different kinds of people live in the different areas? E.g. middle class articulate Nimbiers versus fringe types?
Hmmm.... well, the cynic in me thinks the M11's original planned route through Snaresbrook (ie. a direct line from M11 J4 through to Leytonstone) was avoided because it was Tory-voting back then, whereas Leyton and Leytonstone were and still are Labour...
The M11 starting at the Angel Islington as planned. That should be our campaign!
A number of Labour MPs have shown support for this week's rail strikes by appearing at picket lines outside stations, despite warnings from Sir Keir Starmer's office.
Senior Labour MPs were told not to show support for the strikes.
However, frontbenchers Kate Osborne, Paula Barker and Navendu Mishra are among those to have tweeted pictures of themselves at picket lines.
Sackings??
Scargill was at Wakefield. Thats like Parton at Glastonbury.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
England is not a large country, for much of the country all the trade being done is the last x miles.
If the capacity demand for freight is there, why is freight rail falling as a share of freight, rather than rising? Why are motorways the ones stretched to triple the capacity they were designed for?
If motorways were idle and empty then sure, no reason to invest in more, but its just not the case.
The capacity isn't there at the moment - Moving the fast trains to HS2 is how the capacity is added to the WCML...
The capacity was there in the past, and yet the share of freight being moved by rail has gone consistently down, and down, and down as we eliminated coal.
It is the road network which is bursting to capacity at hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day per stretch, not hundreds or thousands of them.
You may not have noticed this but train passenger numbers doubled from 2000 to 2019 - and that was done by adding more passenger trains to the network.
I have noticed, which was a pretty inconsequential dent in overall passenger traffic, since over 80% of overall passenger traffic remains via road and not rail. You might also notice the population rose in that time as well.
Meanwhile what happened to motorway traffic in the same time? It went up in both freight and passengers, while the rails doubled in one yet halved in the other.
The simple reality is that roads are a far more useful investment, yet are neglected for purely ideological rather than economic reasons. If you're looking at capacity, then instead of a new WCML I'd be looking at a new M6 and M1 etc as alternatives to the existing ones, with different routes and that would double capacity for both freight and passengers by road which is the overwhelming proportion of both freight and passengers moved in this country.
You can't say they are neglected for ideological reasons. An awful lot of money is spent on upgrades rather than new routes. There is no political appetite to build a new motorway. Up here we benefitted from the A90 Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route. Cambridgeshire and the Midlands benefitted from the A14 Huntingdon bypass. Both built as latest spec motorways (which no longer need hard shoulders) but have green signs and an A-number because motorways are bad.
Worse still is how rare these new not-motorways are. Instead of new they spend £bonkers squeezing narrow lanes onto existing motorway carriageways. Huge cost, huge disruption, limited benefit. What we need are replacement routes for these. Build the M31 to relieve the Heathrow quadrant of the M25. Build the M64 to relieve the West Midlands. etc etc
I agree with you. Stop pissing about trying to squeeze another bit onto existing road, build a new one. Because capacity has been breached well past where it was.
eek and others who love HS2 constantly bang on about capacity, but capacity is the issue with motorways and then some. So where are the new lines of motorways? Not widenings, not alternatives, not small quadrants. Entire full routes, as are proposed with HS2.
New motorways ought to be built all the way from London to Newcastle in the East, and Preston or similar in the West, then onto Scotland. And similar new motorways wherever needed, I've suggested before an "M580" which would remove a lot of congestion from the M62.
NIMBYism means the odds of getting a new motorway is now zero.
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
And with that attitude NIMBYism should have killed HS2 too. Why didn't it, considering the economic demand for HS2 is considerably less than M1-2 and M6-2 or whatever you want to call them would bring.
Because on some level people like trains and don't like Motorways.
Also HS2 started in a different era - by the time the current focus on NIMBYism had arrived most of the bits of HS2 that are being built had been bought up and at the very least budgeted for.
I would argue NIMBYism has been around since at least the 1970s.
"The Greater London Council's policy for the shape of London went to public inquiry in 1970, and its monolithic motorway plans came under detailed scrutiny for the first time. The Greater London Development Plan Inquiry was to become the longest planning inquiry in British history - and marked the start of the end for urban motorways in the capital.
"The inquiry had been fully expected for some years. GLC publicity from the mid-1960s had reassured Londoners that it meant anybody could raise an objection and that "nothing can just slip through". It was convened in July 1970 under Frank Layfield QC, a leading expert on planning law.
"Among the objections to high-rise buildings, open space policy and waste disposal, one subject took up more time than any other, accounting for more heated debate, disagreement and animosity than anything else. 30,000 objections to the GLDP were received, and three quarters of them related to the GLC's motorway plans. Everyone, it seemed, had something to say about the Ringways."
Where they went wrong was building the Westway before the rest of the network had the go-ahead. Not actually part of the Ringways plan, the Westway was so appalling both in terms of what it did to those communities and the way the GLC told the people who were now breathing in fumes from the motorway 10 ft from their bedroom window to do one.
What they should have done: assemble Road Construction Units and start building all 4 flanks of Ringway One simultaneously. That way by the time people realised just how catastrophic this would be it was both too late to stop R1 but required Ringway 2 and the various arterial links for the roads already built to have any purpose...
Indeed. Yet somehow, the M1 was built all the way in to Staples Corner with scarcely an objection raised!
And in the 1990s swathes of Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead were flattened to make way for the A12 "M11 Link Road". Which begs the question, if it was OK to build that particular road at that particular time, why not the others?
Did different kinds of people live in the different areas? E.g. middle class articulate Nimbiers versus fringe types?
Hmmm.... well, the cynic in me thinks the M11's original planned route through Snaresbrook (ie. a direct line from M11 J4 through to Leytonstone) was avoided because it was Tory-voting back then, whereas Leyton and Leytonstone were and still are Labour...
The M11 starting at the Angel Islington as planned. That should be our campaign!
Poor Politics from Starmer banning Shadow Ministers and PPS's from RMT picket lines.
Labour are either on the side of the workers or the bosses (Tory Govt) in this Trade dispute.
If its not the former whats the point of Labour
Voters who are siding with the bosses are predominantly not going to vote Labour anyway.
Labour voters who are with the workers will see SKS as a weak boring sit on the fence merchant* and see Labour as abandoning workers even more.
*Which of course he is.
Starmer also going to make a speech at which he will rule out a Labour government bringing back free movement with the EU as he further shifts to reassure 2019 Tory voters thinking of making the move to Labour next time
Hmmm. EEA and even a CU are going to be closed off by the main parties over the next few years then. Will be interesting to see if the LibDems can have any joy doubling down on being the “reverse UKIP”
Ruling out EEA membership is stupid. Ruling out CU membership is very sensible.
It seems like a strategic error from Starmer (unless he is lying - highly possible)
He may or may not bring back the Red Wall but he is giving up on all of Remainia
There is a huge opportunity here for the Lib Dems. For millions of people Brexit is still THE issue especially FoM. Remainers want it back
Strategically to get elected it is vital for him.
He cannot become PM without winning back the redwall and he will not win back the redwall without ruling out free movement/EEA.
The LDs might make some extra gains in Remain seats if they become the only main UK wide party backing EEA but the LDs would back Starmer over Johnson as PM anyway
But this could lose Labour a bunch of seats in big cities. Especially london
Yes but LD MPs in Remain seats would still back Starmer over Johnson as PM. Tory MPs in redwall seats wouldn't.
This policy confirms Starmer has given up on a Labour majority, he is just focused on becoming PM in a hung parliament with LD as well as Labour support
Though without Scotland, that was always pretty likely.
As for the Eurostuff, it was always likely that 2024-9 was going to be about (try to) "make Brexit work by diluting it a bit". And then a bit more and a bit more.
I know it's awfully bad manners for the government to try to launch another Brexit war and the rest of us not turn up, but sometimes the best thing to do is sit and wait.
Except, if Starmer wants the support of the LDs and SNP to become PM with NOM, the price will probably be SM and CU, so STFU*
*I don’t really mean that, I just carried away with all the acronyms. My main point is good, tho
Yet by all comment consent, SM and CU is what we need to stem the blood from our legs given the number of other wounds we are already carrying.
You know that thing that happens in a really bad row? The sort where everyone objective knows what the landing spot is, but none of the participants are yet ready to budge? And it's in nobody's interest to make the first move.
It happens with people all the time, and the current rail strikes are another example.
It can be obvious that the UK's prosperity and internal harmony need a Market Union and Single Customs process aligned with the rest of Europe without it being the right time to propose it. The stewing time is tedious and expensive, but somehow necessary.
The question is- what do you say and do in the meantime? Naming the stewing isn't helpful. But that's where we are.
If the government can afford to pay billions for HS2 then they should have the money to pay the rail staff more.
What ridiculous Brownian bullshit. 🤦♂️
The government can have a sensible role to play in long-term investments in infrastructure that will take decades to go through.
Paying the day-to-day staff wages of private businesses though should fall upon those businesses customers.
Getting new track built is an "investment". Getting a new hospital built is an "investment". Increasing staff wages, paying the same nurses or signal staff or anyone else more is not "investing" in rails or the NHS etc
Regardless of what Brown liked to say. I'm disappointed to see you parroting such Brownian bullshit.
HS2 is a white elephant. Always was. Always will be.
Nope HS2 is only a white elephant if you don't understand the capacity it opens up to shift freight from road to rail.
For reference a new quarry route opened yesterday - 1 train replaces 100 daily lorries.
How many extra lorries and other traffic could be operating if we spent £100bn on new motorways instead though?
100 lorries per day doesn't sound like a big deal to be frank. The M6 carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles per day, not a hundred per day.
Cost, remember. Petrol/diesel. Plus drivers.
100 lorries = 100 Yorkie enthusiasts. PLus congestion at each end.
1 train = 2 drivers.
Indeed.
Fundamentally, the advantage of railways is a much lower coefficient of friction, as well as a resilient trackbed: they can carry far heavier loads for long distances for limited outlays of energy without chewing up the road service and with only a couple of members of staff.
When you add on top how regulated and signalled they are they are much safer too.
Absolutely fantastic for the days when the economy operated by needing tonnes of the same good like coal, going to the same destination, like the coal power plant.
Not so good for the modern economy. But that doesn't suit the agenda some people have to push.
Where do you think the hard core for your motorways comes from? Your Crossrail? Construction in London and the HC? Clue: there is precious little hard rock in the HC.
Have a look at the quarry materials flows. Merehead limestone, for instance.
As I said, if you want to shift large volumes of the same good along the same route, then absolutely rail can be great. There's a time and a place for rail.
But the problem is, post-coal, that its not as much, and not as often. Whereas roads, especially in the age of goods getting more complicated and smaller, are stretched well past their capacity.
Adding more rail routes is tinkering at the edges of freight capacity, because most freight doesn't want to be moved by rail. Adding more motorways would be truly transformative.
Not really - most freight is distributed via a hub and spoke system. Delivery to the hubs can be done via rail with lorries doing the last x miles...
And unless I'm missing something the one problem that still hasn't been solved in the post carbon future is fuelling of Lorries...
BEV HGVs are on the way - the continually reducing cost of batteries and increasing production volumes are now making them viable.
Report on Wakefield By Election says David Herdson, the former chair of the Wakefield District Conservative Association – who left the party over Johnson’s leadership in 2019 – is trying to pick off Tory voters in these areas for the Yorkshire Party (which campaigns for a regional parliament)
Comments
See for example the the M4 relief road (yes I know it's in Wales but its the first example that came into my head)
Tangle with HMRC at your own risk.
None of the three stations above have any Elizabeth line "bullseye" logos or other marketing, just the route maps. Same is true at Slough, the Heathrow stations, Stratford, and Shenfield. Furthest station west with bullseye signs is Taplow, furthest east is Brentwood.
Bond Street is still closed, as are the connections from Stratford to Whitechapel, and Paddington low level to the GWR main line. Changing at Paddington isn't too bad, but at Liverpool Street it's a five minute walk!
There's also bribery laws already existing and more besides.
The idea you can just give money to anyone, for anything, has never been true.
The Brexit vote impact on business investment is unfortunately undeniable and is a warning sign of the low growth trajectory we are now on.
https://www.roads.org.uk/ringways
Fine. You just need to own it.
Scholz in particular, has been unwavering in his recent support for imports of Russian gas, over being seen to arm Ukraine.
Now here is a photo from the canteen of the IRS office in Austin
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FU-3HYfX0AA2qE_?format=jpg&name=large
https://twitter.com/NatashaRSarin/status/1535647339544776708
Now HMRC has a whole set of problems but the issues aren't in day to day tax processing it's in "Customer" Service...
Try and read all the words.
Entertainingly even the piddly Mottram / Tintwistle bypass can't get built because of the risk that it makes Woodhead more attractive as a crossing. Because the M67 / M60 junction can't cope with more traffic nor would the M60 to either side.
So we get stuck with the M62. Which takes all its own traffic. Plus from the cancelled M67 and M64 further south. Plus from the lack of a high quality road any further north (like a dualled A66)
It's fine, you're digging a deeper hole because you can't admit that it is in fact trivially easy to prevent incentivising strikes. Better to just get ahead and admit that you were wrong rather than come up with this stupid scenarios.
Maybe they’ll build the A303 Stonehenge tunnel first!
The FT dodgy chart is dodgy because it chooses 2009 as the baseline, multiple people have already pointed that out. Picking 1997 as the baseline the chart looks completely different unsurprisingly and it becomes clear than 2009 was the aberration and not 2016.
Also HS2 started in a different era - by the time the current focus on NIMBYism had arrived most of the bits of HS2 that are being built had been bought up and at the very least budgeted for.
Wonder how long it'll take to come along. You'd have thought it could be automated from the registry office..
Over 50s the opposite with over 65s being massively opposed.
I think the figures are consistent with the whole thread of selfish oldies being brainwashed Thatcherites!
We need routes to be finished, and we need entire routes to be built.
The M60 and the M62, like the M1 and the M6, both carry a lot of traffic that don't even want to be on the M60 M62 or go anywhere on the M60 or M62, its just that its the only route available.
Just as new routes add capacity on the WCML, new routes would add capacity on the M60 or M62 etc too as well as their own capacity. At present as 'all roads lead to' Manchester at the minute for a lot of routes, meeting at the M60 at the intersection, lots of journeys require taking you into Manchester even if you don't want to go into Manchester. Its utter madness to add congestion into a very congested city because there's no alternative route around at the minute.
That's why if it were up to me, we wouldn't be talking just a few small routes, though they should be built, I'd be talking entire new arteries running the length of the country.
You want to come across as this all knowing sage of wisdom about how things work but you don't know. Every single transaction in the UK is monitored for fraud other than cash. Unless you're suggesting that the union is suddenly going to withdraw tens of thousands on cash to then hand out for incentives (even that's not difficult to spot because of the cash withdrawal) then you're onto a loser.
Cost from memory is £1bn or so for 18miles..
It isn't just a fallacy to say "these networks have done it so we could too". Its wilful ignorance of the technology being advocated.
Strangely they also want to ban "propale" which is a French neologism meaning "proposition commerciale". They probably looked it up and found a Scots word with the same spelling so it went on the blacklist.
https://twitter.com/publicsenat/status/1539184173704937475
Some decision makers like trains and don't like Motorways. Primarily out of touch civil servants and politicians who live or work in London, commute via train, and don't use the Motorways. They don't like roads.
For the 80%+ of the country who do travel by road not rail, they actually do like roads a bit more. But they're not in charge of the DfT.
Poor Politics from Starmer banning Shadow Ministers and PPS's from RMT picket lines.
Labour are either on the side of the workers or the bosses (Tory Govt) in this Trade dispute.
If its not the former whats the point of Labour
Voters who are siding with the bosses are predominantly not going to vote Labour anyway.
Labour voters who are with the workers will see SKS as a weak boring sit on the fence merchant* and see Labour as abandoning workers even more.
*Which of course he is.
I stand by that YG says 59% of Lab voters support 27% oppose and 14% agree with SKS ie don't know
And it requires a lot of 10 minutes to justify building a motorway at £50m per mile.
If you go back and read what I said, I pointed out that UK business investment fell more than its peers after the GFC, and so was growing back more strongly from a lower base. It continued to grow during 2012-15 when the Eurozone crisis caused it to fall in Italy and stagnate in France and Germany. Then after the Brexit vote it suddenly stopped growing in the UK while it kept rising everywhere else. It fell further after Covid in the UK, Japan and Canada but has recovered to pre Covid levels or above elsewhere else in the G7.
The UK's performance since the Brexit vote has been bad, you cannot spin it away
A494 North Wales Expressway. They extended the M56 and then rebuilt to motorway standard the section north of the Dee. Where it loses half its lanes to squeeze onto the existing Dee bridge and along the 1970s Ewloe bypass which is now busier than ever thanks to the main route being flipped from the Chester bypass thanks to the bits built north of the river.
Just finish the sodding thing.
Scrap fuel duty.
I think we can all agree on that.
"The Greater London Council's policy for the shape of London went to public inquiry in 1970, and its monolithic motorway plans came under detailed scrutiny for the first time. The Greater London Development Plan Inquiry was to become the longest planning inquiry in British history - and marked the start of the end for urban motorways in the capital.
"The inquiry had been fully expected for some years. GLC publicity from the mid-1960s had reassured Londoners that it meant anybody could raise an objection and that "nothing can just slip through". It was convened in July 1970 under Frank Layfield QC, a leading expert on planning law.
"Among the objections to high-rise buildings, open space policy and waste disposal, one subject took up more time than any other, accounting for more heated debate, disagreement and animosity than anything else. 30,000 objections to the GLDP were received, and three quarters of them related to the GLC's motorway plans. Everyone, it seemed, had something to say about the Ringways."
https://www.roads.org.uk/index.php/ringways/the-end
Plenty of completely new networks are however GoA3 / 4 because it's only then that full automation makes sense.
From 1997 shows a clear trend of growth outside of recessions (eg 2009 and 2020) and you can draw a trend line from 1997 to 2016-19 being back at trend. But if you start the trendline at 2009 then obviously the trendline should expect the recovery to keep going to infinity and beyond which isn't possible.
How well Brits think the govt is handling… (net)
Inflation -64
Immigration -62
Economy -54*
NHS -51
Housing -49
Tax -47
Transport -36*
Benefits -36
Crime -35
Brexit -33
Environment -21
Education -16
Unemployment -5
Defence +13
Terrorism +29
*Lowest since tracker began Jun 2019
Better is to look at the traffic crossing the Pennines here and wonder where it is going and from where. Had the M64 connected the M1 at Derby and the M6 at Stoke or the A66 been done properly much of this traffic would go nowhere near Manchester.
This is the stupidity of the M6 Toll. The right idea - a West Midlands bypass. But one that actively tries to deter traffic from using it to reduce maintenance costs. Because so much of the network is still to be built it is impossible to even start. Because even if a government said "lets do this" by the time it has got through the detailed design work and the planning enquiries to actually start construction there has been a change of government and work stops.
Manchester-Sheffield connections are a bit rubbish in general, back to the rail debate. A 'crossrail for the north' connecting the cities from Liverpool to Hull remains a compelling idea, but it'll never happen.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J33_728_U-Bahn-Triebzug_für_Glasgow.jpg
Surely the right to withdraw one's labour is a fundamental civil right, certainly for libertarian conservatives.
*I don’t really mean that, I just carried away with all the acronyms. My main point is good, tho
This is a perfect encapsulation of the stakes in the battle for Labour’s soul.
What they should have done: assemble Road Construction Units and start building all 4 flanks of Ringway One simultaneously. That way by the time people realised just how catastrophic this would be it was both too late to stop R1 but required Ringway 2 and the various arterial links for the roads already built to have any purpose...
https://www.roads.org.uk/index.php/ringways/ringway1/camden-town-bypass
Refuse collection workers have accepted a 7.5% pay rise, ending the threat of industrial action.
Members of the GMB employed by Veolia in Chesterfield voted in favour of a deal the union said is worth an extra £2 an hour.
Drivers will be need however to take trains to and from the depot....
Scrap fuel duty
Raise personal allowance to 20k
Flat tax 35% above that, completely scrap NI
The last time the network did this was in the early Railtrack era. Contracts for maintenance cut, farmed out to external for-profit contractors. Who didn't do enough maintenance. And so we had crash after crash after crash. Followed by Railtrack having to admit they hadn't done contracted sufficient maintenance to actually know the condition of its assets. Hence the need for mass temporary speed restrictions whilst visual inspections and emergency repairs were carries out.
But the DfT doesn't want to talk about this. So instead lies about train drivers who aren't on strike. And says its all about pay which it isn't and that they earn £lots which they don't.
And in the 1990s swathes of Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead were flattened to make way for the A12 "M11 Link Road". Which begs the question, if it was OK to build that particular road at that particular time, why not the others?
https://www.roads.org.uk/index.php/ringways/northern/m11
https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko/status/1539240601752940550
More where that came from, please. Lots more.
As for the A12 through Leyton, that was less destructive that the cancelled M11 route would have been (effectively the same corridor but a different alignment) until it met Ringway 1 at the laughingly part-built junction with the East Cross Route.
Senior Labour MPs were told not to show support for the strikes.
However, frontbenchers Kate Osborne, Paula Barker and Navendu Mishra are among those to have tweeted pictures of themselves at picket lines.
Sackings??
Swim.
It happens with people all the time, and the current rail strikes are another example.
It can be obvious that the UK's prosperity and internal harmony need a Market Union and Single Customs process aligned with the rest of Europe without it being the right time to propose it. The stewing time is tedious and expensive, but somehow necessary.
The question is- what do you say and do in the meantime? Naming the stewing isn't helpful. But that's where we are.
https://ibankcoin.com/flyblog/2022/06/21/inflation-might-abating/#sthash.R3VQw1FG.dpbs
Whoever he is!!!