There is no alternative anywhere. Transport is necessary in all cities. Driving should never be a viable alternative to public transport in urban areas
...yet we spent large sums of money in post-war years building motorways (and fast dual carriageways) into/around/by the centres of many "northern" cities:
- Manchester has the M602, A57M and a busy ring road
- Leeds has the M621, A58(M) and a busy ring road
- Newcastle has the A167(M)
- Sheffield has the A57 and a busy ring road (albeit not completed until a few years ago - the previous version put the dual carriageways right through the middle of the city, hiding the people in underpasses below)
...so driving through these urban areas is clearly an alternative to public transport (as can be seen by anyone stuck on Armley Gyratory/ Sheffield Parkway/ Mancunian Way etc at rush hour).
...London has, erm, not a lot - it spent its money on public transport rather than these inner city motorways. This is part of the reason why London is much more dependent upon its public transport.
And herein lies the heart of the problem. Why is it that some crappy one-bed, ex-Council flat goes for over 10x the national average wage? It's because pretty much all the most attractive employment is in that area, so London has developed it's own hyper-inflation. So why has this happened, because too many people & too many jobs are being shoehorned into too small of a space. It's been my argument all along, it's time for the government to invest elsewhere to try to encourage business out of London and into the rest of the country to take off some of the strain.
Of course it won't be easy as business in general seems highly reluctant to move, but this isn't necessarily down to purely business reasons. There's an almost crack-like addiction to operating out of London, usually justified because that's where the best people are. But of course this just isn't true. Much like an addict, business is ignoring a simple fact. Many of the people don't actually come from London at all, they hail from right across the nation. So in order to attract them in they have to offer higher wages, which in turn leads to higher demand on housing, goods & services & results in the mirco-inflation zone we see today. And worse still business doesn't want to acknowledge the downside of it's addiction, the real cost. On top of inflated wages, how much money is lost every year because of delays & disruptions to the infrastructure in & around London? And how many of those disruptions occur because the system is at straining point in the first place? I'll wager that if you were able to calculate the real cost per London based business, it would scare the pants of them. It seems that over the decades every new infrastructure upgrade, be it road or rail has just encouraged more usage & any spare capacity gobbled up. How much longer do we keep chucking money at the place in order to try to resolve a problem that just keeps getting worse?
You should explain to these multi-million/billion pound firms that they'd save huge sums of money if they relocated to Bradford...
Got to deal with the reality of where things are, and have public transport serve that.
I suppose it can be viewed as something as a local tourist attraction, but in the words of the old saying...."Reet gud ter look at, but now't in way of trains to run over it"
Just the same as the Cambrian redoubling and other infrastructure projects then?
There are always going to be examples of newly built/newly electrified bits of line that don't have stock available on day one, just as there'll be examples of spare stock available waiting for infrastructure improvements before they can be put into service.
This suggests that there isn't one and I'm not already playing...
That was in response to moonshot who said Metrolink's a suitable alternative to heavy rail. The same potential problem would apply for any Advance ticket available from Altrincham if you connected using Metrolink not just Advance tickets to London. I said London because of the greater availability of Advance tickets compared to other destinations
For most passengers on the current Metrolink map (95%? 99%?), it is a reasonable alternatie to heavy rail though.
I know you'll come up with a far fetched example to try to prove your point, and I accept that there will be some cases like an Altrincham passenger headed in to Manchester to take a connection to London, but we spend far too much time worrying about these small number of journeys.
You've read the comment out-of-context. Moonshot was claiming the North East has it bad in comparison to the North West. I was saying that an alternative view of the limited Middlesbrough-Whitby is that there is a direct service between the two when Whitby's only a small town. If Whitby wasn't a tourist hot spot people wouldn't care about having a link to a very small town over 20 miles away. In comparison, one of the busiest tourist attractions in the North of England doesn't have good transport links to large settlements nearby.
There's a direct service from Middlesbrough to Whitby a few times a day, but I could find examples of places all over the UK not connected by a direct public transport service.
The fact that Stagecoach/ Arriva/ Network Warrington etc don't think a bus service from Warrington to a stately home over ten miles away (and neither the local council nor the National Trust want to fund such a service) isn't going to convince anyone that it's grim up north, sorry.
And this is the usual scare story used in London to justify London!
Business leaders are not stupid. They will locate where it is most economical for their business to locate. In an era of faster travel and better communications, being close to the customer is of less importance than it used to be. Cost of facilities and access to quality staff at a good price are equally likely to be drivers. However, this does depend on having access to the "faster travel and better communications", and the staff being available at the right price. It is the latter aspect that is likely to damage London in the medium term, with the localised hyper-inflation pushing up staff costs to unsustainable levels. So the question is really whether to make it easier for staff to travel to London, or to improve the infrastructure outside London. A sensible government would embrace both.
The threat is not that business will leave for Paris, Berlin, Brussels etc. It is that it will leave for Rheims, Erfurt, Mons
Why don't these profit hungry businesses move north then?
Staff wages would obviously be cheaper if they relocated north, there are thousands of intellegent graduates churned out by "northern" Universities every year, so no problem with "quality staff". As I've mentioned before on here, I got a job in Leeds a few years ago because the company decided to move a hundred jobs from central-ish London to Yorkshire "to take advantage of lower local labour costs".
Does anyone think that massive businesses were about to locate from Canary Wharf to Bradford, but decided not to because they don't want their staff travelling on a Pacer? How paternalistic.
Oh so because Newcastle is already electrified, the millions of pounds of investment it will be getting doesn't count
No new heavy rail electrification around Newcastle for 20/25 years, no scope of it either. Plenty heavy rail electrification around Manchester at the moment, but you don't seem to realise how much better off Manchester is.
There are plenty of local routes in/around Manchester which aren't going to see any significant improvements in the forseeable future e.g. the Liverpool-Warrington-Manchester line
I thought that the Warrington Central lines was going to see six coach 185s as part of this half hourly Liverpool - Sheffield service (extending to Hull or Nottingham)?
All those Sprinters/ Pacers freed up by electrification are going to be kicking around, allowing capacity increases on lines not currently being electrified.
Or are you saying that because not every line in/around Manchester is being electrified in the next five years then Manchester is hard done by? (note that not every line in/around London is electrified or about to be electrified)
The taxpayer should not pay for Crossrail2. If London wants another crossrail line it should pay for it itself
...so Manchester should pay for any further national rail investments too?
The justification for continuing transport spending and other investment in London is addressing the symptom rather than the cause - which is that economic activity is concentrated in one small part of the country instead of nationwide.
That "one small part of the country" sees significantly more demand than anywhere else though. London Underground carries as many passengers as the whole national rail network. Got to deal with the reality of where people want to travel.
Even with all this in mind Bolton still comes out head and shoulders above Sunderland, and even more so the other rail-served towns down the Durham Coast route, and elsewhere in the North East (Hartlepool, Stockton, Saltburn and Bishop Auckland all still exist, too!
).
Agreed - Saltburn is well worth a visit for anyone looking for a proper British seaside - still got the pier, still got the "Cliff Lift" inclined tramway, much nicer than Blackpool/ Whitby/ Scarborough/ Cleethorpes in my book.
London is always boasting about its wealth - I just think if London wants further improvements to its infrastructure it should pay for them itself.
Maybe since Altrincham is apparently so wealthy, it should pay for all of its own investments too?
