One thing that's rarely taken into account is that the town planning departments of many other cities are run by absolute mental cases as are the accounting departments. London has, for as long as I can remember, had fairly decent town planners and it generates enough money that over time even excessively expensive solutions end up being largely worthwhile in the end (Millenium Bridge for example).
All other cities of any size need to have town planners that are top quality.
I doubt it’s a coincidence. Chicken and egg isn’t it. Having no interesting well funded projects is unlikely to attract top talent to those planning departments
The lack of investment outside of London is quite deliberate
(Though the latter map is missing any points in Scotland. Whether that is an issue with data quality or with actual infrastructure planning policies is left as an exercise to the reader)
For some reason, for population, we always count the Greater London conurbation as just 'London' when we don't do the same for other cities. This creates the perception that London is an order of magnitude larger, when in fact it's not.
A more accurate comparison is with the total conurbation size of other cities. For example, Manchester is listed as having a population of about 550000, but the Greater Manchester conurbation (the equivalent of Greater London) has a total population of 2.8 million.
Birmingham is 1.1 million, but the contiguous West Midlands conurbation is about 2.9 million.
The Liverpool to Leeds cross-Pennine urban axis (which is nearly contiguous) has a population of nearly 7 million.
Yes, these are smaller than Greater London, but not by the amount you think.
I think this is what "Northern Powerhouse Rail" was supposed to address, but I don't know if it's going to get as much love as a London project, if it goes ahead at all :(
You can clearly see the areas in question - London being the big red/purple blob in the far south-east, and the cities/conurbations marmarama described are to the north and north-west of that. They're not individually on the scale of London, but they're substantial population centres that would see real benefits from this kind of public transport infrastructure investment.
Not just harder to justify but the length of time (approx 10 years?) that it can take between the initial investment and people adjusting their lifestyle/moving to take advantage of the new infrastructure.
That said, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol and Birmingham (I'm sure others that I don't know about) have all done an enormous amount of work in the last 10-20 years to modernise.
Transport is hardest of all, of course, since you don't have the space usually to create greener systems without removing something else like a road and not everyone can simply swap easily. That said, I wish they would take some bold decisions across the UK and, like the Hague, make whole town centres pedestrianised during the day to try and force it a bit.
Yes. Frankly, the continued over centralisation of the country around London seems to me to be the single greatest threat to the future prosperity of the country
When you factor in climate change and rising sea levels, London is going to become unsustainable in the next 100-200 years. The Thames Barrier already needs replacing with a bigger structure, or it will become too small to cope sometime in the late 21st century. Possibly sooner than that if warming trends continue to accelerate.
While I appreciate that investment in London needs to happen to solve issues now, the UK should be pivoting more investment to its regional cities that are in more sustainable locations, so that the UK is prepared for when London eventually succumbs to the tides.
I'm not sure I follow your point. I live about an hour from the "centre" of London.
That doesn't mean I want to travel 2 hours a day just to use London's infrastructure.
London is a big place. The centre of London is big. Where my train comes into London is not necessarily where what I need to do is.
So there could be another further hour of travel each way to get across London.
Travelling to and from the station on the home end is also a problem. Since public transport is so dire outside of London that takes much longer than it should do and is much more inconvenient.
Where friends of mine get annoyed waiting 5 minutes for a bus in London, you could be waiting over an hour in the rest of the country ...and if you miss it you're in schtuck, because it's the only one that day.
How much daily travel should we have to put up?
Just to be clear, I don't want less in London, I want more/better outside of London.
Probably better defined as in the number of people living within about 30 miles of Charing Cross. I.e. if about 3m people live in the central belt in Scotland and about 20m people live in the Greater London urban area then you would expect there to be about 6x more transport capacity on any given rail line or bus service. I would say very very roughly the trains in London are 3x longer and twice as frequent as the trains between and around Glasgow and Edinburgh. Busses are probably up to 6x more frequent than in Glasgow simply because the buses can't get larger so you need to run more of them to cope with demand. Trains and busses are still more crowded in London than they are in Scotland, probably because it would be physically impossible to have the same modal share of car journeys in London as you have in the central belt; due to the greater urban density there is not physically enough space to park as many vehicles. Transport investment was neglected in London in the 80's and 90's by the then Conservative administration who thought everyone would drive everywhere in the future. This doesn't work in London and as a result the trains and buses were overcrowded, unreliable and unsafe. Examples: Kings Cross Fire, 1950's slam door trains with no corridors. My train to school was a slam door train that regularly approached the max crush load of 7 people per m² and was the most unreliable line in Britain for most of the late 80's and 90's. Overcrowding on lines around Manchester and Birmingham has probably been forecasted decades ago but the government will not have done anything about it in the last 12 years because the urban northern cities don't vote Conservative just like urban London doesn't.
It is better defined as people living within 30 miles of Charing Cross I think. See comment above. I'm not sure about the 20m figure as I can't find the stats just now. But it's definitely greater than 15m so the basic argument probably still holds.
That seems to be a common attitude in the UK and it’s not helpful. We should be building London level or better transport in the rest of the country, not wrecking Londons transport to bring it into line.
I was not talking about wrecking London's transport, merely using a thought experiment to illustrate how much better London's transport is than what the rest of the country has to put up with.
The point in hs2 isn’t mainly to reduce journey time, even though that is what is usually touted in news articles. It’s to increase capacity and reduce the contention between high speed intercity services and commuter services with many stops. The west coast main line is extremely busy and if you’re going to build more track you might as well build it for modern train speeds.
I'm really confused, because everyone connected with rail seems to be completely 100% aligned on this and they'll repeatedly explain in very easy-to-digest terms the existing problems, and how HS2 will alleviate many of them. It seems like such a no-brainer.
... and yet so much of the public (and ... [sigh] the news and various politicians) seem to be laser-focussed on travel time, and loudly question whether a quicker north/south line is really worth it. And they'll often talk about the focus should instead be on improving utilisation of the existing without knowing that these main north/south lines are already very near capacity.
If I was a rail guy in the UK I'd probably lose my mind.
It is higher speed. It's just not the speed you think it is. And higher peak speed doesn't linearly translate to lower journey time, as you need to speed up and slow down at either end!
People aren't stupid, they can understand that a project can deliver more benefits than just the words in a project's name.
But you've got knowledgeable people patiently giving plain easy-to-digest descriptions on the benefits ... which are ignored entirely by those with a bigger platforms who boil it down to "do we really need the fast trains?"
London is like another planet compared to the rest of the UK.