UK Strategic Planning

[chrisp65]

I thought maybe the train chat shouldn’t be in the baby eating thread and maybe it needs to be a holistic sort of thread for all things housing and energy and trains and stuff. It’s bound to have an element of bolitics about it, but maybe it’s not party political?

Not just the bargain priced facility for people living in Brum to get to just outside London 10 minutes quicker. But mainly that until you all agree I’m right. 

 

[Nicho]

I hate the Tories 

[Mandy Lifeboats]

I am a bit OCD and I've decided that all of the problems in this country could be solved if we made the UK symmetrical.  I've now finalised my plans and I am ready to start it off. 

Stage 1 Birmingham. This would remain unchanged initially and would be the central point from which symetry would be measured.

Stage 2 London. It's the biggest city so we leave it where it is. It would be stupid to move a city as big as London. 

Stage 3. Bristol and Cardiff would be merged and moved to a new location that makes a symmetrical triangle with Brum and London. This might be somewhere in the Bristol channel but we'll be filling a lot of that in to make the Severn and the Thames match.

Stage 4. Liverpool. Moved slightly to ensure symetry with Bristodiff (see above). The Mersey would be altered to match the Thames and the Severn. 

Stage 5. Hull. The last of the 4 cities that will form a square around Brum. It might need to be moved a bit.

Stage 6. Edinburgh stays in the same position. 

Now we have the easy stuff sorted we can tackle the more difficult stuff. 

Stage 7. We need to create a symmetrical equivalent to Edinburgh. But to do s, it will need to be in France. Invasion is a possibility but could get messy. Much better to swap most of Wales with them. Flattening Wales to be symmetrical with East Anglia is going to be time consuming so we avoid that problem. 

Stage 8. Decide whether to fill in the Channel or dig a symmetrical version north of Hull & Liverpool and south of Edinburgh. Filling in the channel would assist with the invasion (Stage 7) and provide a place to put all the rubble from the Welsh mountains (see above). 

I'm not sure of the best option for Stage 9. Does anyone have any suggestions?*

*Find a good psychiatrist is already in progress. 

[sidcow]

The UK wont invest Jack shit in **** all.

We should have high speed rail lines linking all major cities.

We should have decent Tram systems in all major cities

Birmingham ought to be big enough to have a half decent underground system.

But if it isn't in London they wont spend anything (and when they do HS2, people moan even though it does actually help the rest of the country)

A great example is the Bordesley Chords.  Should be a no brainer but probably won't get built in my lifetime.  They will relieve New Street of a lot of congestion, make Moor street another major station and create much more capacity for inner city suburban stations and long distance services to East Midlands and South West.

Not that expensive in the grand scheme of things but expensive enough for Government to take their time.

The problem is they look at short term votes only and pay no attention to long term benefits.   Why can't we just invest like other nations do?

 

Edited March 9, 2023 by sidcow

[KentVillan]

The main issue in the UK with strategic planning is that so much of the economy revolves around house prices. Nobody wants to take a hit to their house price because there’s now a new railway line or flight path or whatever.

And the voting system means any project that affects a Tory LD or Lab LD marginal constituency will be used by the LDs to whip up the NIMBY vote. Local independent groups and Greens also tend to do same thing.

So you just end up with inertia.

[The Fun Factory]

We don't really have strategic planning because the Tories in their wisdom scrapped the Regional Development Agencies when they got into power. The big cities now have some limited strategic planning powers but do not extend to the towns and rural areas. We live in a incredibly centralised country with any major project councils have to go cap in hand to government to ask money for.

[KentVillan]

The other problem is the narrow accountant’s mindset that has infested UK politics since the global financial crisis, which means that projects which clearly have positive externalities across the economy have to justify their existence as self-financing / profitable enterprises. Which sounds sensible and prudent, but is mostly just dumb.

[tonyh29]

34 minutes ago, sidcow said:

The problem is they look at short term votes only and pay no attention to long term benefits. 

I started to write exactly this earlier and then got distracted .. so 

 

This  

[Chindie]

Birmingham needs an underground system. Start there.

[sidcow]

17 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

The other problem is the narrow accountant’s mindset that has infested UK politics since the global financial crisis, which means that projects which clearly have positive externalities across the economy have to justify their existence as self-financing / profitable enterprises. Which sounds sensible and prudent, but is mostly just dumb.

Also bad planning.  look at every military project.  Constantly changing the spec, making orders then cutting back, delaying decisions.

As with HS2 any kind of delay just adds cost.  This HS2 delay won't save any money at all. It will cost a damn site more money now.  It's like paying for something on credit instead of cash up front.  It may cost less per year but will cost a heck of a lot more in total.  We're shopping in Brighthouse here.

[OutByEaster?]

50 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

And the voting system means any project that affects a Tory LD or Lab LD marginal constituency will be used by the LDs to whip up the NIMBY vote. Local independent groups and Greens also tend to do same thing.

What's an LD?

 

[sne]

6 minutes ago, Chindie said:

Birmingham needs an underground system. Start there.

Won't the Mole people/Birmingham City fans get mad if they are chased out of their tunnels when they start building that?

[Chindie]

1 minute ago, sne said:

Won't the Mole people/Birmingham City fans get mad if they are chased out of their tunnels when they start building that?

They've nothing to worry about, it'll never happen. Birmingham will keep it's crown of being the largest city in Europe without an underground system.

Edited March 9, 2023 by Chindie

[OutByEaster?]

I think the only thing that I've got against HS2 is that speed isn't really the problem with our railway network, cost of use is - I'm sure I read somewhere that we can look forward to a £500 return trip to London on the new-choo when it eventually comes into use.

What we need are better railways; more lines, more space and most importantly of all, ticket prices that make them affordable to the people that want to use them.

Nationalising them would be a good start.

 

[OutByEaster?]

Locally, there are huge patches in the service where it becomes impractical - I'm 9 miles from New Street station, but the nearest station to me is 3.3 miles away. In a city like Birmingham it's ridiculous that local services have gaps that big in them. To use a train, I have to drive or use a bus, and I live in a city at the hub of the national rail network.

London has an incredible public transit system; the rest of the country needs some of that investment.

 

 

[OutByEaster?]

What I'd really love to see is rail services that are free at the point of use - paid for in tax  - so that if you wanted to or needed to, you could just get on a train and go to where you were going.without having to pay anything extra - socialised railways - like the health service, the roads and schools.

That would get some people out of their cars.

 

[HKP90]

10 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

I think the only thing that I've got against HS2 is that speed isn't really the problem with our railway network, cost of use is - I'm sure I read somewhere that we can look forward to a £500 return trip to London on the new-choo when it eventually comes into use.

What we need are better railways; more lines, more space and most importantly of all, ticket prices that make them affordable to the people that want to use them.

Nationalising them would be a good start.

 

Exactly. Cost to use rail in the UK is bonkers.

[Chindie]

Outside of London public transport in the UK is a dirty word. Birmingham's is dreadful. Huge areas of the city have no rail connections. The city developed around the car but never anticipated the impact of growing populations using roads that aren't designed for so much traffic, making the car a necessity to get around the city but an increasingly bad way to do it. There's parts of the city that are essentially reliant on a single road to get into the city centre.

Chuck in climate change busting measures designed to discourage car use, and all they've done to mitigate it is a few trams (all the downsides of a train, none of the upsides) and buses, which are shit. Absurd.

Meanwhile London has a huge system offering you options to get across every inch of the city at speed every 2 minutes.

[bickster]

9 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

I think the only thing that I've got against HS2 is that speed isn't really the problem with our railway network, cost of use is - I'm sure I read somewhere that we can look forward to a £500 return trip to London on the new-choo when it eventually comes into use.

What we need are better railways; more lines, more space and most importantly of all, ticket prices that make them affordable to the people that want to use them.

Nationalising them would be a good start.

 

Apples and pears

I agree with you but conflating pricing of fares with building and improving the infrastructure are two entirely different issues. Conflating those issues is a bad idea. Making that connection is what people opposed to such schemes want you to do. The "trains are expensive enough as it is without having to pay for this on top of it."

The rail structure needs massive improvement and investment that is a good for everyone

The fare structure needs decreasing and yes Nationalisation would massively help that but the two are not connected.

The sooner this country wakes up to the fact that we are the only country in Europe that generally runs trains as a for profit business the better. The rest of Europe views the railways as crucial infrastructure, not just for people but for business too, they go hand in hand.

 

[KentVillan]

@OutByEaster?LD = Lib Dem

Re the speed vs capacity thing, I think you run into this same issue with “affordable housing”.

People say we need more affordable housing, not more unaffordable / luxury housing.

In practice, all that matters is building more houses, as that depresses prices and increases availability across the market - which indirectly makes more houses “affordable”.