5 ms·

I wish we could match infrastructure projects like this in the rest of the country. London is like another planet compared to the rest of the UK.

• agd 4y ago
  One factor is that London is so much larger than the next biggest city (approx 9million vs 1.1 million). It's much harder to justify (and pay for) these kind of infrastructure projects in small cities.
  • laputan_machine 4y ago
    That results in a self-fulfilling prophecy though, doesn't it.
    • stormdennis 4y ago
      Absolutely. Germany, by contrast, has several cities that you regard as of on a par.
    • itsthejb 4y ago
      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
  • lbriner 4y ago
    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.
  • marmarama 4y ago
    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.
    • smcl 4y ago
      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 :( For any non-UK people who aren't familiar, here's here's a simple map showing pop. density to give you a rough idea what we're dealing with: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Gridded-UK-population-density-based-on-the-UK-census-at-the-5-km-5-km-grid-spatial_fig2_292189735 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Gridded-UK-population-de... 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.
• TheFattestNinja 4y ago
  The UK has a "Minister for London". I don't think many (any?) other country has a ministry for a single city. That being said, while it's true that many of the "headlines" come from LN projects (Tideway, Elizabeth Line, this) it seems there have been many recent infra projects across the UK. Example: https://www.eclcivils.co.uk/the-uks-major-infrastructure-projects-for-2022/ https://www.eclcivils.co.uk/the-uks-major-infrastructure-pro... and https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/projects/ https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/projects/ (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)
  • zwischenzug 4y ago
    Who is the minister for London? I live in London and have never heard of that title. Do you mean mayor?
    • meepmorp 4y ago
      Paul Scully, according to Wikipedia.
• codeduck 4y ago
  I've honestly always thought of anything within the M25 as the fifth country of the United Kingdom.
• jimmytidey 4y ago
  HS2? I understand your vibe though.
  • celticninja 4y ago
    HS2 is completely unnecessary though. Manchester to London is currently 2 hours. Unless it was going to halve that time, which it won't.
    • cillian64 4y ago
      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.
    • chrisseaton 4y ago
      > Unless it was going to halve that time, which it won't. Why are people so mistaken about HS2. It doesn't halve the time, but IT INCREASES CAPACITY! The West Coast Mainline is congested, and so twisty it's like a rollercoaster in places.
      • smcl 4y ago
        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.
        • 4y ago
• jacquesm 4y ago
  That's one very impressive machine. For perspective, it's 3.6 meters larger in diameter than the channel tunnel bore diameter.
• dzonga 4y ago
  yeah, it would be great if the UK wasn't so London centric. the contrast between london and other places in the uk is dire
• willyt 4y ago
  ~60m people in Britain. About 20m of then live within 1 hour of the centre of London.
  • marmarama 4y ago
    Yes, but it would be about 10m if London had the same underperforming transport infrastructure as the rest of the country.
    • mnd999 4y ago
      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.
      • marmarama 4y ago
        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.
    • willyt 4y ago
      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.
  • Lio 4y ago
    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.
• marmarama 4y ago
  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.
  • nly 4y ago
    London will be underwater and you still won't be able to afford a Victorian terrace.
• richliss 4y ago
  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.
  • switch007 4y ago
    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