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Small as in physical size. Even with a sparsely populated Scotland, the UK has around half the landmass of California so its possible to commute to/from London

Small as in physical size. Even with a sparsely populated Scotland, the UK has around half the landmass of California so its possible to commute to/from London from a great number of locations. You can't commute from Harvard to Mountain View everyday but you can commute to London from Oxford, Cambridge or Bristol. For occasional meetings, travelling to/from Glasgow/Edinburgh is doable. We should take advantage of this and support and encourage startups to bootstrap in less expensive post-codes rather than competing for office space with investment banks.

bshimmin 12y ago
Commuting from Bristol to London on a daily basis is borderline ridiculous - by train it's probably a three hour trip each way (factoring in time to get to where you need to be in London and getting back from Bristol to wherever you live), and by car it's well over 2 hours with no traffic. Manchester is arguably slightly faster by train (but much slower by car) - and a 12 month season ticket would cost you an eye-watering £14,336. Birmingham is probably the biggest city in the UK where I would consider commuting into London as being something a sane person would just maybe think about doing on a daily basis, and that's still over 90 minutes on the train and a touch over £10K annually.
- duncanawoods 12y ago
  >> Commuting from Bristol to London on a daily basis is borderline ridiculous >> by train it's probably a three hour trip each way Its 1 hour 30 mins from Bristol Parkway to Paddington. If you have to cross London, then yeah, it will suck. edit: I'm not recommending commuting to London, kind of the opposite. I'm using it to illustrate the geographical distances. A Silicon Valley type hub is needed in the US because of the continental distances between major cities. In the UK, we should be exploiting better connected cities to make a UK hub rather than continuing to ram everything into London.
  - bshimmin 12y ago
    Well, if you live nearer Parkway than Temple Meads, then it would certainly make more sense to go from there, certainly. As for crossing London... let's say you work in Old Street - that's a good half an hour from Paddington. I think you'd be lucky to have a door-to-door trip take less than three hours. I commute into Oxford Circus from Castle Cary (in Somerset, roughly the same journey time as from Bristol Temple Meads) one day a week: I set off from my house at 6.50am, driving to the station allowing myself ample time to collect my ticket and so as not to miss my train in case of getting stuck behind tractors, and I get into the office at 9.50am. On a good day. I don't mind the six hours of travel one day a week (and I am occasionally quite productive on the train, though often on the journey home I tend to get mildly drunk reading The Economist) - but doing all five days would drive me insane.

bshimmin 12y ago

Commuting from Bristol to London on a daily basis is borderline ridiculous - by train it's probably a three hour trip each way (factoring in time to get to where you need to be in London and getting back from Bristol to wherever you live), and by car it's well over 2 hours with no traffic. Manchester is arguably slightly faster by train (but much slower by car) - and a 12 month season ticket would cost you an eye-watering £14,336. Birmingham is probably the biggest city in the UK where I would consider commuting into London as being something a sane person would just maybe think about doing on a daily basis, and that's still over 90 minutes on the train and a touch over £10K annually.

duncanawoods 12y ago
>> Commuting from Bristol to London on a daily basis is borderline ridiculous >> by train it's probably a three hour trip each way Its 1 hour 30 mins from Bristol Parkway to Paddington. If you have to cross London, then yeah, it will suck. edit: I'm not recommending commuting to London, kind of the opposite. I'm using it to illustrate the geographical distances. A Silicon Valley type hub is needed in the US because of the continental distances between major cities. In the UK, we should be exploiting better connected cities to make a UK hub rather than continuing to ram everything into London.
- bshimmin 12y ago
  Well, if you live nearer Parkway than Temple Meads, then it would certainly make more sense to go from there, certainly. As for crossing London... let's say you work in Old Street - that's a good half an hour from Paddington. I think you'd be lucky to have a door-to-door trip take less than three hours. I commute into Oxford Circus from Castle Cary (in Somerset, roughly the same journey time as from Bristol Temple Meads) one day a week: I set off from my house at 6.50am, driving to the station allowing myself ample time to collect my ticket and so as not to miss my train in case of getting stuck behind tractors, and I get into the office at 9.50am. On a good day. I don't mind the six hours of travel one day a week (and I am occasionally quite productive on the train, though often on the journey home I tend to get mildly drunk reading The Economist) - but doing all five days would drive me insane.