Anything to do with planning along with all the stuff to do with "sprawl" and buildings in general

Brian Micklethwait

I spent the night before election day and the night of election day watching Boris Johnson get elected Mayor of London.  And I think it must have been in the rather testy TV interview he did for the BBC, after his official acceptance speech, that he said he favours moving Heathrow to the Thames Estuary.  I do as well, if only because it will make for such great aerial photos while it is being built, to say nothing of when it is finished.

I have mentioned this notion here before, although the only serious commenter on that thought the scheme nonsensical.  What I didn’t mention was that Boris is in favour of it.  So it may not go away just yet. 

Whether Kit Malthouse, the writer of the piece I originally linked to, is anything directly to do with Boris I do not know.  Ah.  At the bottom of that piece it says that “Kit Malthouse is a businessman and former Tory councillor and is standing for the London Assembly in 2008”, so I’m guessing: yes.  And I’m guessing he got in, if only because the Tories in general did so well.

Vote Conservative for better ways to waste public money!

Patrick Crozier

“It’s not much of a quid pro quo for having lived through the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward...”

The other night Michael Jennings, Brian Micklethwait and myself sat down with the intention of recording a podcast about South East Asian Metros, Michael being pretty clued up on the subject.

We started well.  We managed to keep to the subject for a good five minutes before veering off onto topics as far apart as colonial architecture and the evils of communism1 the Metropolitan Railway’s Club carriages, the importance of passenger information, maps and timetables (or lack of them), international fare system convergence and commuter escalators.

And our tendency for all talking at once continues unabated.  Oh well.

Notes
1. As evidenced by Michael’s quote at the top.

Update 11/01/08 Michael tells me that that “South” bit in the title is inaccurate.

Patrick Crozier

Lead item on BBC Breakfast the other morning was on the West Coast Main Line (WCML).  Apparently it’s running out of capacity so either they’ll have to put up the fares or introduce a fancy “computer-controlled” signalling system or the government will have to build a new, high-speed line.

(Is the comma in the right place in that last sentence?  It should mean a new line that is high-speed and not a new high-speed line to go with all the other ones.  Oh well, never mind).

The reporter also added that because the government was going to introduce toll charges on the motorways that would push lots of people onto the railways - again putting pressure on capacity.  He went on to suggest that what this showed was that the government needed to plan more and it would, therefore, be a good thing when the 30-year plan turned up.

A little later they interviewed Ian Coucher, a high-up at Network Rail.  He thought that all the problems could be solved with a few extra carriages and, anyway, the whole kerfuffle only served to underline that the whole thing was a “success story”.

Oh God.  Where does one start?

Well, let’s try the low-hanging fruit. 

“Computer-controlled" signalling.  I am far from an expert on the subject but I am pretty sure that the signallers have already managed to get the odd ZX80 into their control centres over the last 30 years or so.  What the reporter was probably referring to was “moving block” signalling which is an incredibly snazzy way of putting more trains through the same amount of track.  Snazzy, that is, in all respects apart from actually working.  It was tried on the Jubilee Line Extension.  It didn’t work.  It was thought about for the WCML.  The bosses thought it was spiffing.  The boffins took one look at it and realised it was a non-starter.  The company (Railtrack) went bust.

“Success story”.  The upgrade to the WCML (WCRM as it was known) cost, according to the report, £8.6bn (a sum that looks suspiciously low but I won’t bother arguing about on this occasion).  The tax payer will be lucky if he ever sees more than a few pennies of that.  So, it’s made a loss.  Losses are bad.

Now for the hard bit.  First of all, what’s wrong with it:

• The assumption that higher road prices will mean fewer people using the roads.  It could easily mean more.
• The assumption that if people do flee the roads they will end up on the railways.  They could equally easily end up at home.  Or on marble-smooth super-highways built by road entrepreneurs.
• The assumption that the state is any good at planning.
• The assumption that if the ultimate answer is a new railway that the state should fund the construction.  It shouldn’t.

And here’s how things should work:

• The roads should be privately owned.  So should the railways.
• Polluters should compensate their victims.  Railways just as much as roads.
• If there is enough of a market then road builders will build more.  Ditto railways.
• In the resulting market roads may still dominate but or it may be that railways become viable (though I doubt this) or neither.  Staying at home could well prove the best option.

But how would these new roads or railways be built?

Well, you’d have to abolish planning laws.  Not that that would be any big deal.  The lack of compulsory purchase might be an obstacle but I don’t think so.

Why do you doubt that rail would become viable?

I just don’t think that pollution charges for global warming would ever be that high.  And even if they were high, rail would be punished along with everyone else.  While on a per passenger per mile basis, trains may produce less greenhouse gases, a lot of energy will have gone into the creation of the infrastructure.

Patrick Crozier

After what I said in the post below, here are a couple more dubious surveys:

Suburbs are good for your social life
Fixing congestion is easy

Now, I have little problem in believing that sprawling^* suburbs are good for you in all sorts of ways - after all, I live in one - but fixing congestion? well, that’s quite a different proposition.  Central London has been congested for a couple of hundred years.  Bearing in mind that in that time its governors have ranged from extreme liberals to extreme socialists you would have thought that if there was an easy solution ie not congestion charging, they would have found it by now.

^* Whoops!  Banned word (warning: short).

"For many transport costs more than housing", so says Live from the Third Rail quoting a report in the Washington Post. They think it's a bad thing. So do I but, I suspect, for completely different reasons. They think it is all to do with a lack of planning. I suspect it has to do with too much which would feed nicely into my "abolish planning" routine. And there's also that rather lazy use of words like "sprawl" and "environment" which I would like to get stuck into. Some time.