Re:More emphasis on trains in Europe to replace flights
by eesmith on Wednesday February 19, 2020 @01:40PM
(#22368579)
To add, I recall that the Netherlands also followed the post-war system of adding more highways/promoting cars, so I know it's not simply a corruption issue.
In the 1970s, protests against the increasing number of children deaths caused by cars resulted in the more pro-cycling infrastructure they have now, rather than prioritizing cars first, second, and third like they did in my country (the US) and, I believe, the UK.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/05/amsterdam-bic... for background.
I can't help but also note that post-war UK manufactured cars, while the Netherlands did not.
One point of "unease" (to quote the Wikipedia entry) is that Marples was pro-road; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts#cite_note-50
> A more critical interpretation is that after Macmillan named Marples as Minister of Transport, Britain’s transport policy swerved to the right, and became motivated by the kind of conflict of interest that Thompson notes can be loosely regarded as a form of corruption (9). Actually, in this case it may well have been a rather tight form of corruption. At the time that he was named minister, Marples owned 64,000 of the 80,000 shares of Marples Ridgeway, a civil engineering firm that specialised in building roads"
I as an ill-informed outsider cannot disambiguate how much of the shift to roads was from "expressed preferences" and how much was from "a form of corruption".
You wrote "nationalised railway represents a very tangible instance of massive state planning and control".
But .. so is a national road system. Your country spends billions on roads, which is pretty massive.