The truth of many parts of London commuting is it's really quite unpleasant in many ways and so you're trained to really wish to spend as little time doing it as possible. If the heat, noise, air quality and congestion don't bother you there's also the threat of violence. A friend was assaulted (perp got GBH iirc) on the Victoria line and I've seen a fight break out on the escalators of Green Park at 9am...
I'm sufficiently jaded by public transport in London that my preferred means of getting around if I'm on my own is a lime bike. Any journey under 5 miles will probably be faster and considerably more pleasant.
Hopefully remote working will take some of the pressure off of the city because it really does feel overcrowded. Although personally I probably would still stay near London given it's both where I was born but also having access to international food and Heathrow are quite important as a third culture kid. I've considered moving out to somewhere much leafier but losing access to decent Asian food might be my undoing. That said, I hear Liverpool and Manchester are not bad in that department...
I think your proposal is correct worldwide; it's not a UK-only problem. Unfortunately, it looks like humanity has not yet invented a successful economic model that doesn't require a cramped megacity (with a huge income inequality within) or stealing from other countries (see tax havens).
Ironically, this would be aided greatly by investing in public transport. Andy Haldane gave a great speech about this at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute in 2019 - the most salient bit is from page 37:
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/speech/201...
Excuse the snip, highlighting PDFs is hard, but here's a key-ish quote:
> ..a measure of the “effective” working population. At peak times, the effective working population of Birmingham is perhaps 50% smaller than its measured population due to poor transport infrastructure. This helps explain why Birmingham punches below its demographic weight
Virtually all UK cities suffer from this. The problem, as ever, is a lack of investment and too many cars.
It's pretty obvious you need to spend a ton on public commuting options to avoid a chaotic hell during morning/evening rush (it's already chaos, but it could be much worse).
I’m pretty tired of this belief that it wasn’t investment that made London the economic giant it is - it infects even the DfT and treasury. Invest properly in other cities and they will be equally prosperous.
The treasury is a deeply broken institution, and it has always been resistant to losing "turf". In the 1960s Harold Wilson's administration tried to split its functions: the new Department for Economic Affairs would take the long view, and the treasury's job was to take the short view and deal with the markets. From what I recall reading (source needed, it was a long time ago and I forget the book) it was not just ministerial infighting that caused the problem: civil servants in the treasury didn't want to lose out to the DEA either.
It is always helpful to recall that the four great offices of state are, especially at the upper echelons, ancient institutions whose cultures are unlike anything most of us have experienced.
It's all relative. If you compared this with Japan's public transport system, 'fine' would not be a word you'd use to describe the one in London.
Before another penny in capital expenditure is spent on TFL, every other city in the country needs a metro and decent bus services.
This entirely true and very unfortunate. It is great to see Manchester making improvements on that front, for example, and I hope many cities will follow as the current model is absurd. Franchising like in London is not ideal but a marked improvement.
That said, there aren’t many places in the UK where a single train line can affect hundreds of thousands or a million people each week. Up to a point, improving transport around London is the best bang for your quid.
> Try living up North where hourly trains regularly get cancelled.
Yeah, but that’s a reason to improve the situation in the North, not to rejoice when something breaks down in the South. There are massive political issues to overcome for that, but the UK would be a better country overall if the North was taken seriously.
I'm trying to limit snark in my responses to this article, but wow. It turns out if you invest in something continually at the expense of everywhere else it becomes the lynchpin of the system. Good grief.
The major reason people in the north hate hearing about investment in the south is because politically it is very clearly a zero sum game. If the south gets investment, the north doesn't.
For additional perspective, look at the Crossrail projects: hugely expensive with benefits only felt in one part of the country. (No, Londoners paying tax doesn't count)
For the cost of crossrail, or HS2, every city in the UK outside of London could have comprehensive tram networks and massive active travel infrastructure. What stings the most is that if London didn't exist, became independent, or fell into the sea, everyone else would likely benefit very rapidly.
Almost all regions/cities make below-average contributions to the UK economy. That's because London drags the total way up (IIRC Bristol is the only other that's above-average, but barely).
That's obviously driven by a feedback-cycle that encourages investing in London rather than elsewhere. That does not imply that the rest of the UK would "benefit" from losing London; it would be an economic disaster.
The problem is that governments are focused on raising the UK's GDP, but that's the sum of each region's GDP and London's contribution is so large that it's equivalent to just maximising London (to optimise a weighted sum, put all the weight on the largest term). Perhaps a solution is to use metrics that combine regions geometrically (multiplying each region's GDP): that encourages investment in poor areas, since they drag down the result (rather than simply contributing less; and in the extreme case, a contribution of zero would wipe-out everything else).
We could do the same analysis on other partition too, e.g. multiplying each sector's contribution would make things less dependent on finiancial services.
Indeed. But that’s politics, not a law of nature. The zero-sum game is completely artificial: the money tree does not exist until you need it and then it does. A sensible revitalisation policy for the North would pay for itself over the long term.
The incentives are really not great from a political point of view and that is very unfortunate. Still, hurting London economically won’t help the rest of the UK in any way.
With the billions spent on the purple pine, you'd reasonable expect a decent quality of service that doesn't involve cancelations and days of complete deadlock. Bet if you look at to comparable European countries this reliability would be a joke to them.
The train being every 5 minutes is only for central London, if you live further out you're only served by at most 1 in 3 trains. Missing one sucks much more, during rush hour you can bet you'll be crammed like sardines if you're not early.
I've only been commuting twice a week for about a year, and there have been several occurrences where I get to the station and all upcoming trains are delayed or canceled due to some line failure. The alternative route takes about twice as long if I want it to cost the same. You bet your arse TFL won't give you a refund if your regular route is untenable.
London gets more investment, definitely. But even so the outcomes still lag behind what you'd expect from the capital of such a wealthy country.
Have you seen the DLR?
Fully automated, no hassle.
It's amazing to me that in <current year>, the whole Britian is not clamouring to get rid of Southwest trains that stop because there's leaves on the railway, and the next train is 20minutes away.
I'd rather not gamble being late in front of clients, in London, because leaves fell on some rails.
The Tube gets hotter in the summer than an Aussie beach. 40-50deg in the bowels of the Tube, for a cold and rainy country like the UK is insane.
People pay 3.5 quid for a 2minute journey through London, when you could just walk 10minutes instead.
London work places, set the expectations high, so the Tube should follow. It has nothing to do with the muggles that ride it, and blaming the people is blindness.
No other part of the country has ever had so much spent on mass transit nor will it ever. They have the finest public transport in the entire UK, and always will. I bet you can’t regularly do 1-40 mile journeys at the same speed and cost regularly anywhere else in the UK.
The media recently tried to make out the Elizabeth line was one of the worst services in the UK because it had the highest number of cancellations or something which is ridiculous because if the next train is 5 minutes away it doesn’t matter. Try living up North where hourly trains regularly get cancelled