London Banter - View Single Post - Heathrow third runway to get the go ahead

Roland Perry · January 15th 09, 02:45 PM posted to uk.transport.london,uk.railway

In message
, at
03:44:34 on Thu, 15 Jan 2009, remarked:

When you're in a bust you don't start spending billions on vanity
projects.

So you'd recommend suspending Crossrail until we are well into the next
boom (and suffering from the fact it doesn't exist yet)?

Crossrail is required because even now the tube is an essential
service (the majority of its passengers are not off on holiday) that
is hopelessly overloaded.

You may not have noticed the number of layoffs in banking and retail,
and the reduction of consumer spending (shops in Oxford St need
customers as well as staff).

Heathrow is far from being essential and isn't overloaded anyway.

It's severely overloaded, and "essential" for UK plc's international
business ambitions.

As you say , its merely "predicted" to be so based on some finger in
the air guesitmates which are now all null and void anyway.

You can predict a sine-wave of boom and bust fairly easily (it may not
come true) just as much as you can "predict" an ongoing need for
crossrail.

The amount of economic activity provided to the economy by air travel
is minimal... Even most business can be done using phone or email.

From these remarks I can see you are completely out of touch with
reality. Although large volumes of "grunt trading" can be done
hands-off, you can generally only set up the initial relationships in
person.

Also economic growth (when it returns) is unsustainable anyway. At
some point it has to stop and building more and more runways isn't the
answer - what happens in 20 years if the new one is overloaded? Build
another on top of hounslow? And another on top of staines when thats
saturated too?

Once upon a time the answer was a third airport - which ended up at
Stansted. You may have noticed that Stansted has expansion plans too.

Its like saying "oh , theres less traffic on the roads -
lets build some bypasses!"

The road building programme (such as it is) hasn't been suspended
because of the bust.

You're not good with analogies are you.

Hoon has just announced more roadbuilding.
--
Roland Perry