On Jul 10, 12:57*am, Tony Polson wrote:

Mizter T wrote:

I was suggesting that I don't
think people are really going to be willing to subsidise the
construction of very expensive new high-speed lines which benefit
already affluent commuters so as to enable them to make 100 mile plus
daily journeys. Of course, inevitably any new high-speed line would
increase the incidence of long-distance commuting , it's an inevitable
by-product - but specifically designing and constructing such lines
for commuting purposes isn't on (and of course is never going to
happen). Instead I'd be in favour of spending some of that money to
help all the family men and women who already live in towns and
cities, and to encourage families to live in the towns and cities in
which members of that family work, etc etc etc.

There's a problem here. *There will be a lot of opposition to the
construction of high speed lines that cause a lot of noise and
disruption during construction and a lot of noise in operation, if
people along the route don't benefit in some tangible way from the
services that run on those lines.

I think, if they go ahead at all, we'll have to end up with four track
routes that carry freight and more "local" services as well as up to 350
km/h long distance services. *And that will only encourage long distance
commuting.

Interesting point. The land take would obviously be that much greater,
as would the cost, but nonetheless I can see your point - if a right-
of-way is being constructed, one might as well put in the extra work
and get four tracks out of it rather than two.


You have made some very good points regarding the (un)acceptability of
using colossal sums of taxpayers' money - vastly greater sums than the
already huge amounts spent on rail - to subsidise professional people's
long distance daily commute. *I agree that this makes no sense at all,
and that long distance commuting should be discouraged.

That said, I am in favour (I think!) of the massively expensive
Crossrail project... for a long time I didn't really have any properly
considered thoughts on it because I thought it was unlikely to ever
happen, but it seems it is now happening (as ever there's some
uncertainty of course). Though Crossrail won't facilitate long-
distance commuting per-se directly, but inevitably that will be a side-
effect.

I should just add that I'm not anti-professional people (whatever that
means!), nor anti-commuting as such. I certainly appreciate the
complex and multi-layered reasoning at play behind the decision of
people to do more lengthy commutes. Though I (obviously) do take some
issue with long-distance daily commuting (FSVO "long-distance", which
is of course debatable!).

And sometimes I think I might implode under the mass of my own
internal contradictions... and then just propose that everyone should
go off and live off the land, being crofters and woodsmen, where the
big journey is into the next town but one! But the genie of travel is
of course out of the bottle.