On Jul 10, 9:44*am, John B wrote:

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

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.

...although there's an entirely plausible argument that the large
amounts of money earned by, and hence taxed from, professional people
working in London on long commutes easily offset the subsidy that
their commute is given (compared to a scenario where they live in
countrysideyness and take the kind of lower-paying job that's
generally available outside global financial centres).

That's a fair point, at least for some such commuters. In which case
one could argue that they should simply directly pay more for their
journeys instead of having their commute subsidised (and one could
argue that London might benefit from their presence... one could also
argue it might not as well - higher house prices etc!). Though the
notion that these folk should pay more of the full cost of their
commute might conflict to a certain extent with the notion that
subsidising shorter distance commutes is a legitimate thing to do,
because it means people have access to more reasonably priced property
- or the flip-side of the coin, employers in the centre have access to
a larger pool of potential employees.

I do comprehend it's a rather complex overall picture to say the
least, with a great number of arguments that can be made in favour of
taking all manner of various stances.