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HS1 Domestic trains are a bit busy
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. |
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