#Railnatter
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 มิ.ย. 2024
- With the election approaching, we do a page-turn of the Public Accounts Committee's report into rail reform in Britain, as published back in May.
Six years have passed since the DfT said the railway needed reform, and four years have passed since initiating that reform programme, via its white paper (we've been through the ill-fated Williams-Shapps Plan For Rail already) in 2021. We were supposed to have Great British Railways by March 2024. No such organisation has appeared.
The reason it didn't tells us a lot about the challenges that the next government will face in changing the rail industry for the better - whether radically or incrementally.
You can download the report here: committees.parliament.uk/comm...
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Gareth & NJB on a podcast! Amazing, can't wait to listen to that
All the talk about tax and urbanism, and a mention of being on a podcast with NJB... what a gem of a RN.
Regarding the taxes talk - income tax should really be called a "labour/productivity tax" and VAT should be called an "economic activity tax", for that is what they are.
As the meme goes, just tax land, lol - the ultimate wealth tax.
By comparison National Grid raises huge amounts of private funds for investment in cables and overhead lines.
As you may be aware, oil and gas is moved by waterways, road and rail network, similar to the gas, oil and power networks and should be similarly funded.
Has the line between Leeds and Hull been delayed as part of the TRU to facilitate more expensive hybrid trains by private operators, e.g., Hull Trains?
Will the next generation of Northern trains be step free to match the Stadler Flirt trains on the Greater Anglia Line. Is level access in the North less important than in East Anglia?
you might have answered this before (maybe in the level boarding episode) but why are station builders allowed to ignore the platform height standard? If there's a standard, it should be adhered to unless theres a very good reason not to
The ideal urban planning situation is some kind of mix between the Dutch and the Japanese - controlled chaos through relaxed bottom-up zoning and a clear spatial masterplan of streets, public transport and car traffic.
How will the railways get the required investment if it has to depend on the dead hand of the DfT and the Treasury rather than the City?
Create Streets......I work in electrical wholesale in the words of one electrician 'Never trust a new build or a developer with a brilliant idea'.
Faacist Italy was actually a bit progressive with their architecture, look at some of the stations built in the 1920-30s, modernism was not taboo, like in Nazi Germany.
The DfT is similar to a local authority with no tax raising capability. The City limits the funds for rail electrification, but gushes funds National Grid. Bernadette Kelly is an ineffective "no-go joe", bureaucrat who merely provides excuses for the lack of investment in the railways.
The UK railways will not receive the required investment until the Government policy changes - otherwise just whistling in the wind.
Open access is just the Government's back door method of extracting excessive profits from the rail industry for the bus bandits!
Right wing authoritarians and hipster grifters types are a problem in traditional architecture circles but I would put this down to most being down to a heavy focus on function over form and/or "modern" aesthetics by left wing/apolitical urbanists and other housing/transport campaigners leaving a massive void for right-wing authoritarians and grifters to take advantage of.
Leaving the design of housing to local authorities will likely create a postcode lottery situation where good forward thinking councils will design nice looking environmentally friendly townhouses that are designed to be well integrated into the local town, bad status quo councils will design cheap detached/semi-detached houses that are just designed to be part of a new estate on large plots of former farmland/green space on the outskirts of town with no real thought to integrating into the rest of the town, and bad gullible councils will buy into one of the various building grifts such housing pods/container homes, recycled plastic blocks, modular buildings, or singular owner private-public development like that Create Street seems to be pushing. I am personally of the opinion that the central government should be creating design codes for housing and other buildings that are reasonably flexible to allow local authorities to adjust the designs to fit local character and needs as the design requirements for housing are petty much the same no matter what part of the UK it is in thus leaving it to the local authorities at best can lead to waste effort being put into making 100+ near identical design codes and at worst important design requirements being underspecified by mistake or willful corner cutting and the codes can be broad and generic enough to cover most of the aesthetic range that the bulk of people will like it.)
Using current travel to work areas to redraw the administration borders will just reinforce the current inequalities, for example the reason why most of Lincolnshire is part of the Anglian travel to work areas and North Lincolnshire is part of the Yorkshire travel to work area is because of poor investment (Both in terms of in the quality and quantity of the investments we get.) in the area and the vast majority of Lincoln's engineering plants now being closed due to difficult financial conditions of 1970s and the continental engineering firms that bought up the ones the survived moving operations abroad leading many to have travel to Hull or Cambridgeshire for higher paying jobs. Borders of local authorities are best left to locals to decide.
I certainly do agree on your last point. As for local authorities leading house building design, this could only happen if local authorities got back to 1990s or earlier levels of resource. Which needs to happen for all sorts of reasons anyway.
@@GarethDennisTV I definitely agree that local authorities should get back to the levels of resources they had in the past, and that local authority led house building design can't/shouldn’t happen in any reasonable form in-till that happens, and likewise with my preference of central government designed housing design codes that are reasonably flexible to allow local authorities to adjust the designs to fit local character and needs can't/shouldn’t happen in any reasonable in-till local authorities get back to those levels of resources.
Will the next generation of Northern trains be step free to match the Stadler Flirt trains on the Greater Anglia Line. Is level access in the North less important than in East Anglia?