Soldato
Nah thats only employers with big expensive buildings they want people in. Many are simply selling the buildings when they found productivity remained the same
why all the hate for hs2?
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Nah thats only employers with big expensive buildings they want people in. Many are simply selling the buildings when they found productivity remained the same
Soldato
I think its more about distance/time - around 400 miles (say London to Glasgow) train and plane have very similar total travel times, which is the 6 hours by car. Thats right now at 125 mph trains. Up that to 200 mph trains and the distance / time eqaution starts pushing more distance.
btw London to Manchester with HS2 would drop the time to a fraction over an hour
Under hybrid working you can still reduce your office estate so both things can be true. If you are doing 3 of 5, you only need 3/5th to 4/5th of the office estate you had.
Like I said, there lots of evidence of the detrimental impact of full time working from home on growing new members of staff within the business. Employers are recognising this and taking action to bring people back together more often because it’s beneficial for the business over the long term.
If you actually get in a commuter train in the morning Tue/Wed/Thu is basically back to business as usual.
According to the government, passenger numbers are pretty much back to where they were in 2018/19.
Soldato
The bottom line though `it depends` on what the job is and if hybrid or home working maintains productivity.
With increasing passenger numbers, more stopping trains for those commuters are needed - get most of the express trains onto their own track, from east , central and west, you can then achieve gains on 3 lines. HS2 would mean commuting accross the country would be very viable. Cheaper house prices in the north commute to the south for higher wages per se
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Caporegime
The speed of trains is irrelevant because of the time taken to a) travel to the station and b) waiting on the platform for it to arrive. A car is simply get in and go from your doorstep. In a massive country yes a high speed train network makes perfect sense but this country is tiny.
My daughter has just started college. The train takes 45 minutes with a 15 minute walk from the station to her college and a 20 minute walk from our house to the station. The Journey in a car takes 35 minutes. The train would need to be instantaneous to do it in the same time.
This has always been the inherent design flaw of trains compared to cars unless the station is on your doorstep as well as your point of destination is right next to the station.
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Soldato
I do think if a lot of those opposed to public transport in the UK visited countries where it's done well (or at least better than here) they would open their minds more. If your only frame of reference is the poor implementation of it in the UK, I can understand the opposition.
Holland and Belgium, for instance, are small countries with strong public transport networks.
Holland and Belgium, for instance, are small countries with strong public transport networks.
We need to make train travel a lot cheaper and more convenient, we should favour and improve means of getting to stations i.e proper cycle routes and we should discourage car journeys by making those more expensive.
This and also they haven’t spent any time in a densely populated area that doesn’t have good public transport.
Spend some time in Southern California and let us know how you think the ‘roads first’ approach is working out for them.
Spoiler, it’s awful. It’s a beautiful area of the world paved over with mile after mile of massive multi lane roads at a standstill for most of the day containing mostly cars with only a single occupant. Their roads are genuinely huge, 6 lanes in each direction is not uncommon.
Went to a wedding recently. It was going to cost hundreds of pounds for me and my wife by train (Somerset) or about £40 in petrol. Ridiculous.
Never say never! The video I linked explained a case of his parents benefiting and they live in Aberystwyth.
Soldato
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I don't live in London
I gave the times to get from my house to the places I used to travel for work, flying beats trains by a large margin. Cars about match the train but have all the benefits of being able to actually get around once there and not having to conform to their time table. Cars also cost way less than train.
Even with HS2, from my house it would still be about 3 hours to get to Manchester, I could drive it in 3-3.5 hours and still not have to sort out extra transport once there.
I honestly don't understand people that use trains unless they simply don't own a car.
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Soldato
For a lot of people they simply can't afford the train for commuting.
If I get the train to work for the day it costs £84
If I drive it takes the same amount of time and it costs between £25 and £32
Would I pay £50ish more to have to sit (if I'm lucky) near a load of coughing/snotty noses strangers with no manners who don't understand the concept of headphones? Zero chance.
Soldato
Wait till 15p per mile road pricing comes in. As EV use goes up, the treasury needs its income which has dropped a lot already
Soldato
Labour made a statement 3 days ago that they have no plans for this at present.
Is that a daily ticket or a season ticket for daily travel (usually based on 5 days)?
More like a TFL based limit but yes I agree. Perhaps a peak/off peak price say £35/£25 cap.
A season ticket from where I live to London works out at £35/day IF you went 5 days a week and had 6 weeks holiday. It is an insane amount of money (over £8k if you do the math) and it’s not even that far, some trains are 1 hour 15 mins, others up to 1 hour 25.
If I bought a ticket on the day it’s £106 which is frankly an obscene cost.
That will still be the case post HS2 anyway, given HS2 isnt national but instead just affecting a few routes. Also HS2 was sucking funding from the rest of the network, so its a case of making a n improvement in one spot to the detriment of others.
Thats why I mentioned earlier, doing such a project properly would be nationwide.
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Commissario
One of the problems with saying that you shouldn't do one big route but do routes nationwide is that we don't have the engineering staff etc to do that, IIRC there is a shortage of experienced rail engineering staff because prior to hs2 there had been a push to reduce staffing and most of the work as small, relatively short term projects that meant people left the industry/didn't train up replacements.
The father of one of my friends is a very experienced rail engineer, he was made redundant along with a load of the other people in similar roles about 10-12 years ago to cut costs as "we don't need as many people", he ended up going back after about 6 months as a contractor on a much higher rate when it was realised that they did in fact need people like him (IIRC they suddenly found the money to do more projects when an inquest or something found that the rail operator had been negligent in maintenance and required upgrades).
Ideally what should be happening with a large, long term project like HS2 is that we'd be getting more people qualified and giving them experience so they can then fork off into other projects and we end up with a lot more experienced (and younger) staff to deal with multiple medium/big projects at once, but no one wants to spend the money getting them qualified as we've never got any long term plan in the UK for the rail network that lasts longer than the current project and hopefully the one after that if it doesn't get cut because someone wants to save money in the short term.
IIRC one of the reasons HS2 has cost so much extra is that all the delays in building have basically meant inflation has had a massive impact, as has things like the price of some materials going up way faster than inflation and which would, if it had been kept on schedule have not affected it.
The father of one of my friends is a very experienced rail engineer, he was made redundant along with a load of the other people in similar roles about 10-12 years ago to cut costs as "we don't need as many people", he ended up going back after about 6 months as a contractor on a much higher rate when it was realised that they did in fact need people like him (IIRC they suddenly found the money to do more projects when an inquest or something found that the rail operator had been negligent in maintenance and required upgrades).
Ideally what should be happening with a large, long term project like HS2 is that we'd be getting more people qualified and giving them experience so they can then fork off into other projects and we end up with a lot more experienced (and younger) staff to deal with multiple medium/big projects at once, but no one wants to spend the money getting them qualified as we've never got any long term plan in the UK for the rail network that lasts longer than the current project and hopefully the one after that if it doesn't get cut because someone wants to save money in the short term.
IIRC one of the reasons HS2 has cost so much extra is that all the delays in building have basically meant inflation has had a massive impact, as has things like the price of some materials going up way faster than inflation and which would, if it had been kept on schedule have not affected it.
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Soldato
Yep. That and the constant uncertainty and stop/start nature of it. Contractors are pricing in huge amounts of risk to counter that. Whereas if there was more certainty of it all going ahead, they wouldn't need to. Government interference has caused the greatest increase in the total cost.
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UK public transport has to be one of the worst in EU and also insanely priced..
even expensive places to live and holiday like Switzerland have cheap buses and trains.
There's also this bizarre thing in the UK where a bus ticket in london, is cheaper than in the north east