Foot Long Hot Dog
Player Valuation: A packet of pork scratchings
Yes, but don’t tell the EU mate
Current Affairs The Conservative Party
- Thread starter Ashtonian
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Only temporary - one line down south was booming under temporary government ownership then sold back to the private sector !
The merits or otherwise are irrelevant though aren't they? The fact is, it was something the government could do, even whilst being a member of the EU.
Just stating fact as usual you like to twist it in your favour you kid only yourself.......
Nothing to do with the EU - the private franchise was hemoraging money the government stepped in made a profit then sold it to another carpetbagger.......
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
The lines were never took over on a nationalisation project just temporarily bail out........lol
Clever clogs!
Foot Long Hot Dog
Player Valuation: A packet of pork scratchings
Your original assertion was wrong, as in not a fact, as in not correct in actual reality.
Foot Long Hot Dog
Player Valuation: A packet of pork scratchings
There is nothing to stop the Uk renationalising our rail network. What part of that are you struggling with?
obviously can't read the link........
When it comes to liberalising passenger services, the word “liberalise” is open to interpretation. It could be taken to mean they must be run by private companies, which would rule out any renationalisation in mainland Britain. But that looks to me like the very worst-case scenario.
More likely, state-owned passenger rail service companies – which still exist in all member states except the UK – will have to compete to retain the routes they currently run, probably through competitive tenders. The situation would resemble the current situation in Britain, where subsidiaries of the German and Dutch state rail companies both run franchises.
Again being dictated to by the EU.........
abelard
Player Valuation: £35m
example #1,032,346 of why Tory austerity is a national catastrophe that will hold us back for decades, if not permanently
of course, cynics would suggest that the brighter ones among them are starving the country of transportation investment deliberately, in order to further enrich their already historically lavished base of literal rent-seekers.
.
Planes, trains and the economically mobile
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/08/08/1533723539000/Planes--trains-and-the-economically-mobile/
It is easy to draw on personal experience when commenting on the quality of the UK's transport infrastructure, but even the World Economic Forum thinks there's a problem.
Last year it ranked the UK's overall infrastructure 27th in the world, down from 24th in 2016 and 19th in 2006. For those at the bottom of the economic ladder, however, 27th might feel too high.
A new report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a social change organisation focusing on poverty, examines the ties between access to transport, incomes and employment across a set of regions in the UK.
The report's findings are stark. It says Britain's unemployed often feel transport is a barrier, rather than an enabler, to work. This is partly down to transport costs, which “have increased consistently above the rate of inflation”.
While the report will hopefully contribute to the ongoing political debate over the UK's infrastructure shortcomings, what catches the eye is its set of travel-time maps. Also known as isochrone maps, they neatly show how long it takes to commute from a certain postcode to local hubs of employment. You can find the full collection here.
For example, here's Greater Manchester from the perspective of residents of Hattersley, around 11 miles from Manchester city centre:
Despite being close to Manchester, the morning commute is around 50 minutes. Woe betide the worker offered a job in nearby Huddersfield, 22 miles away by road, who has to endure a brutal 90 minute journey (assuming the transport system functions reliably). If the job centre finds you a gig in Blackburn, then it'll take over two hours to travel a shade under 40 miles.
Manchester has gone through something of an economic revival recently, symbolised by the BBC relocating its headquarters from London to nearby Salford in 2010. A recent report by the Centre for Cities found Manchester's city centre employment rose by 84 per cent between 1998 and 2015, the highest of the major cities in the UK. The number of residents grew 149 per cent from 2012 to 2015.
This growth has had a direct effect on house prices. In the past 5 years, Manchester home values have risen over 35 per cent, according to a Hometrack index. While other considerations have to be taken, not least Manchester's relative affordability versus the South-East, it is not a stretch to suggest a dearth of easy commutes to the suburbs is a contributing factor.
Scanning through the other maps, the pattern remains the same around the British Isles. Take Norwich and surrounding Norfolk, for example, once a pivotal spoke in the UK's shoe manufacturing trade:
While Norwich's transport tentacles extend further than Manchester's, perhaps thanks to local Lowestoft's dry bulk port and Great Yarmouth's historical role as a vacation destination, travel times of 90 minutes plus to market town Fakenham, only 27 miles away, are, for lack of a better word, sub-optimal.
Access to transport matters for a number of obvious reasons.
As any economist will tell you, the UK is in the midst of a productivity slump. The issue is visualised by this chart from a speech by Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's chief economist, which shows real wages and productivity since 1990:
Some may argue that in an increasingly digital world, transport's efficacy will diminish with a worker's ability to work from home. And yes, this view does hold some truth in the mid-to-high end of service-based jobs. But as Tochtermann and Clayton note in a 2011 paper, low skilled jobs are increasingly concentrated outside of cities, “leading to a spatial mismatch between where workless city residents live and where the lower skilled, entry level jobs are located”. Therefore, to get on the employment ladder, it is likely workers will need, at least at the start of employment, to regularly commute.
A higher range of transport options for so-called reverse commutes, such as from Norwich to Fakenham, would also provide more flexibility for workers looking to change jobs regionally without the associated costs, such as moving house. It is hard to see how this would not be marginally beneficial for productivity in the long term.
As an aside, a network of self-driving cars and autonomous taxis, as proposed by our Silicon Valley overlords, is not a viable solution. But that's a story for another day.
Whether the UK government has even a spare hour to consider this report is another matter. After all, it seems the majority of the country's political capital is tied up in one singular issue for the foreseeable future. Even if there was time, it is not as if the government has been willing to loosen the fiscal purse strings for infrastructure recently -- through to 2017, government capital spending as a per cent of GDP was among the lowest in the G7:
Yet eventually the country will have to reckon with its clear lack of ingrained mobility, and not just in terms of transport. When it does, a range of questions over affordability, reliability and viability will have to be answered at both a local and central government level.
However, on the off chance action were to be taken, as with any political choice, there would be losers. An alleviation of the pressure on the South-East would be welcomed by most, bar, perhaps, the owners of real estate in and around the M25. A cynic might argue there is no great mystery as to why regional infrastructure remains on the political back-burner for the foreseeable future.
of course, cynics would suggest that the brighter ones among them are starving the country of transportation investment deliberately, in order to further enrich their already historically lavished base of literal rent-seekers.
.
Planes, trains and the economically mobile
https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/08/08/1533723539000/Planes--trains-and-the-economically-mobile/
It is easy to draw on personal experience when commenting on the quality of the UK's transport infrastructure, but even the World Economic Forum thinks there's a problem.
Last year it ranked the UK's overall infrastructure 27th in the world, down from 24th in 2016 and 19th in 2006. For those at the bottom of the economic ladder, however, 27th might feel too high.
A new report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a social change organisation focusing on poverty, examines the ties between access to transport, incomes and employment across a set of regions in the UK.
The report's findings are stark. It says Britain's unemployed often feel transport is a barrier, rather than an enabler, to work. This is partly down to transport costs, which “have increased consistently above the rate of inflation”.
While the report will hopefully contribute to the ongoing political debate over the UK's infrastructure shortcomings, what catches the eye is its set of travel-time maps. Also known as isochrone maps, they neatly show how long it takes to commute from a certain postcode to local hubs of employment. You can find the full collection here.
For example, here's Greater Manchester from the perspective of residents of Hattersley, around 11 miles from Manchester city centre:
Despite being close to Manchester, the morning commute is around 50 minutes. Woe betide the worker offered a job in nearby Huddersfield, 22 miles away by road, who has to endure a brutal 90 minute journey (assuming the transport system functions reliably). If the job centre finds you a gig in Blackburn, then it'll take over two hours to travel a shade under 40 miles.
Manchester has gone through something of an economic revival recently, symbolised by the BBC relocating its headquarters from London to nearby Salford in 2010. A recent report by the Centre for Cities found Manchester's city centre employment rose by 84 per cent between 1998 and 2015, the highest of the major cities in the UK. The number of residents grew 149 per cent from 2012 to 2015.
This growth has had a direct effect on house prices. In the past 5 years, Manchester home values have risen over 35 per cent, according to a Hometrack index. While other considerations have to be taken, not least Manchester's relative affordability versus the South-East, it is not a stretch to suggest a dearth of easy commutes to the suburbs is a contributing factor.
Scanning through the other maps, the pattern remains the same around the British Isles. Take Norwich and surrounding Norfolk, for example, once a pivotal spoke in the UK's shoe manufacturing trade:
While Norwich's transport tentacles extend further than Manchester's, perhaps thanks to local Lowestoft's dry bulk port and Great Yarmouth's historical role as a vacation destination, travel times of 90 minutes plus to market town Fakenham, only 27 miles away, are, for lack of a better word, sub-optimal.
Access to transport matters for a number of obvious reasons.
As any economist will tell you, the UK is in the midst of a productivity slump. The issue is visualised by this chart from a speech by Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's chief economist, which shows real wages and productivity since 1990:
Some may argue that in an increasingly digital world, transport's efficacy will diminish with a worker's ability to work from home. And yes, this view does hold some truth in the mid-to-high end of service-based jobs. But as Tochtermann and Clayton note in a 2011 paper, low skilled jobs are increasingly concentrated outside of cities, “leading to a spatial mismatch between where workless city residents live and where the lower skilled, entry level jobs are located”. Therefore, to get on the employment ladder, it is likely workers will need, at least at the start of employment, to regularly commute.
A higher range of transport options for so-called reverse commutes, such as from Norwich to Fakenham, would also provide more flexibility for workers looking to change jobs regionally without the associated costs, such as moving house. It is hard to see how this would not be marginally beneficial for productivity in the long term.
As an aside, a network of self-driving cars and autonomous taxis, as proposed by our Silicon Valley overlords, is not a viable solution. But that's a story for another day.
Whether the UK government has even a spare hour to consider this report is another matter. After all, it seems the majority of the country's political capital is tied up in one singular issue for the foreseeable future. Even if there was time, it is not as if the government has been willing to loosen the fiscal purse strings for infrastructure recently -- through to 2017, government capital spending as a per cent of GDP was among the lowest in the G7:
Yet eventually the country will have to reckon with its clear lack of ingrained mobility, and not just in terms of transport. When it does, a range of questions over affordability, reliability and viability will have to be answered at both a local and central government level.
However, on the off chance action were to be taken, as with any political choice, there would be losers. An alleviation of the pressure on the South-East would be welcomed by most, bar, perhaps, the owners of real estate in and around the M25. A cynic might argue there is no great mystery as to why regional infrastructure remains on the political back-burner for the foreseeable future.
It's not difficult Joe. All it means is that services have to be put up for tender, it doesn't say who should win that tender. Lets say the government created a publicly owned, standalone rail entity. We can call it British Rail or something. That entity then bids for each rail franchise. The Department of Transport looks at the options and selects British Rail for each and every franchise. Hey presto.
I will say however how proud I am that you're reading The Conversation. As OldBlue might say, the times, they are a changing.
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
Not really - the terms in the fourth railway package would be met by having a standalone rail entity running some / most services as long as other companies had free and fair access to the rest of the network to run their services.
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