Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Crossrail


The sheep
Originally uploaded by phatcontroller.

Crossrail is the proposed major east-west route across London. It is intended to link the Great Eastern and Great Western main lines with an underground section running across the middle of London. It is suggested that trains will run from, Shenfield and Stratford in the east to Maidenhead in the west, but because of the limited capacity of trains on the GW main line, many trains will turn back at Paddington and it will also be necessary to cut back on the number of freight trains using the GW line. A rival proposal is for a service to Reading rather than Maidenhead, on the grounds that Reading is a more useful destination. The proposal also includes an option for a branch running south to Canary Wharf and Woolwich, to provide an interchange with South-Eastern services.

The central section will run mostly in tunnel from Stratford, via Liverpool Street and Bond Street, to Paddington.

Amongst the benefits are that people will be able to make journeys between the outer suburbs and a variety of central London destinations, without changing. It will also relieve the busy London Underground Central line and the northern half of the Circle line.

Unfortunately, experience with Thameslink, the north-south equivalent, suggests that the project as it stands could have serious drawbacks.

The most important of these, as perhaps regular travellers will know, is that a service across London that joins two main lines is liable to be affected by delays on disruption occuring on either of them and indeed can transfer the disruption from one main line to the other. Crossrail will be vulnerable in exactly the same way.

The second is that using a high speed main line for suburban stopping services may not be the best use of resources, especially when it is at the expense of freight operations.

The third is that the lack of capacity means that many trains will have to turn back at Paddington. This has further potential for disruption and means that many passengers will have to change to continue their journey.

The fourth, which again has been the experience with Thameslink, is that the trains are necessarily designed for a twenty-minute journey but that passengers may be obliged to use them for much longer trips for which they are not suited due to lack of seats and general comfort.

Alternatives should be explored.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...