Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Passengers forced to use older trains

Tram at Saltholmen

On the tram

Rail passengers are being forced to use older trains as the average age of rolling stock reached a five year high, according to the Office of Rail Regulation. The figures were seen as a condemnation of the Government's record on the railways by Theresa Villiers, the Tories' transport spokesman. Commenting on this news, "This news is more evidence of Labour's failure on our railways. For years Labour have been promising extra carriages but they never arrive and the average age of rolling stock continues to climb. Three successive Secretaries of State for transport have promised 1300 extra carriages and yet passengers are still stuck on enormously overcrowded and ageing trains."

It is depressing when this kind of comment is bandied about. It does not help public debate. The government's rolling stock procurement programme has got into a mess, but the age of the trains is certainly not the issue and politicians should not be raising the matter. Surely there is enough to attack the government about without this kind of fatuous nonsense?

Trains and other public transport vehicles are not consumer items with a 15 year life. Typically, they can continue in useful service for three or four times as long. Gothenberg has just refurbished its 1960s trams (above) to keep them going for another ten years, and just as well too, because the city's fleet of new Italian vehicles had to be taken off the road for a couple of weeks in February. Some of the trams in the Milan fleet date from 1928. The trains on London's Metropolitan Line are still looking fresh and giving good service after nearly 50 years.

Daily Telegraph article

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...