Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Two into five won't go



Railways approach Göteborg from five different directions. Starting from the twelve o'clock position, these are Strömstad-Uddevalla, Trollhattan-Älvängen, Stockholm-Alingsås, Borås and Copenhagen-Kungsbacka. There is no route across the city which has a significantly greater traffic potential than any other, and the connect must necessarily be arbitrary. Whichever lines are joined by a cross-city link, most journeys through the city centre will inevitably require a change just as they do now. If services from the two lines from the north continue onto the one line from the south, the result will be that the southern line will be unnecessarily congested and the potential traffic will be insufficient for the service provided. Or half the trains will have to turn round and go back.

A further drawback is that passengers travelling to and from the south to the city centre and northwards will actually experience longer journey times due to the detour they will now be making through having to make a trip all the way round the city centre through the expensively constructed tunnels.

In these circumstances, there is only thing to be gained from constructing a cross city link, is the reduction in the number of trains terminating at the central station, and the associated costs of platform occupation and train movements.

Against that is the disadvantage of joining separate networks: that delays and disruption are propagated from one network to another. A failure at, say, Alingsås will lead to cancellations at Kungsbacka an hour or so later. This was precisely the experience with London Thameslink, a long-distance cross-city route.

Kommentarer

Skicka en kommentar

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...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

The Zombie Train that refuses to die

The Guardian has published a couple more articles against HS2, one by specialist rail commentator Christian Wolmar, and another today by journalist Simon Jenkins. The main arguments in favour will doubtless be wheeled out by the commentators: the need for capacity and the disruption caused by upgrading existing routes. HST itself will severely disrupt services to Euston during the construction period. Capacity can be increased at a fraction of the cost by a variety of measures, provided that it is accepted that the additional traffic will run at existing speeds. It is not generally known that the Midland main line is, or was, four track all the way from London to Trent Junction, between Nottingham and Derby. This is because the additional tracks are separate, having been added for coal trains which trundled down to Brent sidings, on the edge of London, from a collection point at Toton in Nottinghamshire, where the Midland Railway build a huge marshalling yard. Beyond Derby, the main l...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

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...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer