When you feel you have won the arguement by quoting a few paragraphs of a 9 year old 'report' by vested interests and think you can shut the conversation down rather than engaging with legitimate concerns.
When you set out with a 'vision' and then write a 'report' on that 'vision', the only thing that is certain is that your 'report' will prove that your original 'vision' was the correcct one. That report is so openly biased towards it's outcome from the start that from the opening paragraph they make it clear what they are trying to prove. They then continue by putting their conclusions aka aspirations, before any of the so called evidence. Through the entire report they conflate 'The Northern Way' and the Manchester Hub. As if they are they only option and the whole of the North supports it, however with no alternative or counter proposal to evaluate it against.
Then we will look at the Geographical regions that the report has defined. Central Manchester, Inner Manchester, The rest of Manchester. All the other Northern Cities combined. The rest of the country. - If that isn't biasing an 'investigation' to obtain the pre-determined result what on earth is.
Then we look at the way they identify the so called 'rail corridors'. Blackburn aparently has it's own dedicated corridor into Manchester that only serves Blackburn and nowhere else. The only place that can be served 'via wigan' is Southport. However Leeds and York have been pre-determined to be so important that they can be split into 3 seperate grouping (despite the total of all the corridors combined being a fraction of others. Meanwhile at the bottom relegated to an afterthought are the lines heading West.
- Liverpool via Irlam, (So not even Warrington the biggest place on the line) somehow generates less benefit per minute improvement than the line to Southport. Despite it serving the North Wests 2nd biggest airport. Laughable.
- The second and more major Liverpool line is then combined with Chester (remember Blackburn aparently has its own dedicted corridor serving no-where else)
So taking those two into account, the combined benefits of inter-corridor flows across Manchester without wanting to go there: from the entirity of Liverpool (with a bit of Chester and North Wales) is still deemed to be less than that of the Preston and 'the North' via Bolton. This all despite the fact that everyone from Liverpool - Chester and North Wales, have no choice but to Cross Manchester to go to anywhere in the North East and Yorkshire. Whilst people from the Preston and the North Corridor can avoid Manchester by going straight across the pennines or straight down the WCML.
It also has a combined total on just cross Manchester journeys of '1 benefit per minute' less than all of the flows to Manchester Airport combined.
Now we look at the interchange penalty, and conveniently, People on the Liverpool via Irlam and Liverpool / Chester via Warrington corridors have the two lowest interchange penalties. Massive negative number. The report specifically states, So effectively recognising that people on these corridors are the accepted collateral damage of this plan.
Nothing written in that report can vaguely be described as Evidence. It is just waffle and psuedo statistics to justify a pre-determined position. Its an embaressment that you have to rely on such an outdated biased document to justify flawed actions.
Meanwhile in the real-world this week during the evening peak through Manchester Oxford Road (1615-1800) we are averaging about 4 services keeping to their timetabled arrival and departure times. Some places in the world would be embaressed by 4 services across an entire day being late. Here we are supposed to rejoice, when 4 out of 53 manage to keep to time.
Thank you. You clearly have a lot more patience than I have, to sit and go through that pile of utter manure.
I don't know whom to feel more embarrassed for. The charlatans who actually billed (presumably) taxpayer-funded bodies for that nonsense; the taxpayer-funded bodies who can do nothing concrete to make most people's lives better; the people on here who somehow seem to derive a sense of self-worth by identifying with a fairly standard airport; or all the rest of us in the north, with the embarrassing rubbish we have to put up with instead of proper public transport, treated as collateral damage by the first three groups mentioned above