Recent content by NotATrainspott

In the original 2010 plans, the six new HS2 platforms were going to be temporarily connected to and used for the WCML, so that other groups of platforms could be taken out of service and rebuilt in stages. This went out of the window once the plans for the full rebuild of Euston station went...

I'm not advocating ignoring the law. I'm saying that it has been a mistake for the government to plough ahead without changing it. The right way to deliver Euston and OOC would have been to set up - in law - development companies covering the areas around them that had special CPO and land value...

I never said that we would confiscate the property without compensation. But, it is also not fair to pay the owners of the property based on the increased land value that they themselves did not generate, just because that is what they want to be paid. Expropriation does not work as an economic...

I think those problems really just boil down to financing. If the money is there, we can build anything we like. If the money is not there, then we start to be constrained. The fact that over-site development has popped up again and again will be a big part of design changes, as you need to...

Indeed, but the lack of discussion about how to make the most of all of those billions of pounds of taxpayers' money is one of the reasons this project has struggled. Would the land really not be connected to the construction of the railway, if our failure to redevelop it and capture the...

This won't happen, but it isn't totally absurd. The problem with all the over-site development proposals for Euston is that building on top of a railway is hard. Adding in all of the foundation piles so that tall buildings could sit above the railway will be very expensive, meaning that the...

Edinburgh does have a good bus service, compared to other non-London cities in the UK. My point is that if we focus too much on relatively shallow passenger complaints, we'll end up optimising the network the wrong way. The reaction to the 400XLBs with their second set of doors is one small...

These sorts of arguments are essentially irrelevant. All pensioners today are supported by the people working today. There is nothing else. Individually there can be factors like how much people save and so how much of a retirement they can expect, but in aggregate all that matters is the...

If you're mostly using the bus when it's raining then I can assume you would otherwise walk or cycle, and that's good! As a cyclist or pedestrian you have exactly the right incentive structure for the city to thrive. Density and high quality urban environments make life as a cyclist or...

The solution is more trams. There aren't that many route corridors in the city which couldn't justify trams in the long term. In the end, buses aren't that space efficient once you have a lot of them. London buses only work because they pick up some of the design features of trams, with multiple...

Burying trams underground really doesn't make a lot of sense until there are so many trams and so many pedestrians sharing the streets that it stops working. I think that's the situation that Karlsruhe got into when it recently decided to tunnel under the Kaiserstrasse. Until then it's generally...

Manchester Airport is just a convenient place to put a parkway station for Manchester. People from across Cheshire and the wider north-west want somewhere that is easy to drive to in order to catch a train to London. It's similar to Birmingham Interchange, which is at a useful interchange node...

It does seem odd that policy has been drafted up without any real plan for how services would run. If Euston is to be built with private money, then the government needs to have a plan in case that money doesn't appear. It needs to write up a document that would explain how HS2 terminating at...

Can Eurostar charge different fares depending on whether someone has already been registered, or doesn't need to? The result of capped services will be higher fares but there are plenty of people who will be just as fast or faster at getting through border control after it is implemented. A few...

The Merseyrail project isn't comparable. The batteries on the 777 fleet are really just to allow incremental extensions of existing electrified Merseyrail services, but without the regulatory complexity of new third rail installations. The most direct analogy I can think of for Headbolt Lane is...