FYI, the Silvertown tunnel is not with controversy:
> The scheme has faced widespread opposition from local people, politicians, climate scientists and medical experts who say it would increase traffic and worsen public health in some of the most deprived boroughs in the country. They also say it will lock in high carbon transport for generations to come.
Yeah. If they made it bus/cycle/walking only, that would be much better to actually make it better for people to use public transport. That said, plenty of traffic in London is commercial and a delivery driver can't just use the bus.
Better yet if the old tunnel was turned into pedestrian/cycle.
Then you get proper bus options through the taller tunnel, and proper human-powered options with nobody to run them over, win win.
And I guess we're not replacing lorries/vans for a while yet, so they can use the big tunnel with the busses I guess.
And cars can go via the m25, no need for them in the city. Maybe multi-pasenger/disabled only (incentivises carpooling, helps families who need a cubic meter of junk per baby, and disabled people have genuine needs for their adapted vehicles).
But yeah, the harder cars are to use in cities, the better for everyone (even the drivers often enough, still takes them the same time, but now they're not trapped queuing in a fuming tunnel, instead they're dancing playfully through one-way puzzles... ok, maybe it's not much better for them, but not _much_ worse either).
One thing that's rarely taken into account is that the town planning departments of many other cities are run by absolute mental cases as are the accounting departments. London has, for as long as I can remember, had fairly decent town planners and it generates enough money that over time even excessively expensive solutions end up being largely worthwhile in the end (Millenium Bridge for example).
All other cities of any size need to have town planners that are top quality.
I doubt it’s a coincidence. Chicken and egg isn’t it. Having no interesting well funded projects is unlikely to attract top talent to those planning departments
The lack of investment outside of London is quite deliberate
(Though the latter map is missing any points in Scotland. Whether that is an issue with data quality or with actual infrastructure planning policies is left as an exercise to the reader)
For some reason, for population, we always count the Greater London conurbation as just 'London' when we don't do the same for other cities. This creates the perception that London is an order of magnitude larger, when in fact it's not.
A more accurate comparison is with the total conurbation size of other cities. For example, Manchester is listed as having a population of about 550000, but the Greater Manchester conurbation (the equivalent of Greater London) has a total population of 2.8 million.
Birmingham is 1.1 million, but the contiguous West Midlands conurbation is about 2.9 million.
The Liverpool to Leeds cross-Pennine urban axis (which is nearly contiguous) has a population of nearly 7 million.
Yes, these are smaller than Greater London, but not by the amount you think.
I think this is what "Northern Powerhouse Rail" was supposed to address, but I don't know if it's going to get as much love as a London project, if it goes ahead at all :(
You can clearly see the areas in question - London being the big red/purple blob in the far south-east, and the cities/conurbations marmarama described are to the north and north-west of that. They're not individually on the scale of London, but they're substantial population centres that would see real benefits from this kind of public transport infrastructure investment.
Not just harder to justify but the length of time (approx 10 years?) that it can take between the initial investment and people adjusting their lifestyle/moving to take advantage of the new infrastructure.
That said, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol and Birmingham (I'm sure others that I don't know about) have all done an enormous amount of work in the last 10-20 years to modernise.
Transport is hardest of all, of course, since you don't have the space usually to create greener systems without removing something else like a road and not everyone can simply swap easily. That said, I wish they would take some bold decisions across the UK and, like the Hague, make whole town centres pedestrianised during the day to try and force it a bit.
Yes. Frankly, the continued over centralisation of the country around London seems to me to be the single greatest threat to the future prosperity of the country
When you factor in climate change and rising sea levels, London is going to become unsustainable in the next 100-200 years. The Thames Barrier already needs replacing with a bigger structure, or it will become too small to cope sometime in the late 21st century. Possibly sooner than that if warming trends continue to accelerate.
While I appreciate that investment in London needs to happen to solve issues now, the UK should be pivoting more investment to its regional cities that are in more sustainable locations, so that the UK is prepared for when London eventually succumbs to the tides.
I'm not sure I follow your point. I live about an hour from the "centre" of London.
That doesn't mean I want to travel 2 hours a day just to use London's infrastructure.
London is a big place. The centre of London is big. Where my train comes into London is not necessarily where what I need to do is.
So there could be another further hour of travel each way to get across London.
Travelling to and from the station on the home end is also a problem. Since public transport is so dire outside of London that takes much longer than it should do and is much more inconvenient.
Where friends of mine get annoyed waiting 5 minutes for a bus in London, you could be waiting over an hour in the rest of the country ...and if you miss it you're in schtuck, because it's the only one that day.
How much daily travel should we have to put up?
Just to be clear, I don't want less in London, I want more/better outside of London.
Probably better defined as in the number of people living within about 30 miles of Charing Cross. I.e. if about 3m people live in the central belt in Scotland and about 20m people live in the Greater London urban area then you would expect there to be about 6x more transport capacity on any given rail line or bus service. I would say very very roughly the trains in London are 3x longer and twice as frequent as the trains between and around Glasgow and Edinburgh. Busses are probably up to 6x more frequent than in Glasgow simply because the buses can't get larger so you need to run more of them to cope with demand. Trains and busses are still more crowded in London than they are in Scotland, probably because it would be physically impossible to have the same modal share of car journeys in London as you have in the central belt; due to the greater urban density there is not physically enough space to park as many vehicles. Transport investment was neglected in London in the 80's and 90's by the then Conservative administration who thought everyone would drive everywhere in the future. This doesn't work in London and as a result the trains and buses were overcrowded, unreliable and unsafe. Examples: Kings Cross Fire, 1950's slam door trains with no corridors. My train to school was a slam door train that regularly approached the max crush load of 7 people per m² and was the most unreliable line in Britain for most of the late 80's and 90's. Overcrowding on lines around Manchester and Birmingham has probably been forecasted decades ago but the government will not have done anything about it in the last 12 years because the urban northern cities don't vote Conservative just like urban London doesn't.
It is better defined as people living within 30 miles of Charing Cross I think. See comment above. I'm not sure about the 20m figure as I can't find the stats just now. But it's definitely greater than 15m so the basic argument probably still holds.
That seems to be a common attitude in the UK and it’s not helpful. We should be building London level or better transport in the rest of the country, not wrecking Londons transport to bring it into line.
I was not talking about wrecking London's transport, merely using a thought experiment to illustrate how much better London's transport is than what the rest of the country has to put up with.
The point in hs2 isn’t mainly to reduce journey time, even though that is what is usually touted in news articles. It’s to increase capacity and reduce the contention between high speed intercity services and commuter services with many stops. The west coast main line is extremely busy and if you’re going to build more track you might as well build it for modern train speeds.
I'm really confused, because everyone connected with rail seems to be completely 100% aligned on this and they'll repeatedly explain in very easy-to-digest terms the existing problems, and how HS2 will alleviate many of them. It seems like such a no-brainer.
... and yet so much of the public (and ... [sigh] the news and various politicians) seem to be laser-focussed on travel time, and loudly question whether a quicker north/south line is really worth it. And they'll often talk about the focus should instead be on improving utilisation of the existing without knowing that these main north/south lines are already very near capacity.
If I was a rail guy in the UK I'd probably lose my mind.
It is higher speed. It's just not the speed you think it is. And higher peak speed doesn't linearly translate to lower journey time, as you need to speed up and slow down at either end!
People aren't stupid, they can understand that a project can deliver more benefits than just the words in a project's name.
But you've got knowledgeable people patiently giving plain easy-to-digest descriptions on the benefits ... which are ignored entirely by those with a bigger platforms who boil it down to "do we really need the fast trains?"
No one mentioned Seattle's own huge tunnel machine that infamously broke down partway into the job. It was a little larger, at 17.5 meters vs 11.91 meters for this latest UK tunnel machine. It broke down about 1000 feet into the 10k long tunnel. Among the many reasons why the US can't build infrastructure like this is we had specific public votes and lots of grousing along the way. I was proud we managed to pull it off and recover from that major failure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_(tunnel_boring_machin...
> "Currently getting across the river in that area on bicycle is very difficult. You would have to ride to the greenwich foot tunnel and walk."
I jokingly call it the "Greenwich cycle tunnel" because there's always a large number of people cycling through it despite the many signs saying it's forbidden!
IMO a cycle/pedestrian crossing between the Canada Water/Surry Docks area and Canary Wharf (replacing the existing expensive ferry) would be a game changer that would lead to greatly increased development on the south side. But unlikely to happen because it's hard to put a toll on a cycle/pedestrian crossing to pay for it!
Since they're building it right next to an existing tunnel, and the main reason given is for double decker busses, it seems like it would be fairly easy to make it zero emissions vehicles only and add a bike lane too.
Existing, non-zero emissions vehicles can use the old tunnel and be phased out over time, lane by lane.
edit: but on reading more, it seems mostly to be about charging HGV tolls.
If they're having to build a tunnel specifically to accommodate double decker busses that are "just a bit too tall", it sounds like whoever procured the "Boris busses" didn't do their homework, so now we're spending millions to fix something that could have been solved at no cost by buying slightly smaller busses?
In practice, everyone rides their bike, scooter or whatever in the tunnel. And honestly I find it really hard to blame them: sure it's "forbidden", but I'd do the same if I was them (as long as you are not just speeding like a madman)
That's false, Blackwall tunnel is completely banned for non-motor traffic. The pedestrian path way is for emergency use only and it's blocked off at both ends. Going down there with a bike is suicidal and also prohibited. During my 7 years commute on the A2 I have never seen a single bicycle down the tunnel.
You sure you're not mistaken for Rotherhithe tunnel?
edit: I see you're referring to Greenwich tunnel. Fair points.
I've always liked the idea of turning the northbound blackwall tunnel into a combined underground shopping centre/cycle lane/footpath. It's ill-suited to motor vehicles in any case and could be replaced with a new northbound vehicle tunnel.
Idea would be to split the tunnel into two levels with a deck, have the lower right hand lane for cyclists (two way), upper right hand side for pedestrians and the entire left side for shops with frequent stairs/lifts for access between the two levels.
London had this years ago in the form of the Thames Tunnel, however the gloomy gas lighting meant it didn't last long as a pedestrian tunnel. With modern lighting and ventilation I wonder if this is a possiblity.
A bridge across the Thames needs to be very tall to allow ships to pass underneath. Or have the ability to open up for ship traffic like Tower Bridge. This is why tunnels are likely to be cheaper/easier.
People living in East London and South London find it really inconvenient to travel between the both since the birth of London. The Thames River is very wide in the East unlike West London.
It can take between 40 minutes to 1h20m to drive the 500 meter distance between East London and South, by travelling through tunnels or bridges closer to Central London.
For the actual bridge vs the actual tunnel, tunnels start to outcompete once you get a length over a mile or so, so I'd guess bridge.
But since this is in the middle of a busy city, I'd guess other factors dominate, costs for land access and approach roads, river traffic, appearances etc.
The elevation needed for boats to cross under can make the bridge initial cost really high, depending on the height you need to accommodate.
Honestly, i would just trust the architects and urban planners. At least in my country, every new development i saw recently, even those i was kind of against at first (in 4 different cities) were upgrades once finished. Even when it lost something i really was attached to, i have to admit that this is overall better now.
> The scheme has faced widespread opposition from local people, politicians, climate scientists and medical experts who say it would increase traffic and worsen public health in some of the most deprived boroughs in the country. They also say it will lock in high carbon transport for generations to come.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/aug/05/london-mayor...
Also:
https://silvertowntunnel.co.uk/
https://stopsilvertowntn.com/
https://twitter.com/silvertowntn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand