United Kingdom
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
view the rest of the comments
We are already living through a "life sentence of inadequate train service"
Fuck building new lines designed for speed, invest that money in making the existing network better. Trains are already disgustingly over priced in exchange for a disrespectfully shit service. How about investing in making what is already there affordable and actually reliable, fucking privatisation bullshit.
I don't care if the train takes 8 or 10 hours to go from one end of the country to the other what I care about is the fact that you are raped by the 200 plus charge.
Public transport in this country is a fucking joke and what with this prick rolling back and taking some car positive outlook towards the future for this country it doesn't look like it is gonna improve anytime soon. Fuck I hate this place.
HS2 is the investment in making the existing network better. From the article:
It is, but they also keep reinventing and scrapping their long awaited, promised, guaranteed upgrades to the East-West routes across the North, which is frustrating a lot of people. We're still waiting to upgrade to the Victorian Network :)
That's a slight exaggeration, but round Selby/Doncaster/Hull/York/Leeds etc, we're still waiting for track electrification, and we only got rid of Pacers (1984) two years ago, and have now upgraded to "new, cool and futuristic" Sprinters (1984).
"Dad, what was commuting to work in the 80s like?"
"Exactly the same as this, but the chairs were a different colour and there was no disabled toilet"
I suppose it's easy to feel like "Get our 50mph trains up to 80mph (or better?) before you start worrying about making a fast train faster".
Building new, modern railway lines is one way to improve the network. I don't really understand why anyone who advocates for investment in the railways has a problem with building new lines. I agree that they shouldn't be private anymore and that we should massively increase funding, but building new rail and replacing old rail with new rail seems like a great way to improve the network
The rail industry was asked nearly 20 years ago what would best increase capacity in our existing infrastructure and this is what they cam up with. Faster, more frequent services on a high speed line that frees up paths on old mainlines for more local services and more rail freight, as these are at capacity right now
Sure, you can argue that it wasn't a perfect plan, but it's what we have. Framing it as "high speed travel to London" is what the press have been doing for 15 years and is disingenuous.
Of course it doesn't matter because even before this latest idiocy the plan had been gutted down enough that a lot of that extra capacity wouldn't have appeared, and we instead have spent billions extra tunnelling under fields near rich people's homes so they wouldn't have to hear trains every now and then
goes to look
It looks like a rail ticket a week from now (October 10) is about £220 from London to Inverness. A bus ticket (megabus) can be had for £27. On the other hand, rail is about 8 hours and the bus 13 hours.
So if you would like to optimize for price, I suppose that the bus probably is a lot more appealing, though the trip will take longer.
EDIT: Just to check what you could theoretically get the bus time down to, Google Maps says that it's about 10 hours to go from London to Inverness in a car. So that's about the floor on what a bus service could do (no changes, no intermediate stops), short of introducing new or faster highways.
EDIT2: For completeness, air (easyJet) appears to be available for that route for £51 and take 1 hour and 40 minutes. More expensive than the bus, but also much less so than rail, and considerably faster than either.
And this is why anyone would be insane to do anything but fly there.
Heh, I checked the air price and updated my comment after you commented but before I read your comment, but yeah, good point.
Like, yeah, if you’re someone super environmentally conscious then you may be begrudged to fly, and while I understand the big picture is more complicated than what I’m about to say, but that flight, train or coach was going to depart with or without you regardless, so I’m going to be picking the best combination of easiest, fastest and cheapest choice.