Mr Burnham said: “This is not about being unrealistic and it’s not about reviving HS2. But if we leave things as they are then this is an anti-growth strategy.
“The West Coast Main Line is pretty much full and the M6 motorway is definitely full. We have to have a 21st-century rail network.”
Yes, yes, lots of people love playing with train sets. But a 19th c tech might not in fact be entirely necessary for the 21st c. Or, given the speed at which Britain builds, the 22 nd.
No, I’m not saying that every thing is going to be done online. But that things can be done online does remove the strict link between physical transport and economic growth. Whatever that link was it’s now different….
Firstly, he’s not half wrong about the M6. I wouldn’t say it’s full, but the inside lane is like a queue of lorries whenever I’ve been on it. The answer that Burnham has is choo-choos, which can just go in the bin. Despite what the rail people and politicians want, most people doing freight want to use trucks. Because you’re not dependant on the cunts at ASLEF and also because you can go direct door to door rather than driving it to a rail terminal, then onto a train, then off again, and have to worry about refrigeration and all that. The best answer there would be to build more road capacity.
Also, people who drive on the M6 are not all going from central Manchester to central Birmingham and I fucking wish politicians would grasp this point. Like I would take the train to central Manchester, for one client, but I drove to a client near Wilmslow. Just a single extra connection made a considerable difference in time. Because you get into Piccadilly, and you then have to wait for the Wilmslow train. And then you have to get from there to the office.
Solving rail overcrowding is mostly about pricing. Rail is full sometimes. And it’s full because you just have “peak” and “off-peak” rather than each service being priced based on demand. Like the thing of the train just before the rugby to Bath being rammed. Because you don’t just get Rugby fans but also tourists. If you raised the price of it a lot of the tourists would go on the train just after kick-off. Some of the Rugby fans might take an earlier train to save money. But no-one travelling knows this because all the prices are the same.
And on that “strict link”, the high value stuff is mostly digital. A company in Birmingham training an LLM for a company in Manchester is all remote. The servers running it are in Swindon or Dublin.
’Rail is full sometimes.’
Wasn’t some vacuous sleb bleating all over social media just the other day about having paid for a 1st class ticket and finding herself sitting on the floor?
“But that things can be done online does remove the strict link between physical transport and economic growth. ”
I had a good little example of that just the other day. I was supposed to be having a meeting, several of the attendees were coming up from London on the train. But some poor soul decided that was the day to end it all in front of a train, and Paddington was closed and they couldn’t travel. So one of the other attendees (locally based) came to mine, plugged in the laptop and we all had a face to face meeting round my dining room table. Loads of time saved, no choo-choos involved.
“things can be done online does remove the strict link between physical transport and economic growth. Whatever that link was it’s now different….”
Yeah, but with big bits of physical infrastructure you have something you can name after someone, and put a nice plaque on. It’s why every shitty town has a “Deirdre Blenkinsop Way” or somesuch, commemorating some otherwise long-forgotten (and justly-forgotten) councillor. Burnham isn’t going to be satisfied with the next iteration of Zoom being named after him.
Presumably in my example above, had they travelled that would have added to GDP, what we actually did added virtually nothing. A few pence worth of electricity one assumes.
Is this one of the reasons GDP is so flat – the calculation method is not capturing the stuff we are doing for virtually zero that was historically a part of GDP?
There’s an element to it, yes. You doing what he meeting was about will presumably increase GDP. But a cheap meeting reduces it. It’s deffo true that WahtsApp for phone calls reduces GDP as against using land lines charged by hte minute – say.
Never mind the greedy unions – it’s the self-driving cars that’ll kill the railway. Even if we never get full self-driving in cities, with awkward obstacles like cyclists and pedestrians, self-driving on motorways is a doddle.
The government needs to sit down with manufacturers and ask them what they need to get motorway self-driving working. Clearly painted white lines? Segregated self-driving lanes? Electronic equipment on the roadside for the car to know where it is? I don’t know. But the value that could be unlocked here is incredible, and we’re wasting effort even thinking about HS2.
JuliaM,
“Wasn’t some vacuous sleb bleating all over social media just the other day about having paid for a 1st class ticket and finding herself sitting on the floor?”
Mariella Frostrup.
But really, fair enough. A first class return from Somerset to London is about £300.
You’re not going to get past this problem until you have tickets sold for a particular train, which means you can then measure demand, and keep pushing up the price as it gets close to being full. Which also has the benefit of being able to fill up spare capacity, encouraging people to switch from train to car, or just to do a journey they wouldn’t when trains are empty.
But you won’t get that until you get Greed Pig Capitalists in charge of rail, like you have with coaches and airlines who all do this.
“You doing what he meeting was about will presumably increase GDP. But a cheap meeting reduces it.”
What the meeting was about will still happen (or not), whether we met face to face or remotely. So that part of GDP is untouched, but we’ve had 2 remote meetings now, when historically we’d have had face to face ones, so overall the entire process will result in less GDP than it otherwise would have. The only way the remote meetings could increase GDP would be if they were more efficient at getting GDP creating outcomes to happen. Which I suspect isn’t going to happen – deals fall apart for all the usual reasons, not the manner in which one communicates in the run up to them.
“It’s deffo true that Whatsapp for phone calls reduces GDP as against using land lines charged by the minute”
Its not even just whatsapp giving free calls, even calls through mobiles are now capped at very low levels – I pay £8/month for my unlimited phone calls, my late father used to have massive landline bills back in the day (hundreds of pounds a quarter) because he spent so much time on the phone. So it doesn’t matter how many calls I make, my purchase of phone services is capped at £96/yr of GDP.
You can probably do more stuff online but there is still a lot of hardware to move around, hence all the lorries on M6, A14, A1 etc. However a lot of it still goes by rail, and it has increased in recent years. I just looked up the freight trains that are arriving or leaving Felixstowe docks today. 64 of them in total. Sources/Destinations all over the place – Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, various in the Midlands, Teesside, etc.
It actually boggled me when I found I could look up the data & saw how many there were, as the line out of Felixstowe to Ipswich is single track most of the way. And that’s just Felixstowe. There is also stuff to/from Southampton, London Gateway & probably others.
“So it doesn’t matter how many calls I make, my purchase of phone services is capped at £96/yr of GDP.”
Yep.
“The only way the remote meetings could increase GDP would be if they were more efficient at getting GDP creating outcomes to happen.”
#Cheaper meetings (especially the time involved) might well lead to more meetings and thus more deals that actually happen.
Maybe.
Andrew M;
“The government needs to sit down with manufacturers and ask them what they need to get motorway self-driving working. ”
Absolutely not – it’s not as if it went very well last time the government(s) tried to get car manufacturers to make massive changes to what technology they sell. best thing they can do is (like always) to fuck off
What would be a sensible way to use the land that’s been confiscated/bought for HS2?
Sell it back to the confiscees?
Flog it to the highest bidder to run a toll road?
Declare it to be Heathrow’s new runway?
Motorways are the ideal environment for self-driving cars specifically because they are not the public highway, and they are specifically engineered to remove everything you would encounter on the public highway.
We’ve built up the wrong picture of driverless cars because so much of the development has been done in the USA, where they don’t have the concept of Special Roads that we do in the UK.
In the UK, motorways are Special Roads, they are explicitly *not* the public highways, and access is restricted. *Nobody* is allowed on a Special Road unless explicitly allowed, in contrast to public highways where *everybody* is allowed unless explicitly barred. Also, the design requirements contrain the environment, the interaction is highly predictable. Eg, everything is contrained into lanes, you will *not* encountered oncoming vehicles, junctions filter off into a separate area, etc. It is the perfect environment for autodriving. You minimise the environmental contraints put on the system.
I can’t claim the idea, I first read an indirect reference to it in Heinlein’s Methusalah’s Children written in 1940. Paraphrased as: “Mary pulled onto the motorway, put the car into automatic, and as it sought out the guide cables under the tarmac, she dropped the seat and started to doze”. Later: “the autopilot started bleeping, Mary put the car into manual and pulled off at the junction…”
Constrain autodriving to only be allowed to be used on motorways, and you have solved a huge number of the technical problems.
Emil: this isn’t about government telling car makers what to make, this is government asking car manufacturers how the government should be building motorways.
@Jim
It’s the central problem with macronomics. GDP is expressed in money, not value created. It’s quite possible (or in fact normal) for GDP to be showing a money plus for a value minus. The entire NHS for example.
It’s the thing repeatedly makes the Spudcvnt look stupid. All his tiny bookeepery mind can see is money on a spreadsheet. He can’t envisage the value created in commerce that it may, or may not, represent. Mostly not I would think. Like when he wants to print money.
The problem with demand pricing for each individual train is the situation where you don’t know which trains you’ll be catching for your return journey. Even if you do have a plan for which trains you intend to catch, missed connections are highly likely to scupper that plan. And if you have missed a connection, so will a lot of other people, creating a high demand for the next train, with unforeseeably expensive tickets.
It just makes it impossible to calculate whether a journey makes economic sense. Most of my train journeys involve days at the races, and those involve enough gambling anyway, without turning the journey itself into a complete lottery. I’d simply stay at home.
Germany did some trials awhile back on car trains where the cars could slave themselves to a lead vehicle so a block of vehicles would at least be moving together
Recall talk of using it also with buses where cars would just follow the bus automatically.
The rationale seemed be that you had a professional driver in charge of the auto driving so it wasn’t totally autonomous
Paul,
“The problem with demand pricing for each individual train is the situation where you don’t know which trains you’ll be catching for your return journey. Even if you do have a plan for which trains you intend to catch, missed connections are highly likely to scupper that plan. And if you have missed a connection, so will a lot of other people, creating a high demand for the next train, with unforeseeably expensive tickets.”
You can pay for a more expensive flexible fare to come back. I’m not saying all tickets would be fixed. But there are people who are fine with a fixed ticket and will give up flexibility for a lower price.
The plan is like the “Advance” ticket, but a lot more of them.
@Paul, Somerset
Variable pricing could also allow people to decide on the spot that they’ll wait at the station and have a snack rather than get on the more expensive train immediately. That would tend to keep the places in most demand for those who really do need to travel at that time.
bloke in spain,
I do half wonder about when people talk about low Japanese GDP, how much of that is because of things like mothers not working much.
Like, we look richer than the Japanese because of higher GDP. But what if some of that is women working more here. Like you earn £40K, that’s £40K of GDP. You pay tax on that, pay a cleaner £5K and £10K for nursery. So, I think that’s £55K onto GDP, but maybe at the end of it she’s only got £5K net. Barely better off but with huge GDP extra.
They’re supposedly on 2/3rds of our GDP per capita, but I’ve yet to ever see any footage of Japan that looks like some of our colossal shitholes. The people don’t seem to dress poor.
Western Bloke:
They’re supposedly on 2/3rds of our GDP per capita, but I’ve yet to ever see any footage of Japan that looks like some of our colossal shitholes. The people don’t seem to dress poor.
GDP shouldn’t be used as a proxy for living standards. Nonetheless, OECD analysis of net average salaries per capita suggests much the same thing, namely that Japanese “take-home pay” is at about two-thirds the level of ours. (Twenty years ago these differences were much narrower.) But that doesn’t mean Japan is now a poor country – salaries are still above those in Italy and close to French levels, for example. Inequality is also relatively low, which may explain why there is an absence of “colossal shitholes” in comparison to the UK (although I doubt we’d agree on what constitutes these – Japanese urban areas do not look attractive to me, even if they are clean, while I also think that the misanthropic bias dominant on the populist right has led to an exaggeration of the number of such areas in existence over here).