It’s the best decision so far of this government !
That’s easy to say when it is their first decision.:diablo:
The road system to Heathrow is crumbling to bits and there is no valid reason to continue ploughing money into Heathrow when it has reached capacity!
So rather then updating the road you want to move the demand to other places. However, this will quickly mess up the roads at other places at well. Have you for instance been to Luton recently? One minor collision on the access road and there are tailbacks for miles. By concentrating on LHR you can also concentrate your investments and thus make them more efficient.
Thoughts should now be directed at using excess capacity at other airports i.e East Midlands and Manston and start to spread the burden rather than living for ever in the ‘London Centric’ policy we have for airport development.
That has been tried for years now, and failed quite badly. The last airline that started at Manston, EUjet, did not last that long. Manston is too far away from London to even be considered by Ryanair! That should tell you something!
We should also start to seriously look at regulation of rail ticket prices
Agree, British rail is a joke. Unreliable and crowded services are very high fares.
and end the nonsence of aircraft being used for short journeys within the U.K when a revitalised rail system could share the burden.
I agree that using airplanes for these short hops is hard to defend when there is a good railway system. But let’s be honest here, the railway system as it is now is unable to absorb the passengers from airplanes should they be cancelled!
Sure you could upgrade the rail, doing so will take a lot longer then building a new runway (NIMBY’s notwithstanding). The joke of course is that environmentalists hate the though of plowing over 3 odd miles for a runway, but love the idea of plowing over 100s of miles for a railline! And make no mistake about it, you do need NEW railines. Upgrading existing raillines won’t work because the main lines are already at peak capacity. Whether that means doubling existing lines, or adding new corridors I’ll leave to others to decide.
And even if there is a perfect railline, flights are likely to continue to offer direct connections to the long-haul outbound peaks. Just check for instance AMS. They still got flights to BRU and CDG even though there is a perfect Thalys high-speed rail service calling directly at the airport. Same goes for domestic flights in Germany, the ICE trains stop at the airports of DUS, FRA, MUC and various other airpors but there are still domestic flights between those cities. Not as many as there used to be obviously, and the planes have shrunk from A300s to CRJs, but the flights are still there!
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