--- James Heartfield <Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk>
wrote: >
> In message
>
<20020114013535.61744.qmail at web20010.mail.yahoo.com>,
> Cian
> O'Connor <cian_oconnor at yahoo.co.uk> writes
>
> But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the
> railways will never be profitable again.
I think it's impossible to know either way. The railways
> When Cian answers the question 'who wants rail' as
> follows
> >
> >
> >Well for a start commuters to London, seeing that
> >commuting by car is not a realistic alternative.
>
> I think he is making a mistake. Distance travelled
in cars per person is
> much greater than distance travelled by train. In
London it was 3,393
> miles by car to 823 miles by rail in 1998. In the
South East (excluding
> London) it was 6,804 miles by car to 533 by rail.
This has nothing to do with the point I was making. The vast majority of people who commute into central London from the suburbs come by train (I know one person who drives - one more than most I imagine). Getting into central London from most suburbs is murderous. If most people drove there would be an additional problem with parking. Also a significant chunk of Londoners commute internally by train (I catch the Hackney train, for example. Hard to say how London would be affected in the long term by the collapse of the railways, but in the short term it would be very expensive to London based businesses.
> >So
> >we're talking about a group that includes popular
> >middle brow journalists, investment bankers and
> >lawyers. The rest of the rail network may, or may
> not
> >be feasible (we've never really tried to find out)
> -
> >but the links to London are essential. And they're
> the
> >most broken part at the moment.
>
> I don't think that you can ignore the rail losses as
> merely fictional. I
> agree that profitability is no full measure of human
> need, but the
> public's preference for the car is real, not
> imaginary, and it has a
> practical effect on the economics of railways.
Again not the point I was making. Whether the rail network is profitable, or not, I don't think London could operate without it, anymore than it could without the telecoms infrastructure. Even if it could, there's a limit to how long ANY government can piss off a group as powerful as London commuters. That group includes a lot of journalists, investment bankers, lawyers and other "worthies" that this government seems to value quite highly.
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