The PO has also abandoned completely what should surely have been a very
useful piece of infrastructure, the PO tube below central London. General details
were, this went from paddington to whitechapel, once had around 12 stops, was
in 2002 down to 3 stops, now disused. what with the Kengestion Charge on
London, are the PO vans exempt, or maybe the £5 also applies to tube trains too?
Maybe the railways also didn't want the PO traffic. There has been a trend I
find disturbing across the rail network, and even some buses, for speeding up
the journeys at the expense of local traffic and goods traffic. Local tube and
inner city rail stas are closed so rural (wealthy) passengers have a quicker
journey in. The London tube and inner rail lines are littered with closed
stations, mainly between 2 and 5 miles out from the centre. It was only the flight
by the wealthy to rural areas that necessitated this change, and such
closures facilitate even remoter, longer journeys, perpetuating near-terminus
closures of stas. Rural stops are closed so inter city business travellers can get
from London to Bristol in 15 minutes less, but very few local village stas
remain open between Reading and Bristol. Even buses, in inner Leeds, you can wait
on the A64 for a bus to the centre, yet many from outer villages pass you by,
non stop, as if buses from rurals stopped here, the journey would be
intolerably long.
Goods traffic, too. In Lincoln, the line with a level crossing through city
centre threatens to be down for up to 40 mins an hour, why, because freight
traffic is being diverted off the east Coast Main Line so inter city passengers
can get from Doncaster to London a few minutes quicker. I guess rail is better
environmentally than the cheap airlines the trains are competing with in these
speeding up moves, but do we really need to travel this much for business at
all. We do have videoconferences, email etc. Meanwhile closing village
stations forces more car ownership and helps shut the villages out to the poor.
Probably the wealthy car owners already in their rural seclusion like this though.
As a result of the Lincoln threat, which would wreck local bus timetables and
maybe totally gridlock the city as level crossing is right on a main road at
city centre, by the rail station, there is an expensive plan to bury the
station and adjacent rail line below street level, eliminating the level crossing.
So ultimately this million pound project, which will be billed as either a)
helping local traffic flow or b) improving Lincs rail services, is in fact a
huge subsidy to long distance busines rail users.
Hillary Shaw, School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT
email [log in to unmask]
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