Quote:
Originally Posted by Rillington
The question for London's transport network now is whether Crossrail 2 will happen.
---------- Post added at 15:42 ---------- Previous post was at 15:38 ----------
There have always been ideas for Manchester to have some sort of underground network - Picc-Vic was the closest to actually happening which would have provided on underground link between the city's two main railway stations and would have had several stations between the two. For the most part this has now been catered for by the tram network but the notion of some sort of city centre underground network in Manchester has never fully gone away.
|
That’s not really an equivalent idea to the London Underground, or TfL as a whole. London is one of the principal cities of the world. There are few places anywhere that compare and none of them are in the UK.*
“Levelling up” in this context has to mean availability of high-speed transit between Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, so the three of them together can begin to benefit from the same sort of complex connections London has.
* That’s not a homage to the place by the way - simply an observation of its size and complexity in relation to other British cities. And its status as the capital didn’t even make this state of affairs inevitable. It is decades of myopic government investment strategy that kept throwing money into a feedback loop in which the infrastructure projects most likely to boost the economy attracted more and more cash at the expense of everywhere else. That, ultimately, is how we have come to spend an utterly absurd amount of money on Crossrail while claiming it’s too costly to develop rapid transit in the north of England.