Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
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.
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And the bias, usually against northern English towns continues. A modest proposal to restore a short stretch of track and build a new station in deprived Skelmersdale (population 40,000) in Lancashire has been rejected.
As the local MP noted "During the 2019 election, the Tories repeatedly used Skelmersdale Rail as an example of how they will be ‘levelling up’ rail transport. Not just locally, but even on their national campaign website! To now completely turn their backs on Skelmersdale residents, is a cruel joke, a betrayal."
https://www.lancs.live/news/lancashi...ected-24434213
https://www.rosiecooper.net/2022/07/...ne-says-rosie/