this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
215 points (99.1% liked)

Fuck Cars

9620 readers
669 users here now

A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!

Rules

1. Be CivilYou may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.

2. No hate speechDon't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.

3. Don't harass peopleDon't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.

4. Stay on topicThis community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.

5. No repostsDo not repost content that has already been posted in this community.

Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.

Posting Guidelines

In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:

Recommended communities:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago (2 children)

It's a good move, but we can't start thinking that this will solve the fare cost problem entirely. The UK has a network problem: everyone and everything goes to London at the same time. That means for every full train going into London, there's an empty one leaving the city not long after.

That empty train needs the same resources as the full one, so essentially every fare you pay must cover the cost of two trips. The process of spreading destinations around the country is a lot of work and very expensive: new lines, tax incentives, etc.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

Don't people return home eventually? I mean if they didn't, London would just fill up and eventually burst, and I don't mean over decades but over weeks. Commuters obviously go there in the morning and return at night, where the empty train problem exists in both cases (just reversed direction). But any other visitor I'd assume comes and goes at less precisely scheduled times?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

That won't help, you'll just have empty trains leaving Leeds as well as London. Unless people live and work in the same place this is just a cost of a train network.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Not exactly. A functioning train network means that you get people living in London and working in Brighton, or living in Cambridge and working in Oxford.

Many European cities have healthy patterns like this. For example, there's a lot of shared labour between Amsterdam, Utrecht, Den Haag, and even Rotterdam.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Why on earth would anyone pay London prices for a house and pay commuting costs when they could just live in Brighton?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago
  • Their partner works in London
  • Their kid goes to school in London
  • They travel to the continent often
  • They like urban city life
  • Their art studio / gym / dance classes / choral group is in London
  • Their friends and family are all in London

There are lots of reasons. Additionally, as you diversify the transport network and spread work locations around, housing costs even out across the region.