I wish we could match infrastructure projects like this in the rest of the country.
London is like another planet compared to the rest of the UK.
London is like another planet compared to the rest of the UK.
All other cities of any size need to have town planners that are top quality.
The lack of investment outside of London is quite deliberate
That being said, while it's true that many of the "headlines" come from LN projects (Tideway, Elizabeth Line, this) it seems there have been many recent infra projects across the UK. Example: https://www.eclcivils.co.uk/the-uks-major-infrastructure-pro... and https://infrastructure.planninginspectorate.gov.uk/projects/
(Though the latter map is missing any points in Scotland. Whether that is an issue with data quality or with actual infrastructure planning policies is left as an exercise to the reader)
It's much harder to justify (and pay for) these kind of infrastructure projects in small cities.
That said, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol and Birmingham (I'm sure others that I don't know about) have all done an enormous amount of work in the last 10-20 years to modernise.
Transport is hardest of all, of course, since you don't have the space usually to create greener systems without removing something else like a road and not everyone can simply swap easily. That said, I wish they would take some bold decisions across the UK and, like the Hague, make whole town centres pedestrianised during the day to try and force it a bit.
A more accurate comparison is with the total conurbation size of other cities. For example, Manchester is listed as having a population of about 550000, but the Greater Manchester conurbation (the equivalent of Greater London) has a total population of 2.8 million.
Birmingham is 1.1 million, but the contiguous West Midlands conurbation is about 2.9 million.
The Liverpool to Leeds cross-Pennine urban axis (which is nearly contiguous) has a population of nearly 7 million.
Yes, these are smaller than Greater London, but not by the amount you think.
For any non-UK people who aren't familiar, here's here's a simple map showing pop. density to give you a rough idea what we're dealing with: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Gridded-UK-population-de...
You can clearly see the areas in question - London being the big red/purple blob in the far south-east, and the cities/conurbations marmarama described are to the north and north-west of that. They're not individually on the scale of London, but they're substantial population centres that would see real benefits from this kind of public transport infrastructure investment.
While I appreciate that investment in London needs to happen to solve issues now, the UK should be pivoting more investment to its regional cities that are in more sustainable locations, so that the UK is prepared for when London eventually succumbs to the tides.
That doesn't mean I want to travel 2 hours a day just to use London's infrastructure.
London is a big place. The centre of London is big. Where my train comes into London is not necessarily where what I need to do is.
So there could be another further hour of travel each way to get across London.
Travelling to and from the station on the home end is also a problem. Since public transport is so dire outside of London that takes much longer than it should do and is much more inconvenient.
Where friends of mine get annoyed waiting 5 minutes for a bus in London, you could be waiting over an hour in the rest of the country ...and if you miss it you're in schtuck, because it's the only one that day.
How much daily travel should we have to put up?
Just to be clear, I don't want less in London, I want more/better outside of London.
I understand your vibe though.
Why are people so mistaken about HS2. It doesn't halve the time, but IT INCREASES CAPACITY!
The West Coast Mainline is congested, and so twisty it's like a rollercoaster in places.
... and yet so much of the public (and ... [sigh] the news and various politicians) seem to be laser-focussed on travel time, and loudly question whether a quicker north/south line is really worth it. And they'll often talk about the focus should instead be on improving utilisation of the existing without knowing that these main north/south lines are already very near capacity.
If I was a rail guy in the UK I'd probably lose my mind.
But you've got knowledgeable people patiently giving plain easy-to-digest descriptions on the benefits ... which are ignored entirely by those with a bigger platforms who boil it down to "do we really need the fast trains?"
it was supposed to somehow help the north by cutting journey times.
"The government says that HS2 will free up capacity by taking the long distance trains off existing lines and on to the new high speed line."
That's what they were talking about in 2013 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24159571.
For perspective, it's 3.6 meters larger in diameter than the channel tunnel bore diameter.
the contrast between london and other places in the uk is dire