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Comment by switch007 | Hacker News Reader

It’s hard not to think Londoners are entitled and ungrateful.

No other part of the country has ever had so much spent on mass transit nor will it ever. They have the finest public transport in the entire UK, and always will. I bet you can’t regularly do 1-40 mile journeys at the same speed and cost regularly anywhere else in the UK.

The media recently tried to make out the Elizabeth line was one of the worst services in the UK because it had the highest number of cancellations or something which is ridiculous because if the next train is 5 minutes away it doesn’t matter. Try living up North where hourly trains regularly get cancelled

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I fully appreciate where you're coming from and everything you've said is true. But I feel like your opinion may differ if you lived on the south end of the Northern line and had to commute during summer. Doubly so if you were slightly shorter and had to spend your daily commute with your face in someone else's sweaty armpit...

The truth of many parts of London commuting is it's really quite unpleasant in many ways and so you're trained to really wish to spend as little time doing it as possible. If the heat, noise, air quality and congestion don't bother you there's also the threat of violence. A friend was assaulted (perp got GBH iirc) on the Victoria line and I've seen a fight break out on the escalators of Green Park at 9am...

I'm sufficiently jaded by public transport in London that my preferred means of getting around if I'm on my own is a lime bike. Any journey under 5 miles will probably be faster and considerably more pleasant.

I do get it. While I haven’t commuted, I’ve travelled many, many times around London including rush hour. Have smelled many armpits on the tube and even worn earplugs on the central line. (I have commuted in another European city however)

But London is a victim of its own success. It will always be hot busy and crowded. This is just like almost every other major city in the world - hot, crowded public transport at rush hour. What do you want? Every mode cooled to 17c and seats for everyone?

Nobody is forced to live in London, especially the younger ones with no ties who moved there to climb the ladder.

We really need to distribute the economic activity around the UK by properly investing in other towns and cities

Fair enough I don't really disagree with your overall point. Although there's taking the tube and then there's the Northern line where I've heard people going in the opposite direction to get upstream of the queues to get on...

Hopefully remote working will take some of the pressure off of the city because it really does feel overcrowded. Although personally I probably would still stay near London given it's both where I was born but also having access to international food and Heathrow are quite important as a third culture kid. I've considered moving out to somewhere much leafier but losing access to decent Asian food might be my undoing. That said, I hear Liverpool and Manchester are not bad in that department...

Birmingham is also magnificent for (south) Asian food. Glasgow too!

> We really need to distribute the economic activity around the UK by properly investing in other towns and cities

I think your proposal is correct worldwide; it's not a UK-only problem. Unfortunately, it looks like humanity has not yet invented a successful economic model that doesn't require a cramped megacity (with a huge income inequality within) or stealing from other countries (see tax havens).

Normalisation of work from home can reduce congestion in mega-cities. WFH during COVID has shown this.

> We really need to distribute the economic activity around the UK by properly investing in other towns and cities

Ironically, this would be aided greatly by investing in public transport. Andy Haldane gave a great speech about this at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute in 2019 - the most salient bit is from page 37:

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/speech/201...

Excuse the snip, highlighting PDFs is hard, but here's a key-ish quote:

> ..a measure of the “effective” working population. At peak times, the effective working population of Birmingham is perhaps 50% smaller than its measured population due to poor transport infrastructure. This helps explain why Birmingham punches below its demographic weight

Virtually all UK cities suffer from this. The problem, as ever, is a lack of investment and too many cars.

I'm aware of just how under invested the rest of UK infrastructure is outside of London, but that doesn't make complaints about its services invalid.

With the billions spent on the purple pine you'd reasonable expect a decent quality of service that doesn't involve so many cancellations, delays, and days of complete deadlock. Bet if you look at to comparable European countries this reliability would be a joke to them.

The train being every 5 minutes is only for central London, if you live further out you're only served by at most 1 in 3 trains. Missing one sucks much more, during rush hour you can bet you'll be crammed like sardines if you're not early.

I've only been commuting twice a week for about a year, and there have been several occurrences where I get to the station and all upcoming trains are delayed or cancelled due to some line failure. The alternative route takes about twice as long if I want it to cost the same. You bet your arse TFL won't give you a refund if your regular route is untenable.

London gets more investment, definitely. But even so the outcomes still lag behind what you'd expect from the capital of such a wealthy country.

My experience with German trains has been that they're often delayed and canceled. Lovely smooth tracks though.

If London infrastructure investment isn’t working out why don’t we try spending the money elsewhere, you know, for science.

Agreed, that's my personal plan for my own money.

> No other part of the country has ever had so much spent on mass transit nor will it ever.

This entirely true and very unfortunate. It is great to see Manchester making improvements on that front, for example, and I hope many cities will follow as the current model is absurd. Franchising like in London is not ideal but a marked improvement.

That said, there aren’t many places in the UK where a single train line can affect hundreds of thousands or a million people each week. Up to a point, improving transport around London is the best bang for your quid.

> Try living up North where hourly trains regularly get cancelled.

Yeah, but that’s a reason to improve the situation in the North, not to rejoice when something breaks down in the South. There are massive political issues to overcome for that, but the UK would be a better country overall if the North was taken seriously.

> Up to a point, improving transport around London is the best bang for your quid.

I'm trying to limit snark in my responses to this article, but wow. It turns out if you invest in something continually at the expense of everywhere else it becomes the lynchpin of the system. Good grief.

The major reason people in the north hate hearing about investment in the south is because politically it is very clearly a zero sum game. If the south gets investment, the north doesn't.

For additional perspective, look at the Crossrail projects: hugely expensive with benefits only felt in one part of the country. (No, Londoners paying tax doesn't count)

For the cost of crossrail, or HS2, every city in the UK outside of London could have comprehensive tram networks and massive active travel infrastructure. What stings the most is that if London didn't exist, became independent, or fell into the sea, everyone else would likely benefit very rapidly.

> What stings the most is that if London didn't exist, became independent, or fell into the sea, everyone else would likely benefit very rapidly.

Almost all regions/cities make below-average contributions to the UK economy. That's because London drags the total way up (IIRC Bristol is the only other that's above-average, but barely).

That's obviously driven by a feedback-cycle that encourages investing in London rather than elsewhere. That does not imply that the rest of the UK would "benefit" from losing London; it would be an economic disaster.

The problem is that governments are focused on raising the UK's GDP, but that's the sum of each region's GDP and London's contribution is so large that it's equivalent to just maximising London (to optimise a weighted sum, put all the weight on the largest term). Perhaps a solution is to use metrics that combine regions geometrically (multiplying each region's GDP): that encourages investment in poor areas, since they drag down the result (rather than simply contributing less; and in the extreme case, a contribution of zero would wipe-out everything else).

We could do the same analysis on other partition too, e.g. multiplying each sector's contribution would make things less dependent on finiancial services.

> The major reason people in the north hate hearing about investment in the south is because politically it is very clearly a zero sum game. If the south gets investment, the north doesn't.

Indeed. But that’s politics, not a law of nature. The zero-sum game is completely artificial: the money tree does not exist until you need it and then it does. A sensible revitalisation policy for the North would pay for itself over the long term.

The incentives are really not great from a political point of view and that is very unfortunate. Still, hurting London economically won’t help the rest of the UK in any way.

> They have the finest public transport in the entire UK, [...]

It's all relative. If you compared this with Japan's public transport system, 'fine' would not be a word you'd use to describe the one in London.

Totally but it’s the correct comparison to make. Most people can move to other parts of the UK, not to Japan

But you don’t have to go to Japan to make a comparison, you can, as the GP suggested, look at the rest of the country which has abysmal public transport - not fit for purpose - where at least it mostly works in London.

Before another penny in capital expenditure is spent on TFL, every other city in the country needs a metro and decent bus services.

Leeds remains one of the largest cities in Europe with no tram, trolleybus, or metro system. This having had the offer of such things rescinded multiple times.

Leeds was the specific example I had in mind when writing that comment. A city still entirely dominated by cars.

With awful consequences for its productivity and environment, no less. It is easier to commute to central Leeds from Hebden Bridge, Saltaire, and Mythholmroyd than from actual suburbs of the city itself. Utterly ridiculous.

Did you want to trade the British work environment and culture for its Japanese counterpart too?

Maybe? Japanese companies have a lot more loyalty to their employees.

Newcastle here - yep, you wait for a bus to get to work and it just doesn't arrive. That isn't once in a blue moon thing, it's a regular daily thing to a point where you literally can't rely on public transport to get to work or to school.

British people in general are massively blinkered about trains. There are obviously flaws but if I said that I've seen Germans using british trains as an example of punctuality I'd imagine most people moaning about trains would be confused.

Well, London have over 8m people compared to second on the list, Birminghamn with slightly over 2m.

It's pretty obvious you need to spend a ton on public commuting options to avoid a chaotic hell during morning/evening rush (it's already chaos, but it could be much worse).

That’s an argument for spending elsewhere, not London. London is already busy and crowded.

I’m pretty tired of this belief that it wasn’t investment that made London the economic giant it is - it infects even the DfT and treasury. Invest properly in other cities and they will be equally prosperous.

It didn't infect the treasury, it originated there.

The treasury is a deeply broken institution, and it has always been resistant to losing "turf". In the 1960s Harold Wilson's administration tried to split its functions: the new Department for Economic Affairs would take the long view, and the treasury's job was to take the short view and deal with the markets. From what I recall reading (source needed, it was a long time ago and I forget the book) it was not just ministerial infighting that caused the problem: civil servants in the treasury didn't want to lose out to the DEA either.

It is always helpful to recall that the four great offices of state are, especially at the upper echelons, ancient institutions whose cultures are unlike anything most of us have experienced.

Ungrateful?

Have you seen the DLR?

Fully automated, no hassle.

It's amazing to me that in <current year>, the whole Britian is not clamouring to get rid of Southwest trains that stop because there's leaves on the railway, and the next train is 20minutes away.

I'd rather not gamble being late in front of clients, in London, because leaves fell on some rails.

The Tube gets hotter in the summer than an Aussie beach. 40-50deg in the bowels of the Tube, for a cold and rainy country like the UK is insane.

People pay 3.5 quid for a 2minute journey through London, when you could just walk 10minutes instead.

London work places, set the expectations high, so the Tube should follow. It has nothing to do with the muggles that ride it, and blaming the people is blindness.

Having worked in Kingston and had to endure Southwest trains, their service is still an absolute dream vs most of the rest of the country. Trains are cancelled, but the next service is 20 mins away, not hours, and they're not 1970s road bus bodies stuck on rails like Pacers.

I don't think it's being ungrateful, or at least not something unique to Londoners. People think and act relatively. We will always complain about the biggest issue we face, not matter how trivial it is compared others. Or you could say, we always try to improve no matter how good things are. We shouldn't stop fixing things or improving just because someone has it worse.

To people outside the UK, when an English person speaks about the UK and mentions “the north”, they are not referring to the north of the UK, but instead to the north of England.

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