It is from Sheffield on public transport! Much easier to get to Manchester, and with significantly more flight/destination choice it’s a no brainer!
Well, Covid killed off hourly Stagecoach X6 from the city centre to DSA…
…whilst the Castlefield “reorganisation” has killed off the majority of direct trains to Manchester Airport (Three o’clock in the morning and ten o’clock at night, in theory, assuming TPE can run their Hope Valley trains, which I wouldn’t personally trust if I had a plane to check in for in a few hours time) so only one “easy” interface per hour at Piccadilly (the EMR to Liverpool stops at platform 14 from where it’s easy to board an airport train from platform 13, rather than schlepping from the majority of TPE services in main terminal platforms across to the island ones)…
…so neither feels “much easier” to me (plenty of buses from Sheffield to Doncaster and then a connecting service from the same bus station to the Airport, the bus from Stockport to Manchester Airport used to be half hourly pre Covid but I’ve not gone that way recently so don’t know)
Certainly more flight choice west of the Pennines, I’m not contesting that
Peel managed to get big public support for the road link to the airport, very useful for housing and a business park too
You know the way that some firms have a business model that isn’t what you used to think it was? For example, newspapers really exist nowadays not to sell the news to people but to sell those people to advertisers (hence the need to keep them angry/ engaged/ clicking away on their mice)…
…as per the London Standard/ Metro, you could make more money giving the paper away for nowt but using the increased readership to get more advertisers to stump up than you would by relying on just newsagent revenue to sustain an advert free newspaper.
I formed the opinion many years ago that Peel existed with a simple business plan:
1. Get involved in some failing/ failed project at a “distressed” (i.e. dirt cheap) price
2. Get public sector money to try to sustain it - helps if you can go for a source of local pride where MPs will want to nail their flags to the mast and be seen to enthusiastically back it - so Ports/ Airports are a safe bet - the people of Teesside will like an MP effectively handing a blank cheque to sustain the unsuccessful “Durham Tees Valley” because people want to hear about local investment, they like a guy who sells a future of DTV being bigger than Newcastle/ Leeds/Bradford rather than accepting that, although Darlington punches well above its weight in terms of trains, they live in a huge gap between viable airports and it’s just not feasible to sustain lightly used airports
3. See if that blank cheque is enough to sustain a heavily lots making facility for a couple of years, don’t forget to rattle the tin from time to time to shake an extra couple of quid out of well meaning public sector people who didn’t want their fingerprints on the closure of a much loved (but not much used!) facility
4. Insist that the reason figures haven’t made things profitable is because the council (etc) aren’t helping enough, “if only we had a swanky new dual carriageway road and a new train station to encourage people” - the Sunk Cost Falacy means the MPs/Councillors will feel they have no choice but to continue to back these things, even quashing concerns from the likes of the Environment Agency about the impact of the road because we must save our local facility - maybe they’ll have a petition in the local press encouraging people to show how much they want to back this funding and get it built ASAP regardless of wildlife etc
5. Fail. You tried everything, it’s not your fault, ensure that the press releases show how blameless you are, made you could insinuate that Local Government didn’t do enough to help, but you’ve got to keep them briefly on-side because of the next step (maybe you threaten closure a couple of times to see what emergency funding is forthcoming first though?)
6. Ooh, look, you now own a huge brownfield site with adjacent dual carriageway and train station - it’s not viable as an Airport but you’d make a fortune flogging houses there - people are less likely to complain as it’s already been built on, so not like destroying the green belt. Plus you can point out that the road/rail facilities will be a “White Elephant” without any purpose if there’s nothing for them to serve, how could any elected official refuse your generous offer to “solve” the local housing problems by keeping new builds concentrated on this brownfield site (the fact you after making a fortune from turning a failing Airport etc into land rich for development due to the public investment in facilities is just a coincidence, honest!). Planning permission guaranteed.
7. Rinse And Repeat elsewhere in the country - there’ll always be MPs prepared to put local pride ahead of common sense, there always be councillors happy to massively back an airport even when austerity is forcing them to close vital public services, always another sucker…
In fairness, it’s not just Peel who do this and it’s not just airports that these firms use, look at the crazy sums Holyrood is paying to ensure that a couple of ships get built on the Clyde due to the emotional attachment which Glaswegians have to the old dockyards, or look at the “Port” on Merseyside; I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these small but heavily funded “train building” facilities in places like Newport/ Goole/ Clackmannan are about squeezing lots of public sector money to “back local jobs” (what councillor/ MP will want to be seen to reject this scheme to maintain an assembly line?). Even though the initial order of trains only keeps it open for a couple of years, before you have to lay people off and decide that there’s not enough of a gap in the market to keep it going, unless the State either throw u you some juicy bones or at least some of the land is turned over to housing - the factories are all being built in areas where there’s a lack of economic expansion otherwise and you can presumably use that to manipulate politicians - e.g. the WAG/ Senydd will feel compelled to put any new orders to Newport even if it would be cheaper to go elsewhere and still have money left over to give everyone in Newport a few thousand pounds
So, really, Peel exist to transform (failing) business into prime housing land, that’s the ultimate point of the business - they didn’t expect DSA to succeed - they probably didn’t really want it to succeed - their only regret will be the fact that the ECML wasn’t diverted to stop next door (it’d have meant direct trains to Leeds in about forty five minutes and to London in just over an hour and a half, which would have made it prime real estate)
Let’s just see who Peel (try to) get into bed with next, and whether other regions have been paying attention or maybe these parasites will find another pay day (much like Lyle Langley does in Ogdenville/ North Haverbrook etc, if you know your Monorails…)
