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This is why the powers all need to be combined, the Mayor should have the ability to densify areas (in most cases massively enriching the current land owners), put in public transport and be able to capture revenues proportional to the value these things create. The example often given is that...

Here is what you are missing, the point of the metro is not to optimise the long distance journeys it is to massively interconnect the country whilst also providing adequate long distance connectivity. This is the anticipated passenger flows on one line of the "Super Metro" network based on a...

You are a very combative poster to be hanging out in speculative discussions. The longest tube line is the central line which takes 1 hour 35min to go end to end, in that time period our super BEMU could have gone from London to Newcastle. They could get off the train at York, have a piss, a...

Super BEMU would need a little more modifications than just the battery packs as it is also meant to have a higher speed, much higher power and superior aerodynamics. But all those things mostly lie in the category of "tuner" modifications rather than a new vehicle. Unless there is some sort of...

Agree, industries tend to go through stages or vertical and then horizontal integration. Horizontal integration is best for reducing costs in a mature industry vertical integration is where you go when you need to change things. Tesla and it's Chinese clones are vertical integrators, the...

Since we have “car brain” I think we need to have “rail brain”. Having the cars operating autonomously has been feasible since before opening, that they aren't autonomous is mostly an issue of local laws and Tesla solving for a more general environment and not wanting to use "crutches" to get...

I think you will find Musk hates consultants with a passion, fires the consultant, fires the person who hired them! As for the Vegas loop, proposed in 2019, tunnelling began in 2019, first tunnel opened in 2021 (conceived and built within the commissioning period for Cross Rail). 2023...

Ok, so we could go London, Luton, Milton Keynes, Northampton, Leicester, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds - total distance about 300km. We use the super performance BEMU trains that accelerate at tube train rates (1.3ms-2) to very high speed, 400m long train deploys ~70MW to do so (crazy for...

As I regularly point out due to the automotive industry (essentially the world largest industry) adopting electrification I can now buy a car that will beat a Mclaren F1 0-60 for £10k used. This will be having an effect on train design sooner or later, probably later due to procurement models...

Could do worse than to adopt some of the ideas in here: https://www.labourtogether.uk/all-reports/build-rail-save-snails Basically suggesting that we need to do consultations as problem solving exercises rather than as either defence against or collection of evidence and arguments for a...

This was something considered on the YIMBY podcast this week, in most non Anglophone countries the government decides that something is going to happen. Then in that context consultation takes place in a more problem solving basis where developers can be more up front about negative consequences...

See above, even in Japan (where basically everyone lives in a city) or for that matter London most passenger miles are done by cars, it's only really the centres of very large cities where cars are not the dominant mode. All great points about negative externalities (though most of them are...

I was talking about share of passenger km in a country, there is no rich country where the cars share of passenger km is below 50%. The closest is Japan where 59% of passenger km are by car. This is Japan where they have the worlds most comprehensive rail transport infrastructure, the worlds...

People like to trot this out by stating that tax is not hypothecated. The tax paid by cars vastly exceeds the capital and maintenance budgets for road infrastructure. The second response to that is to then trot out an inflated estimate of road traffic externalities, without accounting for the...

I don't think that argument from the trade unions passes the first principles check: The average fully amortised cost of running a car in the UK is 49p/mile, very few un subsidised public transport costs are cheaper than that. There is always the option of buying a cheaper, older or more...

The most basic point around aircraft is that to fly effectively they need to be highly optimised. The 737 had a far greater amount of money invested in its design and development than any individual train design. This design was done by Boeing who had just come out of building all of the USAFs...

See previous point on LCOE of gas plants, at today's gas prices a CCGT plant would deliver electricity at less cost than all the offshore wind contracts bar the AR4 2021 costs. Those wind turbines were priced cheap because there was a low oil price due to COVID and most of the inputs to a wind...

As a nuclear engineer who has been working on RR SMR for 10 years I have more faith in the published cost figures. A lot of the work is being done by the RAB funding model. It knocks around 1/3 off the cost of HPC vs SZB. If you actually do it properly there is no particular reason why you...

Dieter Helm is pretty credible and you can't say he's anti renewables (he literally wrote a book on the end of fossil fuels). The argument that the price of electricity is due to the price of gas is not really true, the nominal wholesale price of generation at any given point in time is mostly...

In case 1: then it’s highly unlikely that they would pick your house that is not being advertised and is overpriced. One of the statutory reasons for not selling would be lack of comparable homes for sale, if those homes exist then this desperate buyer would buy one of them in preference to...