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Our societal status quo isn't exactly working, though? Something is profoundly wrong and if we keep going with the current way of doing things, then we'll end up even worse off. HS2 is just the most obvious example of our inability to get things done. Fair compensation under CPO is necessary to...

Land is not like other assets because it is immovable and you did not create it. That television had to be designed and built for it to exist. Even somewhere like the Netherlands or Singapore where there is significant land reclamation, all that is happening is that land which is below the water...

The statute is the problem, essentially. The government has created a set of rules which makes it particularly hard for the government to actually deliver infrastructure and other public services. The solution to most problems the government faces is to change the rules so that they are less...

Well they improved land values elsewhere by more than they reduced them in Norton Bridge. It's urban areas which benefit the most from long distance rail upgrades but these urban areas are what generate most of the value add in the entire country. Making Manchester and London a bit more valuable...

We're not talking about expropriation here. CPO means you're getting the full market price + reasonable disruption costs of moving etc, so you are made whole. Land ownership rights are critical for people to be comfortable investing in things like building a house or a factory. If people were...

My proposed use of CPO is really just a roundabout way of achieving the same end result of land value taxation. If you tax all land based on its value if cleared of all improvements (i.e. after being bulldozed) then you get to model all of these uplift effects even without redevelopment. This...

Worth remembering that even in Victorian times, heavy rail struggled to compete with tram services. Once the urban area grew and the high frequency tram network expanded along with it, it stopped making sense to wait for an infrequent train. Most of the Edinburgh suburban services were killed...

Yes, indeed, which is why there is a pretty solid case for using land value uplift to fund other public services as well. I'm bringing up railways because they, like other linear infrastructure, provide the clearest demonstration of the point. Education and health are a little bit less obviously...

The politics of CPO here are far less interesting than the politics of public spending when there's no money left. NR is just the state and the state has to "make a profit" to be viable. The state, through NR, making £10m from land development along railway lines is perfectly valid as a strategy...

The value that passenger railways generate is mostly turned into land values. The only way to make a passenger railway profitable is if the railway company can benefit from these increases in land values. Various successful suburban commuter railways worked because the railway company developed...

The alternative is that not-NR is able to buy land and speculate on it instead, waiting for NR to finally do the upgrade. So either the upgrade never happens, or it does but the wider taxpayer has to pay instead while landowners get to benefit despite not having done anything to justify it...

Moderator note - split from: https://www.railforums.co.uk/threads/fife-rail-electrification-decarbonisation.288646/ No, NR should have the power to buy land at current value. It does whatever it wants to make the railway work better, then it gets to sell it on with planning permission for...

No. Because the funds come from the redevelopment. The only successful way to find passenger railways is to (re)develop land for housing. There's no shortage of demand for housing here. For all practical purposes, the railway is the reason why most land in the south east is worth much at all...

Selling off land is all well and good until you need more land again to fix a problem. E.g. for those linespeed improvements, you may want to realign the railway. It happened at Market Harborough but I believe this was only possible because there was a good amount of empty brownfield land in...

Things can be individually wasteful but make economic sense as part of a larger programme. A good example is that the first few hundred or thousand cars for a major car model (think VW Golf) are often consigned to the scrapheap from day one. It's wasteful but not if you're thinking about the...

Well, this is the problem. But it can't be fixed unless we build more housing. And if railway CPO powers are always scoped to be as narrow as possible, then the whole process will end up gummed up. The more land the railway (or any infrastructure/development company) has the power to redevelop...

The rail industry engineers do an excellent job of trying to get upgrades and enhancements done without fundamental impact on lineside neighbours. With Kinghorn tunnel, I think it may be time to consider whether the easiest option is to just CPO the houses above the tunnel and move the residents...

There's a trade-off where the shorter the electrified sections are, the more power draw will be required. If 100% of it is electrified then each train only needs to draw its instantaneous power requirement from the grid via the feeder stations. If only 10% is electrified, then for that 10% of...

There's not much point when extra EMUs around Edinburgh will need to run to Fife. If they did wire all of the way, then they'd probably end up using BEMUs totally under the wires. It's much more useful to keep adding new wired sections further north so that the BEMU fleet can get further, e.g...

This is the problem, unfortunately. Children learn or work out that adults won't allow "bad things" to happen to them, and some children take advantage so that they can do whatever they want. Of course, once they turn 18, that falls away and they then have to learn that "bad things" can indeed...