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Disappointing that HS2 and other transport investment (other than buses!) weren't mentioned in his conference speech yesterday

£11m on "seating, waiting areas and toilets". Are they gold plated?

Well, maybe HS2 could have been part of the solution if built as originally planned but an express line between London and Birmingham isn't going to make much difference. Plus, I suspect resurrecting the original HS2 plan to Manchester and Leeds in the next 20 years is even less likely than a...

It may be private sector driven but they still have to deal with the antiquated UK public planning system. There are lots of jobs supported and money to be made by slowing things down with bureaucracy, consultations, appeals and redesigns.

Airports all over the world are expanding and don't seem to have the same political problems with net zero.

I used to regularly do day trips to Stockholm for work meetings. They were a killer, up before 4am, early flight, meetings all day, dinner with customer, late flight back and home well after midnight. Can't imagine doing it for "fun". A colleague once flew to New York, found out when the plane...

I'm not so sure. Both airlines operate out of Gatwick, they are unlikely to get any more slots at Heathrow and if they do serve different markets then there should be room for both of them at Stansted.

It would be good to see Qatar Airways operating a daily flight from Stansted to give a OneWorld option from the Essex Aerodrome. Emirates seems to do well enough out of STN and there should be sufficient demand from the North London/M11/Cambridge corridor.

While the expansions at Gatwick and Luton (and the terminal expansion at Stansted) are welcome, none of them solve the problems at Heathrow which is lack of capacity for long haul connectivity. There's a chance it gets approved by the 2030s but not a hope of it being built within the next decade.

Or via Dublin or Belfast as long as you don't mind mixing airlines.

It's standard tactics for campaigners against any infrastructure. Even if they don't think they have a chance of winning on legal grounds, their aim is just to drag out the process for so long that the costs keep going up to the point that the government finally changes its mind.

So is that the end of the legal process or could there be yet more objections on other grounds?

Totally agreed. There are a huge number of businesses based in west London, Reading, Slough etc because of the access they have to Heathrow and its global connections. If the airport was moved to Kent or Essex then they wouldn't move with it but relocate to Amsterdam or Frankfurt.

Rail capacity at Heathrow is great if going to west/central London but it is pretty abysmal for anywhere else. I used to live in Surrey and would drive there as there was no good rail connection despite being in a part of the country with the best rail network in the country. The costs of...

Japan is the only country in the world which routinely uses widebodies for domestic flights. Even the US doesn't for coast to coast services. However, they are used high capacity AND high frequency because there is sufficient demand for them. The widebodies aren't replacing several narrow...

Surely you'd want a judge on the case who was a specialist in planning law. This judgement was a step in the right direction but I'm sure the campaigners will be back with more delaying tactics.

One of the reasons is that we are incapable of big projects like HS2, nuclear and airport expansion is that the plans change every time there is a new PM or Transport Secretary. I hope Burnham keeps Heidi Alexander in the job as she does seem to have a decent grasp of the brief and the...

Hard to know what a Burnham government would mean for a third runway as it's something he won't have had to think about until now. It will depend on who he puts into the Treasury and DOT. If Ed Milliband it made Chancellor then it won't be going anywhere.

If the Birmingham to Manchester leg is resurrected (and it should) then the best thing to do would be to totally separate it from the tarnished HS2 brand. Make it part of NPR (not a great brand either!) or something totally new. This tweet from HS2 about the "connectivity network" is frankly...

The Chilterns is a densely populated region is it?