High Speed Rail and Heathrow: Rat scented.

Plans to build a new network of 200mph railways is one of the least bad things the government can do, all things being equal. However, the plan involves the following:

A high-speed rail hub, with 12 platforms, could be built north of the M4 near Heathrow. A shuttle would carry passengers from the terminals to the hub, which could be linked by a 15-mile tunnel to High Speed One, the Eurostar route from St Pancras.

Now, having connections are good thing, but this mechanism - a shuttle to the hub - is just another example of why Heathrow should be shut down and a new airport in the Thames Estuary built.

It is a lash-up. 

There seems to be some kind of mental block in Heathrow, some twisting of the space-time continuum that prevents public transport from being easily accessible from the terminal buildings. The LAST thing I want to do when I get off a plane is to load all my luggage and my tired body onto a train only to have to unload and then re-load at some hub.

If there is a need for this hub - and I think a hub per se is a good idea - then let the hub be an integral part of the airport, just as the rail system is at, say, Hong Kong, where you can SEE your train when you come out of customs into the meeting area, right across the vast, uncluttered, glass-roofed cathedral hall that is Chep Lap Kok. 

Now, in the case of an airport that will handle 4 or 5 times the traffic of Hong Kong, we need something different, but the very challenge of how to connect 5 terminal buildings to a rail hub connecting London and the West, Wales, Midlands, North, Scotland AND the Continent has potential for architectural beauty and majesty beyond anything seen before.

Heathrow has, for me, a destiny. It should be turned into housing. It has rail and road connections already. It is on the "right" side of London - upwind, just as the Thames Airport is on the right side of London - downwind; London being upwind of its pollution.

What we have here, for something that will be in place for 50+ years, is an intention to nail Heathrow into place. Ministers are fast-tracking it. I bet they are. Next election they will be worthless to BAA and other vested interests, so to earn their envelopes (brown) they need to get busy.

Water Supply Failures: The Monopoly Strikes Again

We see that water, and to a lesser extent, electricity supplies have been hit badly by flooding.

It is understandable that a water treatment works was taken out of service when it was inundated if they are configured as I remember when visiting Beckton Treatment Works many decades ago (and boy, that was a fun, if smelly day out!). Floodwaters tend to end up as very dilute sewage, so allowing that mix to slosh into the water treatment ponds can render them unusable until cleaned up. That decision to close the plant is acceptable.

What is NOT acceptable is how one treatment works out of action means so many houses without ANY piped water. I suspect this fragile state of affairs is replicated across the country.

A major part of this is due to the monopolistic structure of the water supply industry. We have privatisation, but we are subject to geographic monopolies, which are against our best interests.

I have posted before that monopolies are a bad thing, but sometimes necessary or pragmatic in certain limited areas. The area where it is pragmatic is in the DELIVERY of water. It is NOT pragmatic in the treatment and SUPPLY of fresh water. Had our water system only retained a geographic monopoly in delivery infrastructure and not treatment and supply, people would still have their water as the delivery infrastructure would be so arranged to enable a plurality of sources to feed any given area - a "National Water Grid", as it were. Such an arrangement would be in place to enable price and quality competition to occur. It would also be possible to equalise supplies in times of drought. When a treatment works is knocked out for whatever reason, it would then not result in what looks to be WEEKS without water, though possibly a time of lower pressure.

Electricity substations are far harder as they are, in effect, part of the distribution network, stepping down voltage as it gets closer to habitation. However, I suspect they are far easier to defend due to their smaller footprint.