HS2/expanding airports?

Unfortunately both these projects run/are very close to where I live and are going to mean huge disruption/upheaval for a whole lot of ordinary people who just want to get on with their lives in peace but I fear its not to be.

I confess heaving a big sigh of relief when the short list was published. Two of the rejected plans involved building an entirely new international airport, to replace Heathrow on our village and adjacent land. One plan envisaged demolishing both our village of around 600 properties and about 40 listed buildings, one Scheduled monument and an adjacent village of a similar size and mix. The other left the village 100yards from the end of one of the two main runways. The perimeter fence would have a little inward curve so that the village was just outside it.

Then there would have been all the extra land needed for all the businesses that always surround airports and housing for the 85,000 people who would work there. We have one of the lowest unemployment rates in England, with less than 5,000 people employed in a 20 mile radius around the site. Where these people would come from or where they would live was never discussed. Most of the available land is flood plain, Green Belt or an AONB(Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty).

It's all close to me too.
What puzzles me is if they build the airport at Grain and the new Thames crossing in the same vicinity, hows it all going to fit in. That's without adding HS2 to the mix.

I understand how people feel but Heathrow is an accident waiting to happen. The frequent "near misses" are, in reality, near hits and I'm sure everyone recalls that phenomenal pilot who coaxed his plane to just over the perimeter fence for an emergency landing to avoid crashing on the main road and surrounding buildings. When Heathrow was built most of the surrounding area was farmland – indeed, lots of it still was when I was a child – but today it is a jam-packed, massively busy urban area. A plane crashing into it doesn't bear thinking about.

And here we are in North Yorkshire with Durham Tees Valley airport with hardly a passenger in sight. Ruanair ( meant to write Ryanair but perhaps my first spelling is better ) and Thomsons have both pulled out and now we can only fly to Aberdeen and Amsterdam I think.
It just doesn't make any sense to put everything around London but then what can we expect when most politicians don't realise that there is life north of Watford Gap.
Expanding regional airports would make much more sense.

Same goes for HS2 - make what we have got better as no doubt if all that money is spent on HS2 there won't be anything left for the rest of us.

What absent says.

Plus, Heathrow is INCREDIBLY busy! It won't be able to cope with the volume of air traffic it gets for much longer.

Sympathies, however, for people living near new proposals.

Another runway at Heathrow won't alleviate the crowded skies for long - it will just attract additional flights; what then, a further runway?

New airport is obviously a batty idea that Boris is plugging (west London votes up for grabs anyone?). It would cost far too much.
Maybe London just does not have the room to become more of a hub than it is. Land prices and the built up nature of the region are against it.

HS2 - if we need a new railway - why does it have to be HS. Travelling on a decent ordinary speed railway I can get from Bangor in the north west of Wales to London in 3 hours. The railway was planned and built over 150 years ago. The only real change is faster, electrified trains. They whizz past the traffic on the M1 as if it was hardly moving (on a good day, I'm talking)
If it was electrified between Bangor and Chester it would be even faster.
We are a small country and unlike France and Spain, where the distances are much greater, we don't need fancy HS railways to get around at a reasonable lick.
It's all about Osborne wanting to say he "improving the economy by putting billions into infrastructure projects". But not actually spending any during his term of office - except of course on hundreds of civil servants working on the longest bill ever to go before parliament.
If he invested in shared ownership housing it would be much better for the economy and would have an almost immediate effect.

It amazes me when residents near airports complain about aircraft noise. The airports were there a very long time before they, in the vast majority, moved there and fifty years ago aircraft were a lot noisier. I used to live between two runways and still live under a flight path. If you buy a house near an airport you get noise. If you buy a house near a main road you get noise.
If we must have a new airport do what other crowded countries do, such as Japan and Hong Kong build offshore and put in the road and rail connections but please stop the quick fix short term solutions that puts a blight on homes already built.

Tiggypiro, another vote for the north. I'm in the north west, we use Manchester, Liverpool and Leeds/Bradford and having been through Heathrow only 5 times, I'd avoid it like the plague. Dreadful place, overcrowded, and the most rude staff I ever met.
I saw in the paper this morning that we have many new millionaires, based on the fact property in the London area continues to soar in price. Here in the north, midlands and Wales, it continues to drop. We desperately need employment and improvements to our transport networks. I don't pretend to be environmentally knowledgeable but I simply can't understand why pouring millions into a faster rail link to London improves life for the vast majority. We need better rail links in the north west. Our commuter trains are always packed, and getting about the region on public transport far from an enjoyable experience. Our roads are largely traffic jams at peak times.

I agree that with Skype and the way in which that type of communication is improving at such a speed, we should be minimising travel, and maximising conference calls where possible. Improving the rail network throughout the country sounds a much better use of our hard earned tax money that the proposed rail link. If we need more airports, and from what I read yesterday, it sounds as though we do - then why not expand one of the northern airports. I don't like to think of churning up the countryside either, but I am so irritated by everything being london centric.

I know of at least one big company, that owns a "household name" in which the managers seem to like nothing better than to drive huge amounts of business mileage to endless, lengthy, meetings. Productivity of the country would improve more if they stopped this nonsense and got to grips with the conference call. You don't need video conferencing if you know everyone. And if there are too many people for an audio conference, then you probably shouldn't be having a "meeting" at all.

This is precisely my original point - a lot of the trips (by whatever transport) by business people are basically "jollies" and perks of the job. New technology has overtaken this and we should not be investing in old technology. There needs to be a change of culture that says that unnecessary travel is as unacceptable as smoking in public places is now. The attitude that reinforces the idea that you become more important and have higher status if you are sent off to New York on behalf of your company has to change to one where you get a pat on the back for being an expert on the new technologies that avoid this. I think that history will judge us as quite mad in this score.

I would go further and say that we need to be less selfish and hedonistic in our thinking about our "right" to travel where we want when we want - maybe the planet cannot afford for us to do that.

I fully understand and appreciate the views of those in the north, who would like a big airport there, but all the research and analysis has shown that London, particularly London, and the south east generate most of the international air passenger traffic and that there are a significant number of transfer passengers, who will go elsewhere (Netherlands, France, Germany) if they have to travel between airports for their transfer. This is why expansion at Heathrow has, over the years, been consistently preferred to expansion even at Gatwick and Stanstead.

I am not saying I like the decision, but the only solution to the problem is the one that Howard Davies has recommended as have others over the last 20 years or more. My personal preference is for the Isle of Grain. It has the land, the situation and is in an area of high unemployment desperately in need of regeneration, but it is a very expensive solution and may not work.

In a country the size of Britain and with its high population the optimal solution for internal travel of any distance is a really good comprehensive railway system. Far better than very short haul air routes.

I might add that my house lies 100 yards from the main London-Bristol line and, even though we do not have double glazing we barely notice the trains. there is neither visual or noise pollution. I prefer the trains to the constant hum of the major dual carriageway the other end of the village.

What really aggravates me about all this is the way that party politics pushes it's way into any big decisions such as these. Nothing will now be decided until after the next election as the 'parties' don't want their chances affected by any decisions made now.

I feel very sorry for those who live near and will be seriously affected by all of this. Delaying decisions causes more strife than is necessary but ofcourse the polititians are not the least bit concerned for those affected otherwise they would define the routes and planning quickly to alleviate some peolple worrying unnecessarily. The vagueness of it all doesn't help.

You can't send freight by skype.

It's the passengers they are banging on about absent - they don't want to have to change between airports e.g. heathrow and gatwick.
I know freight hubs can exist - Shannon worked as one (not sure status now) because Irish tax laws made it tempting to fly your freight from say France to Ireland and then on to the States. But it is a rather different market isn't it?

Neverthless, Heathrow handles a huge amount of freight. It even has a vast area called the freight village. I worked there once in my summer vacation from university and completely messed up the filing system.

no doubt, but not sure this is the reason for the pressing need for hub? I don't know if it figures.

I am with tiggypiro and Iam64 on this one. As a Northerner we are quite used to being classed as "the poor relations" compared to the South but I am now beginning to think it has gone too far. The new rail link (costing billions) is a pure waste of money when what we should be doing is improving what we already have. I could die laughing at the introduction to the HS2 website Building a connected Britain when infact it should read Building a connected South of England Will it really mean so much to knock half an hour off a journey? Will contracts be signed or lost on that basis? "Oh dear I am so sorry I couldn't possibly place that £10 million pound order with you as it will take me 84 minutes to come and sign the papers, however if you had a high speed rail link and I could get there in 49 or 50 minutes it would be a different matter". So it will reduce the journey time between Birmingham and London, big deal.

On the subject of the extra runway etc. I can only see that once again any money or investment available is being concentrated on the South of England. Surely what should be done is to encourage businesses to move out of London into the surrounding areas and heaven forbid, dare I even say up North. This would then help to even out the housing demand and the house prices and spread the wealth around the country a little fairer.

Governments have been trying to get businesses to move out of London and the south east for at least 60 years. In the 1960s I can remember Harold Wilson and Tony Benn giving big companies, especially car manufacturers huge subsidies to build plants in the north west and Scotland, but as soon as the market gets tight, the first thing the companies did was shut down their Scottish and north western plants. It had cost them so little to build because of the subsidies, so it cost them little to discard them. Actually, I went to university in Newcastle, when it was still part of Durham University and I can remember Lord Hailsham coming up to Tyneside in the early 60s to try and invigorate the economy and encourage industrialists and business men to move north He was not successful.

I thought if we saw house prices in the south east and London rocket, relatively to the rest of the country, difficulties getting staff when housing was expensive would force companies to move out, but it hasn't. All that has happened is that the businesses have employed migrants, who can be paid little, and who are prepared to live in slum conditions.

I would love to see businesses moving out of the south east, I live there and it getting more and more built up and unpleasant. But nothing any government has done over 60 years has got business men and industry to move north and I doubt it ever will.

The only way for the northern regions to get going again is to do what they did in the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, build your own businesses, pull yourself up by your own boot straps. Make yourselves a thriving economy again, make the north a land of opportunity and then the balance will shift.

Sounds great in theory FlicketyB but in reality not possible.

How can we possibly "pull ourselves up by the bootstraps" when successive governments continue to waste money on rail links and runways/airports to further benefit the South whilst up here in the North we are apparently not even worth the investment of dualling the A1 North ?

Not only will the new HS2 not Build a connected Britain it will succeed in *Creating a more divided Britain".

I think it's quite reasonable of passengers not to want to change airports in the middle of a journey. Does one have to do that at other places? (I know the answer is sometimes yes at New York, but the airports aren't so far apart there i think).

My son sometimes flies back from NZ via Amsterdam. It is cheaper than a direct flight to the UK. His choice. Nobody has to transit via a particular country. If you want to land at Heathrow and get then the cheapest flight to Scotland you might have to get on a coach to Luton etc etc
If you are in the US and you want to get to, say, Turkey, you have a vast range of options. This is all about getting more people to choose London as a place to go through, paying airport taxes and buying a latte or two as they go.
Have we got to compete? Does London actually have the land or the money to compete? Would the money be better spent on improving commuter services to places like Leeds?