New runway at heathrow

[inbetween]

I agree with you on the final part, but not so much on the first part. For example, loads of tourists use Etihad to get to Dubai and they land an hour's drive away in Abu Dhabi. A journey time of 45 mins from airport to city centre (which is what it would be with HS2) isn't particularly excessive from my own experience, but it would obviously require customers to be educated about this. Plus Birmingham wouldn't be replacing Heathrow, it would just be supplementing it, offering an alternative for those willing to take it and helping to ease the burden on Heathrow.

I keep hearing on TV/radio that the UK urgently needs more airport capacity but this was never about the UK, only London. I just think they're missing a trick here to set the country up for decades into the future. Anyway it's obviously not going to happen no matter how much I bang on about it!

I think the point is though why expand Birmingham at all? It isn't run to capacity, it already has an albeit infrequent but direct rail link to Euston? Why isn't this already happening?

The reason of course is price and demand, no-one is going to pay to fly to Birmingham unless they absolutely had to or if it was cheaper. People fly into Abu Dhabi because it is cheaper than Emirates plain and simple. Given the choice though and with equal pricing, would you fly to Abu Dhabi or Dubai? It would also take a few years to build a new runway, a whole new infrastructure system takes decades and aviation isn't going to stop growing to wait.

The biggest argument in all of this was not for the regions but for Gatwick however Gatwick already has some rail links and still has virtually nowhere near the utilisation Heathrow has. Put it this way, if you have a motorway with a lot of congestion, do you take the cheaper option to build more lanes or do you build a new motorway at great expense in a completely different place and hope people use it? The M6 Toll is a good example of why it won't work, people would rather sit in traffic than pay a fiver to skip it.

 

[stonerblue]

haha, fuck off boris

 

[kevin horlocks wand]

Just another excuse for further investment in London. It's utter bullshit.

Oh we need further airport capacity in the south this has been in discussion for 40 years. In Manchester we have the m6 and m60 for 40 years , what has been the car and population expansion since then. Doubled? Yet we are still left with the same shit roads and shit railway connecting us to other northern cities. Forget hs2 or hs3 the priority now is another fucking runway in london just as they are finishing the cross rail project in London. It's utter bullshit, the over centralisation of this country compared to others is just a joke.