Commuter-Rail and Inner-city decline

[cle]

I once got in trouble for telling said person to eff off (with a c-word topping) so go easy people, the mods are fickle sometimes, especially if they have a shared personal interest in the troll's city of choice.

I would just go for ignore...

[makita09]

Done.

[Romania1]

Originally Posted by cle

I once got in trouble for telling said person to eff off (with a c-word topping) so go easy people, the mods are fickle sometimes, especially if they have a shared personal interest in the troll's city of choice.

I would just go for ignore...

I know what you mean. But I never tell posters to eff off, although many should.

[Harry]

If the mods are unable to deal with blatant trolling like this that detracts from the forum they run, then they need to ask themselves why they undertook the task in the first place.

I'm not a regular poster here by any means, although I have been coming back on & off for years. To be honest, I think I'll just take another holiday from this section for a while...at least until the problem goes away again. I have more important things to do than read the inane ramblings of a serial troll - who could clearly do with a little help. The repeated insults and condescension are a clear indicator of self-esteem issues - which I hope he manages to deal with before he gets much older.

[Romania1]

Originally Posted by Harry

If the mods are unable to deal with blatant trolling like this that detracts from the forum they run,

Harry, I know what you mean. Some destroy threads with personal insults as well.

[mr_jrt]

Originally Posted by stimarco

Just a poke and a prod through the "User Control Panel" stuff. Found the "Ignore List" feature. Problem solved.

Good idea. Done!

[Gareth]

Originally Posted by cle

I once got in trouble for telling said person to eff off (with a c-word topping) so go easy people, the mods are fickle sometimes, especially if they have a shared personal interest in the troll's city of choice.

I would just go for ignore...

To be fair, we have no Liverpool mod and even so, Mad John doesn't exactly do the city any favours on here.

[Joseph_Locke]

Originally Posted by mr_jrt

Good idea. Done!

Me too. Peaceful, isn't it?

[london lad]

Originally Posted by Romania1

You now need to read Post No. 1

For god sakes man pay attention. Are you some kind of mad crazy fool.

POST511 is the new Post 1. Harrison said so.

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpo...&postcount=511

Now if your not going to bring anything interesting to the conversation then get back to the medication.

[Romania1]

Post 511 is 510 way below Post No. 1. Pay attention learn to add up.

Boiled beef and carrots
Boiled beef and carrots
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[london lad]

Originally Posted by Romania1

Post 511 is 510 way below Post No. 1. Pay attention learn to add up.

Boiled beef and carrots
Boiled beef and carrots
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Your not getting it read post 511 and don't come back until you take it all in. Granted its not by Harrison but you have to learn to widen your horizons.

Only fools and mentally disturbed individuals follow Post No.1 these days.

[Romania1]

Boiled beef and carrots
Boiled beef and carrots
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[london lad]

Originally Posted by Romania1

Post 511 is 510 way below Post No. 1. Pay attention learn to add up.

Boiled beef and carrots
Boiled beef and carrots
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Originally Posted by Romania1

Boiled beef and carrots
Boiled beef and carrots
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Your not quite right are you poor chap.I can only guess you read post 511 and realised the world doesn't revolve around Post No.1 and it blew your tiny mind.

Constantly jabbering the same old nonsenses means you have run out of medication dear chap.

Next you will be telling us the grand around the world cruise circuit will be stopping at Salford.

BTW what are your thoughts on a light rail circuit around Aintree?

Best have a long lie down in a darkened room

[Romania1]

Originally Posted by london lad

BTW what are your thoughts on a light rail circuit around Aintree?

Not much as heavy-rail rapid-transit is already there.

Boiled beef and carrots
Boiled beef and carrots
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[Ashtonian]

Originally Posted by Romania1

Trains Create Economic Growth and are Viable

It is generally accepted that railways create economic growth and that they are viable. The problem is that many railways used accounting systems based on ticket prices, which made them "unviable". They were viable as the economic growth they created soaked into the land emerging as land values. This wealth was not captured to feed back to fund the rail networks. Hence many realistically viable railways closed down due to a flawed accounting system, taking only ticket sales as the metric for viability.

In the USA the motor corporations bought viable rail networks and closed them down to sell motor vehicles. The LA tram system bought by GM is the glaring despicable example - the Keystone Cops were filmed on it a lot. In the UK, the road transport lobby was influential in the Tory party who in a few short years closed down 1/3 of the UKs railways in the early 1960s. Since then little was modernized - modernization has been far to slow. Electrification has not made a great impact in the total rail network. The oldest inter-city railway line in the world, the 1830 Liverpool-Manchester line, is just being electrified, which will be 185 years after opening. Every study since the 1960s closures condemned it, with all stating full modernization.

Trains in the UK are increasing in passenger usage and the system is now bursting, requiring more rail lines, stations and trains. There is (was until Cameron stopped rail investment) a scheme to open up closed lines, to great success.

The example of the London Underground Jubilee Line extension - £3.4 billion to build and the land values around it rose by £14 billion. Before Crossrail in London is open land values around the under construction line rose. Did land values elsewhere drop as a result of the lines? No.

Commuter-Rail

Rapid-transit Commuter Rail, with its radial lines from the city centre, enabled people from the outer suburbs, and surrounding small towns, of cities to access the jobs in the city centre. In the specific case of Liverpool, this contributed to the decline of the inner-cities, as people moved to greener, and cleaner, places to live.

In the case of commuter-rail, and large through roads, as opposed to a meshed metro, it was not a good thing as commuter rail contributed to inner-city blight.

The authorities that allowed the construction were naive at the time. OK, the outer reaches of cities were supposed to be drawn into the city. I doubt they were expecting the city to be drawn out. In Liverpool's case The electrification of commuter-rail lines in the early 1900s drew people away from the inner-cities. The new electric trains were very fast and clean. At the same time large boulevards were built radiating out from the city and a comprehensive tram system was built with trams in the central reservation - John Lennon lived on one of the boulevards. Trams could get people out of the centre pretty fast as well, but not as far, or as fast, as commuter-rail. The clean running, electric, comprehensive tram network closed down in 1957 for some inexplicable reason. The opening of the under-river Mersey road tunnel in the early 1930s, added again to the decline of the inner-city districts as the middle classes moved out, with the poor working class remaining.

The Liverpool inner-cities were a mixture of working and middles classes. Whole areas of near 200 year old Georgian houses were demolished. OK, some working class houses needed bulldozing for sure, but the people who lived in the inner-cities were disenfranchised. The Georgian houses still are being demolished singularly, as absent landowners allow them to rot. Seeing the success in the USA, the city was denied to implement Land Valuation Taxation.

Rail overall creates economic growth but sometimes shifts wealth from one area to another. Thought out properly, rail does overall create economic growth with no negative effect on any district. Implemented incorrectly rail can have a negative affect on a community. That was the case with Liverpool and many north American cities as well:

1. The outer parts prospered while the inner-cities slumped.
2. Visitors see the now ugly inner-city districts easily as they circle the city centre.
3. The city then gets a negative image from outsiders,
4. The city image suffers
5. Overall Investment tails off
6. The city declines

That is all too famiiar.

In hindsight a fully meshed interconnected metro network, rather than radial tracked commuter-rail from the centre outwards, would not have resulted in the extensive inner-city decline. A meshed rapid-transit urban rail metro would have knitted the community together rather than being divisive.

The rails weren't initially built to serve the city or its residents. They were built to shovel money into the pockets of land in suburbia and green fielsd, raising the value exponetially as the tracks ran through the land.

The commuter-rail was also meant to get people to work in the centre to make money for companies. The commuter-rail is a tool of the commercial sector, not a mechansism to improve the lives of the population. The railway magnets built the lines in the 1800s and no doubt made killings on increased land values. If people use the commuter-rail for other uses then that is their bonus as far as the railway builders or owers are concerned - the lines are radial in a star formation. A meshed metro network enables people to seamlessly travel from district to district, like the superb Paris Metro - it serves all the people, and business, all over the city with most of the metro being underground. People use it like they would use a bus it is so convenient.

Liverpool's commuter-rail lines were built in the 1800s. They were electrified in the early 1900s. In the 1970s they were networked together being joined in the city centre. Yet, as late as the 1970s when new tunnels were being bored under Liverpool's city centre, there was no move to create a metro network extending to the inner-city districts. The inner-city districts continued to decline to total collapse, soon after the networking of the commuter-rail lines. The merging of the commuter rail lines made difference to the lives of the inner-city inhabitants.

Liverpool can have a Full Metro revitilising the Inner-Cities

Ironically, the Liverpool region has countless disused, mothballed, trackbed and tunnels, some of the oldest tunnels in the world are under the city, the 1929 Wapping tunnel was the first bored under a metropolis - about 4 to 5 miles of tunnel with disused underground stations, while the city slowly gets clogged with cars and large pieces of the city cut away to accommodate ugly soul destroying roads.

Recommissioning these tracks and tunnels would convert the commuter-rail into a economic growth meshed, gridlike, metro network. Central government would not put up the cash to do it. Economist Fred Harrison mentions this point mentioning Liverpool, in Ricardo's Law, that billions are poured into London's rail infrastructure while a fraction of that would benefit greatly Liverpool expanding its urban rail network. Liverpool could probably pay for its own rail expansion/metro creation by using Land Valuation Taxation, and Liverpool's taxpayers alleviated from the cost of building CrossRail in London.

Fred Harrison explained the financial negative affect of rail, and it went something like this....

Railways create economic growth. This crystallizes into land values. If this was recycled back into funding the nations rail infrastructure everyone would share in the net gains. But it is not. The current laws dictates that this surplus income from land values is delivered as windfall gains to the landowners.

Thus the transport sector is transformed into a sophisticated mechanism for redistribution of income away from low-income taxpayers who fund infrastructure, to asset rich people.

This is how the trick is perform in relation to railways:

1. Government tax on people's wages, their effort - and sales, what they buy
2. Subsidies given to railways using community taxes
3. Strategically located land rise in value because of the railway
4. Windfall gains pocketed by landowners
5. Shortfall in funds to renew rail infrastructure
6. Government raises rates of Taxes on Wages and Sales.
7. Go to No. 1 above and the cycle starts all over again.

The Enterprise Economy Implodes.

What was meant to be a benefit to the community acts against large sections of them.

I know nothing about your history or identities, but what you have written seems very interesting.

Just from a pure mass transit point of view a meshed metro is the better option. Have you any diagrams of what would make a plausible meshed metro for the Liverpool area?

[Romania1]

Originally Posted by Ashtonian

I know nothing about your history or identities, but what you have written seems very interesting.

Just from a pure mass transit point of view a meshed metro is the better option. Have you any diagrams of what would make a plausible meshed metro for the Liverpool area?

Below: Merseyrail now. Showing the radial lines. The lines runs through predominatly middle class districts, indicative of the economic growth created along the lines.


Below: How it can be using disused rail infrastructure - disused stations are circled. Not all lines are shown on the map:


Read below. It shows how a city centre circle line can be constructed cheaply running through Inner-city districts.
http://tinyurl.com/mllyjr

Below: This shows a city centre Circle Line running through the inner-cities using existing lines, disused tunnels and some cheap cut and cover tunnel across a park. A number of vital new stations can be built along it. These districts would be regenerated naturally giving them back their dignity, and stop the constant flow of public money poured into them, just to keep them fed and housed.

[somersetchris]

[Romania1]

This poor wretch is from Somerset you know.

[Salif]

Romania1 - any chance of that 'dream' map being split into segregated lines showing the different services which would run?

Also what are the chances of a new link being constructed between the Lime Street approaches into the underground network?

And couldn't JLA be accessed with a loop line allowing through running services and greatly expanding the range of potential links to the airport?

Final question, where would the former overhead railway fit into all this, if at all?

[ill tonkso]

Originally Posted by Salif

Romania1 - any chance of that 'dream' map being split into segregated lines showing the different services which would run?

Also what are the chances of a new link being constructed between the Lime Street approaches into the underground network?

And couldn't JLA be accessed with a loop line allowing through running services and greatly expanding the range of potential links to the airport?

Final question, where would the former overhead railway fit into all this, if at all?

Not sure how sarcastic this post is but a direct link to the airport is a logical thing to do, like Manchesters spur.