Passenger rail is for adventurers and bums

Ken Brown k.brown at ccs.bbk.ac.uk
Mon Feb 3 12:33:05 PST 2003


Steve Mynott wrote:

> In the UK at least railway stations tend to have been built in the ugly
> parts of towns for good reason -- simply because land is a lot cheaper in
> the low rent parts of town.
> 
> Also railways stations and the associated cheap hotels with a large
> transient population tend to attract undesirables such as drug dealers,
> muggers and hookers and the sort of thing which pushs the value of your
> house down and nice middle class people don't want on their doorstep.
> 
> The people in richer areas tend to have more political clout and more
> effectively oppose development of this sort.

Actually, in most places in UK, the railways precede the development of
the town. So the industry & cheap areas follow rail, rather than vice
versa.  

What you say is often true about new road building though. Everyone
wants big roads a couple of miles away - no-one wants them on their
doorstep. That's how Labour took over London in the 1970s - the old Tory
GLC committed political suicide by road-building.  Roads do not make
votes.

Of course, what /should/ happen is that the people who need the roads
pay the people whose towns they go through...





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