The Anonymous Widower

An Understated Headline

This article on Business Insider is entitled A rail link between Oxford and Cambridge could help create a massive tech hub in the UK.

Could is not the word I’d use!

This page on the Government web site, contains a summary of the report, on which the article is based.

This is the second paragraph of the report.

The Commission’s central finding is that a lack of sufficient and suitable housing presents a fundamental risk to the success of this area. Without a joined-up plan for housing, jobs and infrastructure across the corridor, it will be left behind its international competitors. By providing the foundations for such a strategy, new east-west transport links present a once in a generation opportunity to secure the area’s future success.

As housing is so important to any development, this is crucial. The interim report makes a series of recommendations. This is the first.

• Government should go ahead with East West Rail’s initial phase, a new link cutting journey times by more than half on the route from Oxford to Bedford and Milton Keynes, ensuring it is delivered before 2024; and it should invest in developing as soon as possible detailed plans for both the next phase of East West Rail (which would complete the link to Cambridge) and for a new Oxford-Cambridge Expressway.

So why is the Government farting about?

I blame the following.

• The route via Bedford, contains lots of great-crested newts, in all the disused brick works.
• The name; East West Rail Link, doesn’t have North in it.
• Oxford doesn’t want a railway, that might encourage more visitors who would interfere with academic life.
• The Sir Humphries of this world went to one of two universities; Oxford or Cambridge. They believe the two academic cities shouldn’t be connected and certainly not via Milton Keynes.
• Addenbrooke’s hospital has objected, as it will bring lots of patients from the route to their world-class facilities.
• It doesn’t go near Islington for the Labour Party or Edinburgh for the SNP.
• Democracy

The Chinese would have built it last week or possibly yesterday, as it calls at Bicester Village!

November 19, 2016 - Posted by AnonW | Transport | Cambridge, East-West Rail Link, Oxford, Politics