This smells a lot like using correlation to hypothesize causation. You could tell a different story about richer cities being able to afford better public transport.
Subjectively, most UK cities feel less dense than many continental cities, with less apartment living and more urban streets with two story terraced houses. Could tell a similar story about that.
UK laissez-faire local government combined with tribal politics making the ruling party incentivized to starve those local governments of funding - especially transfer funding when Tories are in power and Tory local government is usually restricted to rich areas not needing transfer funding - more material for storytelling.
IMO the UK political culture is toxic, education is particularly poor. Everything is centered on London and yet all the elite live outside in the green belt, while crime driven by inequality is rising and police numbers are continually cut, and legal aid is also being cut, leading to mistrials and slow cases due to self representation, and free movement is attacked by all sides.
I'm looking for the exit. This place is sick. The next domino will be something even more extreme, and it's chance whether it's left or right extremism.
I think you’re making the UK to sound a lot worse than it is. The crime rate is still relatively low and on par with most Western European countries. And I don’t see how education is poor the UK has some of the best universities in the world, and decent schools. In fact the number of people with degrees has been slowly rising.
The UK is a great place to live and work, don’t let this comment tell you otherwise. Everyone on the internet seems to catrophise things
Yet in 8 years of mythical "austerity" the Tories have managed to gut every service to breaking point. Education is so broken that tertiary education has become an exercise in marketing and delivering least for the £9k a year. Schools are so starved of funding that 80% report being in crisis, as do Police, NHS, libraries, well everything really.
Local government funding is more centrally funded that at any point in UK history, and the last 8 years have brought an insane skewing of an already heavy skew in favour of London and the South East. The North-South divide is 2:1 for pounds spend by government now.
8 years to destroy every achievement of inclusion and protection since the war. 8 years to put a third of UK children into poverty and a welfare system actively designed to get people to choose to give up. The bastards even knew that whilst rolling it out.
I'm also looking to leave. I really, really don't want my retirement here any more as we abolish everything that was once worthwhile about the country and rush to public services that work as well as the US (ie not at all).
The UK has become, surprisingly quickly, a terrible place to live and work, with widespread poverty and low wages, and a job market devoted to zero hours contracts for all.
> he UK has become, surprisingly quickly, a terrible place to live and work, with widespread poverty and low wages, and a job market devoted to zero hours contracts for all.
I wouldn't say 2.8 % [1] of UK works on zero hour contracts mean the job market is 'devoted' to zero hour contracts. Just because it is in the news a lot doesn't mean it happens all the time.
Honestly your post makes it seems like the UK is this corrupt, broke country when it couldn't be further from the truth.
All I see is posts against the tories online but every election they've been the majority.
> makes it seems like the UK is this corrupt, broke country when it couldn't be further from the truth.
If so, how is it that we no longer fund $service adequately any more (where $service is any and all of them)? How is that possible after so much has been privatised leaving so many fewer to fund publicly? Why can't we afford enough police?
Why can't we afford adequate library provision? Interesting that parliament keeps their public library though, isn't it?
How is it that in a time of highest levels of employment food banks have grown from barely existing to being everywhere? Could it be that policy has resulted in deliberately inadequate welfare provision? How, in a time of such extensive employment, are wage rises barely noticeable?
If your definition is a few incoming oligarchs buying up expensive property they never set foot in, or someone putting up a willy waving skyscraper sure UK is doing great. By every other measure, including levels of mental health, poverty, satisfaction etc, UK has effectively shot itself.
Oh, and don't hold up Tories being elected as some sort of proof when our democracy is one of the least representative on the planet[1]. Our system is biased both systemically and demographically.
It feels like a corrupt, broke country, especially after a visit to London. It feels like somewhere to be deeply embarrassed of, and I mostly am these days.
Seems like your pet peeve is the Tories. I mean i still think you’re massively over exaggerating, the UK is one of the best places to do live and do business.
Maybe read other news stories apart from the ones that aren’t just anti-Tory.
Not really - the system is just as unrepresentative for Tory voters in safe Labour seats. The net result is extreme lack of representation for just about everyone. It's the system that's broken - it's only functional for a two party system, yet still breaks for individual constituencies.
My real peeve is what the party system has become, even compared to when I first joined the voting electorate during Thatcher's first term.
The centralisation, and disenfranchisement and corrupt use of private capital in PPP was just as bad under New Labour.
Anti Tory sources? Thanks, that made me smile. For most of my life the Telegraph and weekend FT were the primary sources delivered to house, with Economist and New Scientist subs. I'd buy a Guardian periodically for balance, sometimes the FT full time. I no longer read the Telegraph since it became a rubbish tabloid Daily Mail 2.0 which leaves only Reuters, Guardian and to a lesser extent Independent as serious UK sources online.
The UK is a broke corrupt country. It has levels of inequality and institutional corruption the US can only dream of.
There has been no public service ethic in government since the 80s. Government has become a tool for leveraging policy for personal and corporate wealth extraction and the promotion of privilege. Promotion of common welfare and social investment are currently absolutely taboo.
The reason the Tories keep scraping through election wins is because the UK media are institutionally right-wing. The Tories rely on a base of confused pensioners and - increasingly - dog whistle racists. Latterly, BBC editorial has been obviously compromised, with BBC News failing to challenge or question government policy in any way, and selective reporting making dissent seem either small or irrelevant.
The result is that British voters are probably some of the least educated and informed in all of Europe.
None of this is good. I left the UK last year, and I genuinely fear for the future of the people I left behind. Historically, the next step in this kind of post-imperial malaise is traditionally a military dictatorship. I hope the UK can pull itself together and avoid that, but I worry that it's going to be a very close thing.
Well thanks for bailing, and thanks for the advice to those you've left behind. Your hopes are greatly appreciated and I am sure that if we do manage to avoid military dictatorship we will all be very grateful for your help and assistance in avoiding this dire situation.
Invest into a system for 30 years so the older generation can live comfortable lives off your investments. The same generation being in power, guts your retirement because of austerity.
The tension across generations is so large today, that I wonder if systems that establish intergenerational dependencies are ethical anymore.
Why should a generation that enjoyed cheap education, be able to pull the ladder from behind them once they're done?
Unpopular opinion, but I've wondered if in its pursuit of fairness, Democracy allows a people that are unaffected by a change to blissfully ruin things for those who are adversely affected by it.
IMO, social democracies aren't equipped to deal with an "I got mine" tendency rooted in looser associations with traditional social structures. (such as family, religion or local communities. Not preaching, I am an aethist)
It should be noted that now ~45% of the UK population enter tertiary education vs <15% a thirty years ago [1]. This shift is necessary economically and yet politically unsustainable from general taxation. The shift to a debt driven system has been driven by this.
I've had similar sentiments, especially after enjoying life outside of the UK. Admittedly, part of that was supported by a London salary, although I could have lived on far less. The quality of life here, compared to other (even less well off) places is shockingly poor for how expensive it is, unless you're wealthy enough to avoid most of the problems (including the tax burden).
I'm fine with staying in the UK in the short term but I have huge misgivings about starting a family and raising kids here. If I were to do so, they'd be enjoying the things that most people here don't have the luxury of (private education, etc.).
IMHO the UK is not as bad as described by the OP, but it has certainly some issues that should be addressed ASAP.
I am an expat that has been living in Oxford & Cambridge for many years, after living in many other countries.
Upon arrival, I was shocked at how bad the public transport was in Cambridge. Different bus companies, incompatible tickets, unreliable schedules and extortionate prices. Trains are a bit better, but nothing to be proud of.
Second shock comes from car commutes. South & East England is pretty flat. But the road network really needs an upgrade. For example, highway interchanges are often roundabouts (!) leading to absolutely massive jams.
Thus, what would be a regular commute to work in mainland Europe by either public transport or car (say Buckingham to Oxford) is a bit of a nightmare and thus something nobody does.
Third thing is housing. Bad quality, and land controlled by a few leads to really high prices. Plus, low density and the aforementioned transport issues make it really hard to buy in cheap places that are a bit far away.
Lastly, education is expensive and there is a lot of elitism. In the US, I think it's not so difficult to get into e.g. Stanford if you come from a poor background as long as you work hard and get really nice SAT scores. However, in Oxbridge admissions are heavily biased towards high end schools. The only students from poor backgrounds I have personally met had exceptional achievements in their CV (e.g. IMO medals).
> Second shock comes from car commutes. South & East England is pretty flat. But the road network really needs an upgrade. For example, highway interchanges are often roundabouts (!) leading to absolutely massive jams.
Roundabouts are actually way more efficient than junctions (and a lot safer) because of the low speed. I can imagine it must have been a big shock coming from the US tho.
> Third thing is housing. Bad quality, and land controlled by a few leads to really high prices. Plus, low density and the aforementioned transport issues make it really hard to buy in cheap places that are a bit far away.
I mean the UK is a small place and supply/demand tells us the land is going to be expensive.
Roundabouts are fine for cars on slow to medium speed roads - 20 to 40mph at a push. But they are a lot less efficient for longer trips. You don't get roundabouts on motorways or big dual carriageways. Slip roads and grade-separated junctions - often grade-separated roundabouts - are more efficient for time.
Grade separated junctions also take up a lot of space and divide communities, so I'm not 100% in favour.
Not true. Motorway exits are normally a roundabout, with busiest exit slip roads traffic light controlled. Sometimes the roundabout is broken up with more extensive lights. A defining characteristic of motorways is the absence of junctions on the actual motorway.
Dual carriageways sometimes adopt a motorway approach, with traffic light controlled slips, but are mainly roundabouts for junctions. It's been a while, but even on the A1, outside the A1M bits.
There's a slip road on and off the motorway and a roundabout at the end of motorway restrictions. That is straight into a roundabout. There are no junctions on motorways themselves. That was the whole point.
> highway interchanges are often roundabouts (!) leading to absolutely massive jams
A common quip in the UK is that the solution to any traffic problem is to build a roundabout. I agree they are terrible in congested areas, but I think Brits have a certain fondness (or stubbornness) for them.
> Lastly, education is expensive and there is a lot of elitism. In the US, I think it's not so difficult to get into e.g. Stanford
Stanford is far more elite than Oxbridge - I don't know how you could think otherwise. The price of admission makes it so, plus extreme competition. It's a poor comparison.
I don't like UK outside of London - I find it either sad and worn out with the same cloned high streets repeating every 50 miles, or smugly self-satisfied villages with wealthy people living in houses with names instead of numbers.
London itself is pretty good. It is, however, quite squalid, and crime is getting worse. Best thing going for it is the wages are pretty decent, for Europe. Population density could be a lot higher though, and property cheaper.
I'd like to take London, and plop it into the Alps - somewhere near Grenoble - or the Mediterranean - somewhere near Barcelona, though Barcelona already has a much higher quality of life, IMO. Take London out of England, and it would be fantastic.
By education, I mean primary and secondary. UK exports education at third level and it's pretty good.
And yet the country voted for Brexit, mostly without even knowing what they were voting for.
I agree with the OP that politics in the UK are toxic. There are only 2 parties that matter, and they are essentially the same, even though they would have you believe differently. The parties never work together, and spend all their time shamelessly sniping at one another and blocking bills based on political points scoring. It doesn't feel like either party wants what is best for the populace.
Then you have the tabloid media, which constantly fans the flames of hatred and outrage, poisoning the minds of a large part of the populace, essentially able to make them believe almost anything that suits the narrative of the owner's political affiliation.
> And yet the country voted for Brexit, mostly without even knowing what they were voting for.
Well obviously enough thought it was the right option.
>I agree with the OP that politics in the UK are toxic. There are only 2 parties that matter, and they are essentially the same, even though they would have you believe differently. The parties never work together, and spend all their time shamelessly sniping at one another and blocking bills based on political points scoring. It doesn't feel like either party wants what is best for the populace.
That how government works. You have the main party in power and the official opposition that tries to block bills it doesn't agree with. It has been like this for centuries.
> Then you have the tabloid media, which constantly fans the flames of hatred and outrage, poisoning the minds of a large part of the populace, essentially able to make them believe almost anything that suits the narrative of the owner's political affiliation.
I agree with you on this I don't think it is a problem unique to the UK. And I think it'll get better because the sales of newspapers is decreasing.
Well, indeed. If you ask the usual humans if they want to eat, sleep, work, have fun, and also go grab a drink, yes, they want all of that at the same time.
People are rarely consistent in their wants, and it's no surprise that the voters eat up the imperial nostalgia. The UK will negotiate the best deals. Ah yea, sure you will. Naturally in the free time left after negotiating brexit itself.
> Well obviously enough thought it was the right option
While I voted remain, I agree that we have to respect the outcome of the vote. But politicians on both sides told lies and half-truths, and many voters really didn't know what they were voting for - and of course some were simply ignorant, whipped up into a xenophobic frenzy by the tabloid press. The whole things has been a shambles, and demonstrates just how fucked up out political landscape is.
> That how government works. You have the main party in power and the official opposition that tries to block bills it doesn't agree with.
That's not how it's working though - my point is that Labour will block bills based on political points scoring, not because they actually disagree with the bill.
While Labour is not in power you won't get anything out of them about what they would actually do in this or that situation - they refuse to have an opinion on anything (but will invariably spout "well, we've been very clear"), and seem to exist to heckle the Conservatives
But some believe any old shit that vile hate rags like the Daily Mail bombard them with - let's not pretend that xenophobia and ignorance don't exist among voters in the UK.
You apparently believe this data somehow proves your point... which in a roundabout way, kind of proves mine.
The data you've linked to doesn't give any figures for immigrants - presumably most of the people of Black, Asian and Mixed ethnicities are actually British.
> the UK has some of the best universities in the world
Let's not confuse leading research groups with general education quality. UK undergrad and PhD courses are short and their funding model makes difficult for universities to fail students (this is similar to what happens with master degrees all over the world).
I'm a master's student in the UK so I'm not really sure what you mean by 'short courses'? The UK follows the Bologna process and bachelor degrees are 3 years, masters 1, PhDs are 3 years.
I'm not, Oxford and Cambridge are always in the top 5 universities in the world don't see how you can argue they are not.
> The UK follows the Bologna process and bachelor degrees are 3 years, masters 1, PhDs are 3 years.
That is not true for every European country. In lots of them bachelors last 4 years, and some degrees just morphed their old plans in undergrad+masters as a way to keep them longer (5-6 years). As far as I know, placements years are unusual too.
You also does not need a master to get a PhD in the UK. I have met plenty of 23-24 year olds with PhDs there.
And again, the biggest problem is than most teachers cannot fail more than a small percentage of their students, even if they are absolutely terrible.
> I'm not, Oxford and Cambridge are always in the top 5 universities in the world don't see how you can argue they are not.
Even if Oxford/Cambridge/Imperial have excellent undergrad courses (as I am sure they have good PhD courses), that does not change the reality of the other 200. At some point, by the way, I was doing a PhD in a top 4 UK university. And I can tell you that the quality of undergrad courses I saw was questonable at best.
I agree with most everything you say, but it's worth noting that the problems you mention leading to "poor productivity" are pretty much "all of politics". I think this is what you are getting at - its not one thing, but it's how we arrange everything- from funding justice systems to effective road transport and ensuring all citizens feel heard and engaged.
Brexit has at least pushed "everything"
on to the agenda - but sadly it's again too simple solutions that are the problem.
I understand your desire to go - I just don't think the grass will be any greener elsewhere.
> Subjectively, most UK cities feel less dense than many continental cities, with less apartment living and more urban streets with two story terraced houses
I suspect this depends upon the part(s) of the UK that you visit. If you were in Glasgow, or Edinburgh, up in Scotland you'd find that the majority of people live in tenements:
There are huge swathes of the country where people live in terraced homes, and still more where people have detached/semi-detached. I suspect if you wandered around in London you'd find both of those, as well as the ubiquitous tower-blocks.
Crime driven by inequality? It's very plausibly driven by poverty, poor educational system and extreme social marginalisation (i.e. lack of good social capital), but these are not the same thing as "inequality".
I couldn't find a paper with a quick google, but i did hear in a recent podcast that it is exactly income inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) rather than absolute poverty that is the biggest predictor in criminality.
Here is a clip that mentions it; if I can find a paper to reference i'll edit this comment when I get home:
I don't have a good answer for that observation, I was just repeating what I had recently heard. It's not clear how localized the measured effect is, ie. how proximate the inequality must be. It's possible that since the top 1% is getting so much more disproportionately wealthy, it might in fact be making the rest of America more equal to each other. Maybe (wild guess on my part) there is less average difference between the poor in a neighborhood, and the middle class in the same area. The wealth inequality is hidden in statistics and is not so much in our faces.
The issue is that in a place like London inequality rapidly leads to poverty because the income/wealth differentials are so high.
On the ground, at the moment, housing is monopolised by those with decent careers or established wealth.
From scratch?
Someone a few years into a career in a well paid field may be able to afford a flat or house quite far out. A bog standard middle class worker may be able to afford to rent a small flat.
Someone working in the supermarket full time will be sharing a flat or house; someone worse than that (e.g. children of the above, part-time or unemployed) will likely be more than one to a room unless they managed to acquire social housing when it was still available.
Overcrowded housing leads to high stress levels, arguments, kids spending their time on the street, all sorts of nonsense.
I work in Farringdon and live in Enfield. I commute through Tottenham. I've been attacked in Tottenham twice in the past couple of years.
This is a pattern through a lot of London. Central London has a lot of well-paid workers, but even then almost nobody can afford to live there, unless they're happy with tiny flats or sharing. So they commute to nicer homes outside the city center. And the slums - and Tottenham is essentially a slum - see these well-off people travel through their area, and try to take what they can, because they can't see a route out.
I'm not sure how I feel about this article. I agree overall that UK public transport is generally pretty bad - it gets even worse when you're travelling inter-city and it's poor value for money. But I feel a little bit like this is nicely presented data and a compelling narrative being used to come to a pre-determined conclusion.
When the case for Transport=>Productivity is introduced they talk about the GDP vs Population graph in France and indeed start presenting a neat little example that tells the story they want:
> For example, Lyon, the second largest city in France, is more productive than Marseille, the third largest city, which is in turn more productive than Lille.
Nice and easy, right? However that was a very interesting choice of city to stop at, because the next largest city - Toulouse - has a higher per-capita GDP than both Marseille and Lille. Then the fifth largest - Bordeaux - is higher than Lille and is mere a whisker shy of Marseille. Only after we skip over a number of tightly bunched cities do we see a bit of a cliff where St Etienne, Toulon and Montpellier are smaller and also relatively poorer. You can definitely see something if you squint your eyes and look at the graph, but to me it just looks like the French cities are more equal overall than the British ones. But we know that already if we compare GINI coefficients of the countries as a whole (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...).
Most interesting is the massive outlier in the main graph - Edinburgh. It has no metro system to speak of (save for a single expensive and much maligned tram line) and an OK-but-nothing-special bus network. It's certainly not a sprawling city, but it's not compact either.
The poorer British cities definitely need some love and investment, and improved public transport will undoubtedly be needed. But this article presents an oversimplification that makes me a little uneasy about accepting any of their conclusions.
I too suspect a pre-determined conclusion. That said:
Edinburgh, like London, has a single integrated transport authority (Transport for Edinburgh) albeit legally it's much less powerful than London's. I suspect that might be relevant.
As a tourist (I've never lived there, only visited) Edinburgh certainly _felt_ like an integrated system where I shouldn't expect every journey to involve negotiating new obstacles, unlike in my own city where any substantial journey is likely to involve understanding how the different bus and train companies have different ticket policies.
> Most interesting is the massive outlier in the main graph - Edinburgh.
Edinburgh shouldn't really be on a graph of non-capital cities, given it gets a number of economic benefits from being a capital city, e.g. being the centre of the Scottish legal system, seat of the Scottish government, most popular tourist destination in the country (as capital cities often are), etc.
There are many possible factors that explain the UK's productivity gap. But ultimately, productivity is mainly an inverse function of labour cost.
In economies with a high supply of labour and thus (relatively) low wages, there is less incentive for businesses to invest in labour-saving plant and technology. Why make the risky investment in automation when you can just hire more workers cheaply?
The car wash business illustrates this: where there is a good supply of cheap labour, you'll find "hand" car washes with multiple attendants ready to wash your car by hand at any time. But when labour is more scarce and expensive, washing cars by hand isn't really viable. Businesses will instead invest in automatic car wash equipment - and productivity per unit of labour is therefore higher!
In (higher productivity) France, automatic car washes are everywhere.
In the (lower productivity) UK, there are an awful lot of hand car washes.
I think a much more likely explanation for Birmingham's low productivity is that it has the highest share of people with no qualifications (education) in the UK and the gap is becoming wider (https://www.centreforcities.org/reader/train-attract-retain-...).
I don't think they are mutually exclusive. I had people with cars turning down a job with me because they couldn't face the 7 mile commute on the edge of town, on a motorway, because it could take them more than an hour.
If the headway between buses is greater than 15 minutes, then few people are going to chose it as their transportation option. If one bus fails to show, often enough for me not to bother and walk instead, then you have a 30 minute waiting time at an open bus stop in cold driving rain.
Now I live in Asia and the buses are extremely frequent headway is less than 10 minutes, and I have no need for a car.
>Now I live in Asia and the buses are extremely frequent ...
Where in Asia? Being home to over half the world's population, it's extremely diverse and my impression is that the average Asian person had much worse access to public transport than the average UK resident.
Yes, if you add China, the Four Tigers and Japan then you are already covering 1.6bn people. All of these countries/regions have fantastic public transport in the urban areas.
Every politician and transportation decision maker in the US needs to read this one. That goes double for the collection of clowns who are letting New York’s transit systems rot.
> Big cities are more productive! In France (and Germany and the USA)
But then exclusively talks about, and provides data for, only French cities. In addition, their statement really goes against my experience of public transport within the big US cities I have visited.
Public transport in the US is, as a rule, wildly inferior to public transport in the rest of the OECD. But still, all things are relative, and the quality of public transport in the US is more or less on a gradient, with bigger cities generally better than smaller ones.
Another factor is that car ownership is much higher in the US (with the sole exception of NYC), so poor public transport impacts a smaller population. (In car-dependent societies, however, poor infrastructure and traffic congestion can have a similar impact -- limiting the effective "size" of the city -- so it's not like relying on cars lets one escape from this problem). Whereas in the UK, the low quality of public transport (outside of London) is not compensated for by comparably high levels of car ownership.
My company is working on urban-accessibility metrics that should make it much easier to have data-driven discussions about the correlation between transport networks and economics. Can't wait to show that off in a few months.
What are we counting as high levels of car ownership? I always blindly assumed it was pretty high throughout the UK, for exactly the reason you give. I've no data, look forward to reading yours - thanks!
76% of UK households have a vehicle, as opposed to 91% of US households. More than vehicle-ownership, however, significantly higher petrol prices in the UK inhibit usage by a fair amount (2018 averages: $2.50/gal in the US, $7.00/gal in the UK). Finally, most US cities have much better-developed intra-urban motorway networks, rendering the car relatively more effective for commuting. UK urban roads saturate at lower volumes, on average.
So the net result is that the while the UK population has moderately lower rates of actual car ownership -- actual spatial accessibility via the car, in generalised-cost terms (travel time * value-of-time + monetary cost), is substantially lower than in the US.
It's pretty limited: Boston, New York, San Francisco, San Jose.
Yes. Living somewhere is very different to visiting. But I think it's fair to say that experiences of public transport are usually much worse when you live there. That's because you have to experience it during peak times (i.e. getting to work/school) and throughout all the periods of engineering work. And of course you use it a lot more (and will probably better remember the few terrible times it failed compares to the many more boring times it Just Worked).
But maybe I am wrong and there are some bug US cities with great public transport. I'd be genuinely interested to know since the article gave no clues.
Chicago has pretty good public transit. Not Europe/Asia good, but solid. It is different for living and visiting because it is entirely built around getting people into the downtown area (hub and spoke). This makes it harder to go from neighborhood to neighborhood, but easy to go from home to work and back home.
I do see what you are saying, but that neighbourhood to neighbourhood travel pattern is well handled in some places. I guess the geography of somewhere like SF might explain the mess they have going on.
Birmingham is a motor city. You don't get a bus, you drive. It is as simple as that. The infrastructure was built for cars and the leafy suburbs have plenty of parking. People drive in and don't get the bus.
I use the term 'people' to refer to people with proper jobs, if you work in the NHS as a nurse or if you do cleaning, work in a shop or anything else serving customers then you are waiting an extremely long time for a bus and having quite a walk at the other end. Things may have changed recently but from what I remember you had absolutely silly waiting times after 6.30 p.m. Stay at your desk one minute past 5.30 and you have that thirty minutes of walking and waiting before your bus comes along if you are lucky.
There are other factors such as the cost of living in the city. Although not London prices, if you want to 'get on the housing rope-ladder' then you are going to be off the bus route and driving in.
People do like their cars in Birmingham, for religious reasons a lot of young men don't drink. This leads to a lot of them taking a lot of pride in their motors to therefore never take the bus.
There is a large pedestrianised area in the centre however there are also roads that are as big as motorways going through the city. Things like the exhibition centres and other things alluding to Birmingham's status as second city were very much built with the car in mind.
I cycled when I lived there and my experiences of the bus was gained after I got run over by a car from the other carriageway collecting me on his bonnet. The bike didn't take it too well so the bleak misery of the bus was not my choice. The waiting was definitely bad for productivity.
There was one other cyclist at that workplace of sixty or so other people and only the receptionist got the bus, starting at 6.30 a.m. from Lichfield to be there before 9. Everyone else drove.
I did have reason to drive there once, it was on work business and I made the mistake of taking the wrong exit from 5-ways roundabout. A mile later stuck in the slowest traffic ever in Halesowen I was ready to abandon the car and set light to it. Luckily it wasn't my car so I spent the best part of an hour trying to get back to the right exit of the roundabout. That was not 'productive'.
> Birmingham is a motor city. You don't get a bus,
I work in Birmingham at the moment, and have previously, and commute 40 odd miles in each day. There is a mainline train from near my house to the centre of Birmingham which takes around 1 hour. I took it when I worked in the centre. Now I work right on the edge of Birmingham, just off the motorway that surrounds it. I can drive there in about 1hr 20min (depending on the appalling traffic and constant roadworks, it should be a 45min trip). From the motorway I have to drive round 5 miles of lethal back roads to get to my office which is less than a half-mile as-the-crow flies from the motorway junction. Even thought it is on an industrial estate the roads suck! I would love to get the train, but I would be left with a hour or so of extra journey time on those disgusting busses, so doubling my commute time. Birmingham had a motorway infrastructure that was amazing for 1955. Now it is a car park at peak times.
> People do like their cars in Birmingham, for religious reasons a lot of young men don't drink. This leads to a lot of them taking a lot of pride in their motors to therefore never take the bus.
I note in some areas there are signs saying that cruising around is banned by order of the high court!
> things like the exhibition centres and other things alluding to Birmingham's status as second city were very much built with the car in mind.
The exhibition centre has a railway line and an airport too. The connection to Birmingham center (New Street, now 'Grand Central') is excellent. But then it is like a spoke and hub distribution model...but with only 2 spokes. If you are not on a rail route you are stuffed, because of those busses!
When our staff are doing stuff at the NEC (National Exhibition Centre)
they stop in the hotel there, despite our offices being only 12 miles away as-the-crow-flies!
> there was one other cyclist at that workplace of sixty
I agree, cycling in Brum is horrible. The lanes are too narrow.
I feel that the report writers are on to something, I sit in the M6 motorway traffic each day and see the miles of people wasting their time with me. This must be a fabulous productivity hit to the region.
I think you have cause and effect backwards. Car culture stems from poor planning, from the car being needed to survive. Add in options for not needing a car and the culture will change.
The religious element is somewhat real, due to the Birmingham area being the center of UK car manufacturing for decades. Detroit could be a decent comparison: area built by the motor industry for the motor industry, attracted the poorest and most ethnically diverse elements of society in large numbers, then declined pretty rapidly once car plants closed.
Public transport might help, but alone it’s unlikely it will shift much.
There is a very different story of immigration to the UK. I assure you that (almost) everyone who arrived from afar to end up in Brum worked their asses off and the second generation born here are true Brits with the family values, respecting the religious heritage and the work ethic. Some might not want to work dawn to 11 in the family business but there is plenty of entrepreneurial spirit. Those with fancy cars who happen not to be white in Brum and the car culture that goes with it is something I really like even though I think cars are 'evil'.
I don't believe there is a lot of 'Great' in Britain, but what there is has certainly been in part due to the efforts of people working in vibrant Birmingham. More canals than Venice.
Before I went there the snob friends of mine in London and the shires told me it was a concrete jungle and I would be better just going to prison or walking off a cliff. But it has to be one of the friendliest and most welcoming places in the UK. The people there take an effort with their appearance which makes Londoners look like tramps in comparison. I found tree lined avenues aplenty.
I have never been to Detroit and am not in a hurry to do so. I am not entirely sure I would survive that long even if I was looking for the good in everyone. Brum may have some concrete and dispiriting housing (lived in some for a while) but there aren't vast tracts of wasteland with feral dogs and everyone having access to a gun.
Sure the big car plants of the West Midlands are no more, to be replaced with things like shopping centres, however, there are pockets such as the Jewellery Quarter where you have high tech next to low tech, cutting edge next to century old.
Also different is how the suburbs developed. It was the car that caused Detroit to donut out into suburbs for the centre ring to become no longer needed. I understand Washington DC has sort of done that too. Birmingham certainly does not have a ring of wasteland around the citadel city centre. Just a few 60's tower blocks to be wary of if it is late at night and you aren't familiar with the area.
But the motor industry was not in Birmingham, the motor industry was centralised almost entirely in nearby Coventry. And the collapse of the motor industry has almost completely decimated the city.
You can make the argument that Coventrians moved to Brum following the blitz but it's rather revisionist to compare Birmingham to Detroit when the reality is that Coventry is the closest corollary.
True, I tend to include Coventry in "the Birmingham area". Birmingham's decline was the result of manufacturing collapse in general, not just the automotive sector. But the city was definitely altered pretty dramatically to suit cars.
I am interested in your definition of "proper" jobs after you exclude NHS nurses, cleaners and shop workers. You sound like a snob from that statement. Perhaps "well paid jobs" would have been a better way of phrasing it?
A job that supports the worker in taking an efficient, stress free form of transport in to work is a "proper" job.
A job that pays so little that they'll skimp on their commute every single day is not a "proper" job.
I know people in London who take multiple buses in to work in the morning rather than using the tube. It takes them significantly longer. It's cheaper.
They do it because they don't have "proper" jobs; their employers don't care about them.
I self identify with the cleaning staff, the night security guard and the others that are undervalued in the workplace. I also grew up working in retail and did factory jobs. As for nurses, I met the one that saved my life in the supermarket recently and I certainly expressed my gratitude, much to her surprise!
I assure you that I am fully tongue in cheek when it comes to 'proper' jobs. I do a little bit of coding and not telling other people what to do. For me coding is one of the few truly creative disciplines open to me but it is actual work.
I don't object to anyone being well paid if they work for it. Maybe 'rentier class' should have been my turn of phrase, but I am British and my humour would be fully understood in Brum if not in Alabama.
I keep forgetting American language is so different. We use 'bin' to mean a 'wastepaper basket'. We don't need the extra explaining words that bloat out the lingo but we do have things like 'u' in colour.
The full sketch on this private joke us Brits have on American use of the language is worth a watch just for next time English is over literal:
The article suggests a causation, but points out only a correlation without proving it. There are lot of other ways in which French and UK cities are different - there might very well be some other reason why there is a lower 'churn' in UK cities and the lower public transport variable might just be accidentally correlated.
Anecdata: UK elites don’t like living in city centres. Anybody worth anything runs from English city centres as soon as they can afford it. If France is anything like Italy, they take the opposite approach.
This might compound the public-transport issue to the point of significance, but such a cultural element won’t be eradicated by simply providing more “poor people’s transport”.
That definitely does not tally with my experience in Manchester and Liverpool. Nobody worth any real money lives in the city, they're all in big Cheshire villas.
The young professionals might like to play Friends for a bit, but as soon as they spawn or make real money they're off in a blast.
I'd be surprised if Birmingham were any different, considering that city centre in practice is almost non-existent.
London and Edinburgh are the only places with real elites living in cities, but they are the exception to the rule.
What's the rationale for not including capitals? Why are they on a different population/productivity scale from 2nd cities?
Also I'm not sure I believe the lines. As in, they seem a bit sensitive to me. If Lyon wasn't there the France line would be much flatter. And there's plenty of deviation from either line, there must be significant other factors involved.
However I've spent some time in Birmingham and other 2nd cities, and there's something to be said about the argument presented. Particularly in Birmingham, the area is more like a bunch of loosely connected suburbs. Not a lot of tall buildings, lots of separate houses, by the looks of it. A fair few big box store malls. Loads of buses, not much else. You're better off in a car, which presents similar problems.
Almost all of the analysis done in this article falls flat on its' face because London has been excluded.
The UK effectively doesn't exist outside of the South East from the perspective of most individuals with significant wealth or power (central government included).
Super clear data viz that strikes a point quickly and makes it easy to join the hypothesis.
I found it so clear and easy that there is probably some scientific bias that makes it non valid argumentation. If someone could point that out, would be great.
One counter argument is that they probably applied a basic linear least squares fit to the data. Simple linear regression, using the L2 loss i.e. (y-f(x))^2, is extremely sensitive to large outliers (like Birmingham and Manchester). Without more medium-size cities in the 1-2M range it's hard to say for sure.
If you didn't have those data points, the story would be that the UK has much more productive cities (per size) than France. The trend line with those two cities removed is far steeper; practically vertical! And in fact if their analysis of Birmingham is correct - that it's effectively a much smaller city and should be placed further left on the graph - then it would also support a much steeper line.
What does that tell you? Probably that the population size of British cities is not a good feature to use to estimate productivity. Or that Birmingham and Manchester are outliers - they are huge cities compared to most of the rest of the UK, for a start.
That's not to say that the article is wrong. Public transport in large cities is pretty poor outside London. I don't doubt that if Birmingham had a decent mass transit system, it would be more profitable.
They also avoided the issue of Manchester, which does have a dense public transport system (similar to Liverpool), but is also punching below its weight.
Never mind that they're assuming that France is the benchmark (despite drawing a trend line on the UK), they included Edinburgh which is a capital ...
"The first journey is a bus from the south of the city, Stirchley to, Birmingham. This 3.5 mile journey takes about 20 minutes between 6am and 7am, and about 40 minutes between 8am and 9am."
That would be the school run. To test my hypothesis, I'm going to try to run the results during a school holiday in a bit.
Very pleased someone has actually done what I have often thought about (but done nothing about) while standing at the 97 bus stop in the rain early in the morning... getting the data from the departure system. I wonder how I can get my hands on a sample of the data...
I'm increasingly frustrated by transit-related articles like this that completely overplay the data they have.
If you look at the US metro areas with the highest productivity (defined in this article as GDP/capita) [1], they are definitely not the ones with the best or even extant transit.
The highest average commute times in the us are under 40 minutes in spite of that [0]. We have enough cars and car infrastructure that only a few % are stuck with buses; their poor performance has little impact on overall journey times.
The average is about 25 minutes and it goes up by only a few minutes in especially congested places. (If a 5 minute traffic jam is existentially distressing, wait till you see what waiting for the train is like).
Most of the top areas actually have really good transit, with the exception of Midland (on the list from west Texas oil money) and maybe Des Moines (I’m unfamiliar with it so I’m making an assumption).
San Jose and Sunnyvale have the cal train, linking a 50 mile long area into about an hours worth of travel. Bridgeport and Stamford have the metro north train, enabling commutes of 40 miles for tons of people to New York.
Consider what would happen to the South Bay if the Cal Train closed, or to Connecticut if the Metro North shut down. Way fewer workers would be able to to live their, and the populations would shift.
To anybody living outside London, hyper-centralisation is the obvious problem. Govt has done little in the past two decades to stop every new HQ making London just that little bit more essential.
Whole industries need to pull out and other cities get a crack at fresh, planned-ahead growth.
Rebuilding London every few years to deal with the latest calamity isn't practical.
Another factor is the density of England vs France; Birmingham is virtually halfway between London and Manchester, both are a fair bit closer to London than Lyon. London is a huge leech pulling economic activity out of the rest of England, and HS2 will make it worse.
What kills me about public transit is the variance. One trip in or home can often take 70% longer than another. It kills whatever motivation I started my trip with and I have to work up to it again.
Subjectively, most UK cities feel less dense than many continental cities, with less apartment living and more urban streets with two story terraced houses. Could tell a similar story about that.
UK laissez-faire local government combined with tribal politics making the ruling party incentivized to starve those local governments of funding - especially transfer funding when Tories are in power and Tory local government is usually restricted to rich areas not needing transfer funding - more material for storytelling.
IMO the UK political culture is toxic, education is particularly poor. Everything is centered on London and yet all the elite live outside in the green belt, while crime driven by inequality is rising and police numbers are continually cut, and legal aid is also being cut, leading to mistrials and slow cases due to self representation, and free movement is attacked by all sides.
I'm looking for the exit. This place is sick. The next domino will be something even more extreme, and it's chance whether it's left or right extremism.