I didn’t count HS1 as one of those eight new river crossings, because it doesn’t actually connect the north and south banks of the river, even though it crosses the river. The nearest stations are at Ebbsfleet, where it serves a giant car park, and at Stratford, where it misses the largest rail interchange in East London.
Transport schemes are designed by transport people for transport objectives (typically capacity or journey times) as opposed to for human objectives.
We invest about £20 to 30 billion each year in new transport schemes.
If you asked people in their local areas what they would like, they’ll tell you they want their kids to be able to play out, to be able to walk to the local shops, and to be able to get back from the pub without having to get a lift. But our schemes to increase capacity have simply enabled more of us to go faster on existing routes.
If we’d invested £1 trillion (roughly how much we’ve spent in my lifetime, in today’s money) on meeting peoples’ actual needs, we’d have ended up with very different environments.
