I happen to know a lot, professionally, about both airports and high speed rail. We have needed a new airport around London for a couple of decades, but an estuary airport is not the answer. It would probably be another white elephant because most of the demand is to the west of London. The 50% of the income distribution accounts for 95% of flights, and they disproportionately live in West and South-west London.

It would be far better to back a scheme like London/Oxford or two more runways on Gatwick as the 2019 deadline is about to expire. With Gatwick, the drawback is that you’d have to undertake major earthworks for the second new runway, but that would undoubtedly be a lot less than building a new island in the estuary. You would also have to do something about the appalling road access to Central London – maybe upgrade the A23 to motorway all the way into town.

Or you could put three more runways on Stansted, though the drawback, as with the estuary airport, is that the current single runway and terminal aren’t full because, again, all the demand in London is in the west and southwest.

Heathrow expansion is a total non-starter – though the 2003 SERAS study costed a third runway at £3 billion, by the time I looked at it in 2008, £13 billion was far more likely. The capacity increase would be relatively small because the runway wouldn’t be full length, and the political opposition is frightening. A few farmers around Stansted, or even tens of thousands of residents of Crawley, can be brushed aside with little difficulty, but the two million west Londoners under the Heathrow flightpaths are another matter entirely.

But the other thing we shouldn’t do is dither for another couple of decades.

Mail on Sunday recreates car journey Mrs Huhne would have had to have made if she was driving when clocked for speeding.

It finds it would have been impossible – unless Lewis Hamilton was driving.

Pretty obvious really – this just looks like a way of keeping the story in the headlines!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2063734/The-great-Chris-Huhne-road-test-The-Mail-Sunday-sets-solve-energy-secretarys-wife-REALLY-driving.html

No. Tax breaks for stay-at-home mothers.
Paying someone else to do your ‘duty’ as a parent is the most bonkers idea ever to come out of Hatemen’s mad excuse for a brain.

You choose to have them = you accept a decade of caring and staying (largely) at home to do so.

Much easier if there are two of you – so get married and STAY married.

chrisbrooke Chris Brooke
It’s good to read on pp.383-4 of his PhD that Saif Gaddafi is generally enthusiastic about the work of the International Criminal Court.

Whilst we’re waiting to for our Sunday morning treat – here’s an amusing way to waste 5 minutes

How should I vote in the Republican Primaries 2012?

Vote Match helps you decide how to vote in the 2012 Republican primaries by comparing and matching your views with each candidate’s policies.

It decided I should vote for Herman Cain.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/republicans/8876878/How-should-I-vote-in-the-Republican-Primaries-2012.html

I’d love to, but bit beyond my budget right now. Hope there will be lots of pix of PBers in paper hats :^)

And here’s some geek trivia re roundabouts

http://www.economist.com/node/21538779?fsrc=scn/tw/te/ar/whatgoesaround

The quicker virtually all traffic lights on roundabouts are removed, the better.
Those that remain can be ‘peak times only’
Birmingham is currently replacing large roundabouts with sets of lights. No-one seems to have told the Highways Planners that the purpose of a road is to carry the maximum traffic at the maximum SAFE speed. How you decide on the acceptable accident rate is a matter for debate, but closing a main arterial road for 60-85% of the time (as lights do, allowing for pauses between changes), is utter madness.

Hemel Hempstead is rather overly keen on roundabouts myself – their giant one surrounded by orbiting mini ones reduces me to a nervous wreck. http://www.tachoblog.com/wp-content/uploads/090415-magic-roundabout-hh-sign.jpg

on the Iron Lady film topic – there is an interesting review by India Knight in the STimes. She’s a pretty lefty lady and hates Mrs T. Here’s a snippet of her review:

“And here we come to the crux of the matter. If I were a 20-year-old woman, born after the end of Thatcher’s tenure in No 10, and found myself watching The Iron Lady at the cinema of a Saturday night, I would be bowled over.

I would think: “Here are Boadicea and Elizabeth I rolled into one: here is my new heroine. Why did nobody tell me this self-made, self-propelled, take-no-prisoners feminist superstar was so wonderful? Okay, so the politics are a bit dubious, but wow.”

I asked Morgan, who wrote the script, how she would feel when women’s magazines such as Grazia started running features on how to get the Thatcher look — picture spreads on the best blouses with bows, on the best Maggie-style handbags, on how to get your hair authentically helmet-like. She stared at me aghast and said she would be horrified. I have no doubt whatsoever that she needs to brace herself for being very horrified indeed come January. ”

*stunned at the prospect*

:^)

I think there are two similar roundabouts elsewhere in the country. Or to be more accurate, were. The one on the A13 is being turned into a complex flyover/underpass/conventional roundabout system, allegedly at least in part to cater for traffic to the Olympic Mountain Biking site just outside Southend.

New thread
Miliband drops to his lowest point in the YouGov leader ratings http://bit.ly/tm7ziw

There’s another of those ‘orbital multi-bouts’ near Romney in Hampshire (IIRC) and it scared the heck out of me the first time I came to it (around 20 years ago).

I’ve been there only once or twice since, and I was better prepared for it!

The lights at the Guildford Cathedral rbt are a particular nonsense, since their justification was always dubious, and then the access slip-road from the A3 was extended and improved, so there was no point any more (and they spoil the view of the Cathedral, too.

Needed (if ever) for 15-30 mins a day, Mon-Fri, term-times only, they operate 24/7 for no useful purpose whatever.

I complained about it (to Hampshire Highways, who, oddly, are responsible for a roundabout NOT on a main road in the centre of Surrey’s County town and HQ) about 8 years ago. It took weeks to get a reply, and I was told it would be raised at the next relevant meeting, some months(!) hence.

Nothing has changed. Highways people, it seems, never make mistakes, and LOVE controlling people, traffic, things.

Muppets, the lot of them. Bristol switched off EVERY traffic-light in the entire city in about 1984. Chaos was predicted, but traffic flowed better and people were more polite, letting side-traffic in. Then the switched back ON those where it was felt they were essential.

A bit more of that is needed – particularly on the motorway access roundabout ones, which exist simply to allow the M-way to be closed when VIPs travel along them and/or the M-way is shut after an ‘incident’ as accidents are called today!
I can see that has a useful purpose, but the cost is not justified – a policeman and/or some cones could do the exceptional jobs just as well.

They should be switched of at all other times – but the cameras there (and the light’s phasing) is deliberately designed to stop you and allow your number-plate to be recorded.

Sad, really, deeply, deeply sad and an OTT response to 9/11 and 7/7, I assume.