| My pet peeve is that I want a total moratorium on infrastructure improvements inside zone 1-2 at least, maybe further out. Instead, what would be far better for London, would be a 20 year commitment to running commuter level trains services between a ring of zone 4-5 stations and nearby commuter towns even further out. The reason for such a long commitment would be to allow businesses to trust they can move further out and still have access to a decent talen pool in commutable distance, and for people to be able to trust they can move there. [Ideally I'd like to see a focus on investing in clusters outside of London entirely, like Birmingham, and Leeds-Sheffield-Manchester] The more that gets invested into the centre, the more traffic it encourages, and it's far more expensive to add capacity in the centre than it would be to encourage businesses and people to move further out. E.g. I live in Croydon. There's relatively direct train tracks between Croydon and Woking and Guildford and further afield, so in many cases you could create far larger commutable areas without even new track, just a commitment to running services at frequent enough intervals. Instead most times it's faster to go in towards the centre of London first. Then change planning rules to allow dense housing by default surrounding the immediate station areas but tax underutilised plots heavily coupled with guarantees of pouring money into construction until house prices start sloping downwards. Currently we're in a situation where the prices are exacerbated by developers just sitting on plots knowing prices will go up, and treating actual construction "just" as a final exit. We need to get to a point where developers lose money unless they build quickly, and where people stop seeing their home as a financial investment. |