[linuxftw]

> Well, first up, they'd have spotted that our major cities need more frequent and faster rail connections from suburbs to centres and that these are prevented at the moment by insufficient platform capacity in stations like Leeds, Manchester Piccadilly and Birmingham New Street. So we need more station capacity in our city centres.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Build new cities, don't keep shuffling people into the existing ones. When you keep building new infrastructure to shuffle people into the same cities, the property values at the tail end of the infrastructure rise, pushing people further out, increasing the demand for new infrastructure.

The property prices inside the city stay inflated, wages stagnate, the working class loses.

[decimalenough]

The UK does not need more cities. In fact, like most of the industrialized world, their second-tier and third-tier cities are suffering since the entire economy and population are both getting inexorably pulled into London. This includes the planned cities ("new towns") that tried and largely failed to do exactly what you suggest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...

[linuxftw]

It's an easy problem to solve if you want to use government levers: Raise the minimum wage inside London. Keep raising it until businesses start moving to other cities.

[Etheryte]

This is a considerably worse solution with unknown knock-on effects, especially when compared to a well understood solution of making a few stations handle more capacity.

[linuxftw]

It's always just a few stations. Driving up the property values of the landlords in the cities. It's a never ending cycle.

[Etheryte]

More and more people are moving out of smaller cities every year in favor of London. Building new cities that no one wants to live in does not solve the problem, no matter the cost. Look at Italy for a good example, there are places where the local municipalities are offering houses for 1€ if you come and live there permanently, but there's still nearly no takers.