Main Story here: BBC News With more here: Guardian.co.uk Well, it's been given the go ahead from the Govenment, but has angered many. Personally, i would be more worried about air and ground safety, with all the aircraft flying over London. What are your thoughts on this decision? Sam
I'm hoping that it the villagers rise up in armed resistance. Fire bombs, protests, angry old ladies, rotting veggies....the works. Things are too quiet. This should give the media a good 4-5 months of stuff to chew on.
Possibly the dumbest decision ever (well, ever since the last dumbest decision). This contravenes any carbon reduction policy going, creates more traffic in an already overcrowded airspace and more importantly, does not address, but probably worstens the problem of: how do people get to and from Heathrow in the first place? If you look at its mainland European competitors, you'll notice that all airports there have excellent direct railway links to anywhere in the country (and Europe as a whole). In Schiphol (Holland), for instance, you walk off the plane, past Customs, out the Arrivals lounge and down the escalator to reach the platforms of a railway station underneath the airport. Trains run every 15-30 minutes during the day, and 24 hours a day a train will take you all the way to Belgium or Germany. Every hour, on the hour. Heathrow, meanwhile, is an absolute motorway nightmare to get at. Mr. Hoon of course will appeal to the holy cow of "the economy", hoping that this will revive things a bit. But some decent investment in the rail infrastructure would do the same and offer much bigger, long-term benefits. Industry means goods, and goods need to be transported, right? It's cheaper by rail.
I agree schiphol is a great airport, if anything heathrow is like a bad shanty town, keep tacking crap on everywhere. And what outrages me is the fact they want to rip downa whole town! This is purely money driven, but as the economy is going tits up, no one will be flying on hoilday anymore, hence a massive waste of cash! Its a joke!
I say they ditch Heathrow and splurge a load of money on an airport constructed on artificial land to the East of London. That way, there's less people to piss off and you can start again with much improved infrastructure. Having said that, it would cost a lot of money - but at least it would provide work.
Heathrow has it's own tube station, but it's not mainline unfortunately (so when I used it it took me about 1hr to get to Victoria), it also has a direct fast train to Waterloo. There's a direct Coach to Victoria which costs a couple of quid. Public links to Heathrow are good (could be better) but they (as with most UK public transport) aren't being used effectively.
That's why i like Gatwick, Direct trains from the Southcoast to Gatwicks own station, Trains can depart Southampton, Portsmouth, Bognor Regis, Littlehampton, Brighton and Eastbourne, and will all eventually get to Gatwick, as well as Gatwick Express (Which now runs on to Brighton) Road links are also good, with the M23 and other decent A roads. I do know they are planning to expand Gatwick, along with Stanstead, but whether they will or not is another matter. Sam
Just sink the M4 and build a new airport on top of that. EXACTLY what they did with Schipol which is the best airport I've been to. AND it would create so so so many jobs. If they were going to build the third runway, it should have been done 15 years ago, maybe 20. Bloody Labour make everything so difficult. Nothing will suit everyone - they might as well just get on with it.
It has a tube station that ONLY goes to central London! London train network in itself is bull because to get OUT of London anywhere in the country, you have to go RIGHT IN.
I'd much prefer they take the money for the third runway and spend it on railways instead (provided they renationalise them first) Airports can look after themselves. trains can't, and privatisation fundamentally will never work (lets go from not-for profit system to one identical to the first, but that we need to pay lots of extra money to to shareholders with no real competition to our business, that'll work)
The picadilly line isn't a FAST line though. It takes (according to TFL) 56 minutes to get from Heathrow to Victoria, that with only ONE change. They need to have better direct transport to mainline stations and one to say a "Carpark station" where there literally is just a train station, and a car park.
Exactly. It takes about an hour to get from Heathrow to central London. From there you have to traverse to other railway stations to then set out for the rest of the UK. The whole concept is utter madness. At Schiphol, you step on any train coming along every 30 minutes during the day, every hour at night, and you do not have to get off until Dortmund or Brussels if you want.
If anyone expects Obama's America to be much greener than Bush's, or indeed any advanced nation to cut back on its appetite for excess, pay attention to this decision. When present-day commercial interests meet the future welfare of Planet Earth, nobody in power is thinking of the children. We're all doomed, doomed I tell you...
The uk allready has more than enough airports, they could just improve the access to the other airports instead.
bingo. That or they could inprove the airport directly (terminal staff etc.) When i travel i make it explicitly clear to the person booking my flights that i will not fly through the UK, its just aweful and i avoid it like the plague!
I aggree compleatly about the remarks about transport and the airport as a whole. When I flew to canada recently it took me 18 mins from touchdown to being on a train to toronto including laugage pickup. When I came back to the uk the same process with a train to victoria station took 3 hours. Stupid, they should imporve what we have already before making anything new that would be just as bad.
One time when I returned from Norway to Schiphol, I knew I had come home because the first ~2 trains which would have taken me to my destination weren't running due to infrastructure issues. I love our rail system Schiphol is still a dream compared to other airports I have been, though, including Frankfurt. Heathrow is a bloody nightmare, they had the nerve to just park the plane and drive us with buses to the central terminal, from which we then had to find our way to the proper terminal (two buses, lots of walking). I also loved the 2.5 hour delay for my flight that day *cringes*
