The Country is the Natural Unit of Policy Analysis
This post is to explain why comparative policy analysis must start with sovereign states, rather than their subnational entities. This includes urbanism, despite the anti-national orientation of some urbanists. In particular, all of the following claims that I routinely have to deal with are incorrect:
- The claim by Americans that the US must actually be compared with the EU, and its states with EU member states, on matters of economic and social performance.
- The more fundamental claim by Americans that American states, subcultures, ethnic groups, and other subdivisions are so different from one another that they have to be compared with European nation-states and the US writ large is too diverse to be so compared.
- The claim by urbanists that metropolitan areas are a more natural unit of analysis than states, for example the transnational Blue Banana as opposed to the EU member states (and UK) that it overlaps.
Policy and politics
Politics in virtually all first-world democracies is nationalized. Political parties are nationally unified, and the president (if executive) or prime minister is a well-known national figure. Regional politicians can have special features relevant to their region, for example big city mayors tend to be more cosmopolitan than is the norm for their parties but are still understood to represent the party and its governance. Even in countries with a split between national and provincial parties, like Canada, there is enough overlap that one can talk about the Doug Ford faction of the Conservatives and about the factions Pierre Poilievre is appealing to even though Ford runs Ontario and isn’t a federal politician.
None of this exists across national boundaries. The EU has EU-wide party umbrellas so that one can identify green parties, social democratic parties, right-liberal parties, Christian democratic parties, various flavors of extreme right parties, and so on, but it’s almost unheard of to attack a party in national politics based on what another party in the same umbrella group in a different member state. Even on fundamental issues, parties that coordinate closely may differ: there’s an umbrella group of agrarian Nordic parties, whose Norwegian member is strongly against joining the EU and whose Swedish and Finnish members are not particularly euroskeptical within the Union (its Danish member is the main center-right party and supports joining the euro).
Different enacted policies can be used as a mirror with which one judges one’s own country’s politics. Thus, in Sweden, people extensively look at what other Nordic countries do and try to learn lessons, or, more often, pick and choose examples to justify their preconceptions of what Sweden should do. Finnish education was very popular in Sweden in the 2010s as an aspirational comparison. In Finland, the Green Party, Vihr, looked at the shutdown of nuclear power in Germany without adequate renewable replacement, and decided against backing a similar policy for Finland; the party supports maintaining the nuclear plants for now. But it would be unthinkable in Finnish politics to attack Vihr for a policy backed by the German Greens, or even by the Swedish Greens, Mp; for example, Mp voted against joining NATO, but this has not led to any attacks on Vihr, which voted in favor and which is in support of rearmament to deter Russia.
Within countries, this is completely different. CDU cuts ads attacking the governance of Berlin under all-left coalitions for national consumption. Most people on the German center-left speak with disdain of the Lower Saxony gang, the SPD elite leadership drawn from the state with ties to heavy industry, general political inertia, and a pro-Russia foreign policy (Schröder was mayor of Hanover before he became chancellor, and other 2000s-10s SPD elites from the state were warm to Russia). In the United States, moderate Democrats across the country find themselves having to denounce Zohran Mamdani, who is not in national politics and doesn’t so far have much of a path to go into national politics.
What the state does
The OECD Fiscal Decentralisation Database shows the proportions of taxation and spending at each level of government. Some states are atypically centralized, for example the United Kingdom. Others are atypically decentralized, for example Australia or the United States. But even in the United States, taxation and spending are majority-federal, and the biggest state spending program is typically Medicaid, heavily federally regulated in law and politics.
Meanwhile, at the EU level, the share of the budget is so small it might as well not exist. The social insurance, health care, and military spending that dominate spending are entirely at the member state level, or even devolved further. (Nordic health care is managed at a regional level and not at the state level; Finland has 21 well-being regions for health and welfare.) The EU has a very large role to play in the sort of regulations nobody notices and are not subject to mass politics, for example coordinating health insurance and education reciprocity between member states, or coordinating rail rolling stock regulations so that the national homologation processes are mostly the same and the same trains that run in Germany can run in France and vice versa.
Not for nothing, the infrastructure system shows some hard borders. Within EU member states, intercity rail can be fast and convenient. Most major provincial cities in France are connected to Paris by TGVs averaging more than 200 km/h end-to-end. German trains are slower, but the national network has tight integration as far as can be pursued on such a complex system, and further investment aims to tighten this integration, to enable somewhat higher average speeds. None of that exists across borders. The only cross-border all-high-speed system in the EU, from Paris north to Brussels and thence Holland, is beset by high fares, designed for business travelers only, nothing like the more popular model used by SNCF domestically; the most recent data I have seen has international TGVs and Eurostar averaging twice the fares per passenger-km of domestic TGVs. States build high-speed railways and run trains on them; the EU passes passenger rights regulations to deal with some cross-border frictions.
In the United States, it’s hard to exactly compare the situation, since the only trains that we would consider bad but barely passable are the Northeast Corridor and a few branches; the other trains might as well not exist. But the trains that do exist do not meaningfully respect state boundaries, because American geography developed as a single polity and not as 13 or 50. Even state-subsidized corridor trains on Amtrak are often cross-border, such as the Michigan trains to Chicago, or the Illinois-subsidized trains to St. Louis. The highway network, meanwhile, operates on a single national standard, and so does the freight rail network, without the labor frictions seen at some intra-EU borders that frustrate the use of rail freight at long distances.
Economic and social outcomes
Because politics is national and most services are provided directly or indirectly at the national level, the economy is national as well. This can also be seen in economic growth. Megaregions are invisible in it, and national growth matters more than anything. For sure, there can be trends within a country, with relative decline or growth in various regions, but these don’t really align with any story of globalized megaregions. In Germany, one can see the convergence of East Germany to West German living standards, but otherwise, megaregions like the Blue Banana are irrelevant – Hamburg, firmly West German and yet outside the Blue Banana, doesn’t behave differently from German metropolitan areas in the Blue Banana like Frankfurt. And in Italy, the economic stagnation from the 1990s to 2020 affected both the North and the South – there was no further divergence as the Blue Banana model might have predicted.
The same can be said of social outcomes. I’ve repeatedly made Americans on social media angry by pointing out that the United States has low life expectancy. They keep retorting that actually the problem is drag from the Deep South, and New York and California are doing fine, with life expectancy about two years more than the national average. And yet, life expectancy about two years more than the national average is rather common in rich regions with selective migration, even in European countries with even access to health care, like France and Spain.
Culture and migration
People in a particular country or region are immersed in its media and learn in detail about its differences. When researching the Swedish case, I kept finding these intra-Nordic comparisons that focused on differences in road funding details between Sweden and Norway, differences that from outside Scandinavia are invisible (in fact, the construction cost history of Sweden, Norway, and Finland is largely the same, with Denmark being only somewhat different).
This can lead to a kind of insularity, in which people are too aware of their own country’s internal diversity and insufficiently aware of others’. Thus Americans can recite details of how different regions or ethnic groups in the country behave, and even pronounce certain cities European, cities that lack pretty basic aspects of common European culture (say, association football). This is where the mentality among Americans that the interregional cultural differences in the US are more comparable to differences between rather than within European countries comes from. They are only vaguely aware of German stereotypes involving Bavaria, a state that views itself as so special that it’s had separate political parties since 1918, or of England-Scotland and Wallonia-Flanders differences that are in some cases greater than interstate differences in the US (the American education system is broadly the same regardless of state; England and Scotland don’t even have the same length of undergraduate education).
The United States, after all, is a country with extensive internal migration. The Census Bureau’s 2024 estimate has 15.7% of people resident in the United States born abroad or in Puerto Rico, and 43% born outside the state they live in. Among adults, a slight majority, 51%, were born outside the state they live in. Immigration numbers in Europe look rather like the immigration numbers to the United States, and not at all like the interstate migration numbers within the United States. EU mobility is rising but still so far from intra-US mobility that the comparison is silly.
This is why, in mass transit, the United States has a national class of planners, consultants, agency managers, and staff. Managers move between major systems easily, and planners in California are expected to be aware of what is happening on the East Coast (in the other direction, it’s less expected, because of core-periphery dynamics). The assumptions made in Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington are broadly the same. The assumptions made in New York have a few idiosyncracies coming from New York feeling special, but they’re still within the same constellation of what people think is obvious elsewhere in the United States, and overall the differences aren’t larger than those between German cities or between French ones.
Those assumptions not only are different in Europe, but are different between countries: the British, French, and German ways of building rapid transit are different, and there isn’t even a unified Nordic way but rather different paradigms in different Nordic capitals (and yet the costs and procurement systems are the same). This cascades down to the level of activism: German environmental advocates are sour on U-Bahn expansion, viewing it as part of a cars-and-trains paradigm and preferring trams; in contrast, anti-subway activism in green politics is uncommon outside the German-speaking world.
At most, one can say the United States is comparable in its internal diversity to the combination of Germany and Austria, in some aspects. One cannot compare it to Europe writ large, nor can one compare its states to EU member states rather than to subnational divisions like German Länder. Americans in their solipsism try to convince themselves there is no need to study the rest of the world in detail, but merely to collapse it into macroregions like Europe or Latin America, and to analogize entire nations with their diasporas in the United States. But it’s not meaningfully possible to understand the world at this scale – macroregions are real but analysis of policy, including transportation but also the usual economic and social topics, has to be down at the level of sovereign states first with no illusion that a province in a large country is comparable to a smaller country.
Schröder was Prime Minister of Niedersachsen, not mayor of Hanover.
Germany has some sort of postnational Sonderweg probably because of having an identity as being the conflict zone of its neighbor countries:
The capital Berlin is somehow combining styles 1.,2. and 3., while 4. Stadtbahn is still missing, but we have small-profile metros which is somewhat similar to countries like France and dedicated MetroTram tramway lines, just the combination of both is technically hard due to the tunnel profile and the platform height.
The construction costs in Munich are not at all Southern European.
About “the shutdown of nuclear power in Germany without adequate renewable replacement”: That was, of course, Merkel’s policy, i.e., center-right, which doesn’t make it surprising that the Finnish Greens reject it. Contrary to what Alon implies, the German Greens’ original nuclear phase-out, agreed with the Social Democrats in 2002, was accompanied by major efforts to expand renewables.
After Fukushima, Merkel slightly accelerated the nuclear phase-out and, a few years later, began to slow the expansion of renewables. As a result, renewables did not grow quickly enough to both compensate for the loss of nuclear power and significantly reduce fossil-fuel generation at the same time. Moreover, grid expansion under Merkel consistently lagged behind the pace required by the Energiewende.
In the meantime, however, renewables have more than made up for the nuclear phase-out. They now have a much larger share of electricity generation than nuclear power ever did, and are therefore also driving down fossil-fuel generation.
Adding a small nitpick on the Finnish situation too. The Finnish Greens (should be Vihreät, Vihr. is the abbreviation) were very anti-nuclear at the start of the 2000s. The party was still very divided on the subject in the 2010s, leaving the government in 2014 after it had granted Fennovoima the right to build a new power plant (which later did not materialize due to ties with Rosatom). The party has turned its stance around only within the last ten years.
Is there any place in the US that is considering doing a transit project without federal support? Federal funding comes with a number of string attached – buy American is an obvious example, but there is more. What they are or what they mean to a project I don’t know. A large part of federal control is legally based on optional funding – the constitution gives strong state rights, but the federal money is a powerful reason for states to do what the federal government wants anyway.
The above assumes you are working entirely within a state. The west coast has a number of cities like that. If your metro area crosses a state line then you have no choice about federal rules.
The original 4½ miles of the Denver light rail lines were built without federal funding, opened in 1994.. The start of a regional rail network radiating from Denver aims for opening in 2029, assumes no federal funding.
Interesting, I did not know that.
Are they able to take advantage of no federal funding and in some way make a better project because they don’t need to follow federal rules (the obvious one would be the feds can’t remove funding)? Or are they using the same consultants otherwise building the same type of system everyone else does.
Consultants were used for specific tasks on the 1990 – 1994 RTD Central Line project, supervised by a team of people with previous light rail or local construction experience. The result was derivative from Edmonton, Portland, San Diego, and Sacramento. [Edmonton was derivative from Montreal, Toronto, Frankfurt, and Cleveland.] The biggest miss was that early on I suggested starting out all low-floor, and the idea was dismissed by our General Manager (from Sacramento) as too radical. The biggest hit was that we removed bus congestion from downtown streets.
The most fun was telling grasping property owners and community groups that because this was not federally-funded we could not add unrelated amenities. The tight funding also made it easier to say “no” to riders of costly suburban peak-only express routes when they wanted to keep their ride into an edge-of-downtown terminal. The transfer to LRT went to the center of downtown.
One little-known fact is that the key board member was a DU Econ professor who was an expert on municipal finance. He understood the relationship between capital and operating costs better than most people. He was an obnoxious character who was disliked by the staff, but when he was in his field, I came to realize that he knew a lot.
We don’t have excessive “extras” for local people along the route yet our costs are still high. I think the low cost French do more extras actually.
On one side of the tramway/light rail spectrum are the old style trams running in Blackpool or downtown Toronto. At the other end are the light rail operations prominent in North America. Toronto just opened a typical one, Line 5 Eglinton. In car-centric areas, they often win support from taxpayers thinking that they will decrease congestion because other drivers will use them.
During the 1970’s, most French observers noticed that car and bus traffic had a destructive effect on urban centers. Cities like Lyon and Marseille could support a subway but what about the others ? Their trams running unprotected in mixed traffic had long been dismantled because they were too slow and more expensive to operate than buses. In general, there was no room for US type light rail promise that something cheaper and almost as effective than a subway could be built without encroaching on road infrastructure. Something else was needed and that something was the facade to facade redesign of the street landscape. The amenities described as “excessive extras” in North America and the UK are crucial in this process. One needs to convince citizens that the inconvenience imposed to car owners will be compensated by an overall upgrade of residents experience.
In France, the choice is mainly made at the ballot box. Diverging transport policies were the main topics during last spring municipal elections in Paris, Lyon, Nice and elsewhere. With their congestion charges, NYC snd London similarly favor some transportation modes over others. Elsewhere in the UK, one can see free competition between cars and private or public buses running on similar routes than newly built tramways. The UK taxpayer is hit twice. Not only construction costs are high but ridership is low, around 440 000 annual trips per km of tram/light rail line, as opposed to around 1.46 million in France and 1.76 million in Switzerland.
Certainly in Londons case pretty much everywhere has good enough public transport access to the city that you don’t really need to drive in it unless it’s absolutely essential. And London doesn’t have Paris’ wide roads.
Fair, but not quite sure why.
I would suggest two reasons: 1. urban density in all French cities & towns is quite a lot higher than in the UK, hence many more people have easy access. 2. cities & towns in France and Switzerland still have lively, attractive centres; while there are large malls off motorways everywhere it hasn’t killed the towns unlike in the Anglosphere where malls and big-box culture has.
…………
I just looked at the Croydon Tramway (the only one in Greater London not counting DLR) which is a modern tramway opened in 2000 (replacing a much older system). It gets 17.2m pax but over its 28km (and 39 stations) that still only averages 614,000 per km.
The British cities with enough people for a tram have “attractive town centres” too still. It’s the ones of 20,000 where there hasn’t been a lot of new homes that are just nail salons and vape shops.
“Some states are atypically centralized” – I guess that characterization refers to any federal country. Their states’ autonomy differs wildly between spending and taxation. Australia is a case in point. Spending is split about 54% to 46% between federal and states+local, but the federal government raises 80% of the revenue. Switzerland is the other extreme. There, the spending split is reversed and aligned with the taxation split: about 45% to 55%. This typically excludes social programs and health care (managed by the cantons also in Switzerland). That also makes the U.S. more balanced in both taxation and spending: ~53% to 47%. (Who decides taxation levels is yet another question.)
So in federal countries a lot of spending decisions are being made on a sub-national level—which is of course the point of federalism. The point about the EU holds, however.
I miswrote: The quote should of course be: “[other states] are atypically decentralized” – That’s what refers to federal countries. Sorry.
In their study of Fiscal Federalism 2022 the OECD specifically studied decentralization of transport services:
“In the transport services sector, the central government again has the most decision-making power on average, but power is more balanced towards transport providers and local governments.” “[…] with rail services more centralised, and less likely to be the responsibility of local governments compared to other transport services.”
I think you’re underestimating the recent increase in popularity of association football in the US. Leave aside the performance of the national team, which only becomes relevant every four years and is therefore highly idiosyncratic (and Germany is also on a bad streak in that manner). It’s now quite common for people to attend MLS games, and you see flags and hats and other merch all over the city. It’s so much more believable that the US could achieve soccer parity within a few decades than transit parity, sadly…
Yet.
Half the list are “motivating reasons the EU should get itself together and federalize already” and the other half “the mechanisms that will change when the EU federalizes”. Well, several in the latter half are already trending in the right direction anyway, e.g. internal migration for work is rather higher among younger people.
I just caution the EU to be careful. Federalization can be good, but it can be bad as well. The EU has a number of governmental issues that they really should address first. Since I’m not in the EU and many people in the EUI have written extensively about them: I don’t feel it is my place to say more. those in the EU really should learn about the issues. Some issues should be corrected soon, some are annoyances that should be fixed eventually, and some are non-issues that “fixing” would make work. Wisdom is telling the difference – good luck.
The North Americans figured that out in the 19th Century. On May 31st 1886 according to Wikipedia.
The US became a nation well before the railways came. So that is consistent with Alon’s notion.
Australia to this day has 7 or 8 different gauges, though the major backbone routes have become standard gauge –except the 1680 km Brisbane to Cairns line which is 1067mm (it early adopted Pendolino to compensate a bit for the lower quality ride).
Australia did not federate until 1901, long after railways were established in each state and it has grappled with this stupidity ever since.
Contrariwise, the already-federal US’ states for a long while (roughly until the ACW) deliberately introduced breaks of gauge between the A&B RR and the B&C RR to create transshipment jobs, a higher population, and generally, grateful voters at B.
@adirondacker: it’s not as if Europe hadn’t agreed the Bern loading gauge and so forth. Including a (rather inflexible) system of payments for one railway’s wagons being used, or tied up, on another’s network, because that was a thing that happened all the time. Relatedly, in the end-WW1 peace deals, everyone found it natural to specify transfers of rolling stock into the peace deals.
You argue that three claims you routinely deal with are incorrect. I agree on two but “The claim by urbanists that metropolitan areas are a more natural unit of analysis than states, for example the transnational blue banana…” is in my opinion reasonable.
This is most obvious in the US where New York City transport issues do not stop at state borders. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, established in 1921, oversees much of the transportation infrastructure. The 1968 Metropolitan Transportation Authority, whose name is self explanatory, considers itself as the largest regional public transport authority in the Western hemisphere.
In the context of nation states, the Canton of Geneva is connected to the rest of Switzerland by a thin band of expensive land but 95% of its border is with France. Its transportation issues are clearly transnational and the border comes second. It was moved through land swaps when Geneva Airport was expanded and again when the Swiss A1 highway was connected to the French A41. The Léman Express, a S-Bahn/RER type of service, has been moving commuters seamlessly through the border since 2019. Ridership is well above target. Genève and Annemasse will soon have a second rail link. Trials started on the Line 17 tram extension 3 weeks ago. The L15 tram link between the Gare SNCF in St Julien and Genève will however be delayed by a July 2026 federal court decision regarding the Swiss segment.
The French minister who popularized the concept of a banana shaped core area of development was originally a steel worker and union representative from the Lorraine area which he included in the banana. His coal mining and steel making region was struggling and Chérèque task was to oversee the transition. His efforts were appreciated locally and he kept his position when the conservative won the 1988 ballot. From a French perspective, Lorraine was a rust-belt like peripheral area while the banana put it in the driving seat of European development. It did not make much sense and the concept was more successful outside of France. It remains influential with most of EU money transfers explicitly going from the core to the periphery.
Another influential transnational factor you overlooked is culture. Nowadays the French in French tramway renaissance refers to the language instead of the State. The revival starting in Nantes has spilled across the borders as seen in Genève, Lausanne, Liège, Luxembourg, Algeria (Alger, Constantine, Mostaganem Oran, Ouargla, Sétif, Sidi Bel Abbès), Tunis, Rabat and Casablanca. No renaissance was needed in the adjacent German/Dutch speaking areas where legacy tram networks were never dismantled.
metropolitan areas are the reasonable unit of analysis when you are asking individual routes, what lines to build. LA needs to consider all the suburbs , but shouldn’t consider San Francisco, much less New York City.
However the subject here isn’t how to plan an individual area. The subject is how plans are made. Even though LA and San Francisco don’t consider each others lines/routes in the other when making plan; they hire the same people to make large parts of the plans. When they have an idea they look to see if someone else had the same idea (almost always – it is very unlikley to have a truly new idea) they look at how it was done in other US cities, if it works, and hire the same consultants that did that. And so even though the details are planned for the separately for each city, there is a lot common.
Kinda-sorta on topic: is the Transit Costs Project interested in detailed Asian cases? Alon, you have often cited Japanese, Korean, and Chinese data in your posts. Yesterday, NYT published this article, concluding Delhi Metro was a success, citing on-time performance, cost, ridership, modal share, and equity. But being an article in a newspaper, it’s slim on details. I would love to read a case of the same level of detail as New York or Sweden or Istanbul of Delhi. The article notes DMRC’s involvement in the proliferation of metro systems all across India, which is a most encouraging development.
This probably means that e.g. the Agra Metro is overbuilt.
Wikipedia says Agra Metro cost “₹350 crore per km” i.e. $37M/km, or $176M/km PPP (numbers from ChatGPT). Which seems kind of reasonable for a city of 1.7M that’s growing and relatively dense.
India builds metro tunnels, viaducts and modern rolling stock at a very competitive price.
Ridership is however typically disappointing, say from 6 to 60% of initial projections. The main reason is poor connectivity. The train ride is a first world experience but the stations have been described as vast monstrosities with oddly placed entrances. One generally walks out of the station into a chaotic environment without sidewalks or organized bus connexions. Stepping into a rickshaw or electric tricycle in front of one’s residence for a direct ride to one’s destination is often easier, safer and faster. Cost is another issue. Many find metro tickets too expensive for their modest income. This puts smaller systems under severe stress since they were expected to operate without subsidies. In the summer of 2025, Indore’s 17 km metro received 95 146 paid passengers. Total revenue over 3 months was said to represent less than the monthly electrical bill.
Agra did 1.7 million in its first year according to https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/agra-metro-from-ground-aman-trehan-9lvyc
Not wonderful given it serves the Taj Mahal.
The 5.95 km Lausanne métro M2 and Agra Metro 6 km Phase 1 are similar in length, and length only. M2 opened October 27, 2008 and carried 22 million in 2009, in a city with 1/10th Agra’s population. M2 minute stations are rapidly accessible from pedestrian friendly streets because they were built as close to the surface as possible, and well connected to CFF, LEB trains and M1 trains. Pedestrian Observations blog often compares costs, nothing wrong with that, but the quality of a project, which cannot be summarized in a number but is tangible for daily users, may be more important.
Autorickshaws aren’t substitutes for rapid transit trips. No auto driver is going to go that far from his neighborhood.
As far as safer or faster – autos have no safety devices. Their safety relies on their low speed, maneuverability, and driver skill. Traffic’s horrendous everywhere all the time. It’s an incredibly unpleasant, slow, loud, noxious experience.
You’re completely correct about street chaos and station size, but that’s nationwide; in other words I don’t see a huge influence of that on ridership. There aren’t strongly demarcated sidewalks in any city where they aren’t shared by slum dwellers, hawkers, animals, food vendors, parked two- and three-wheeled vehicles, etc. Everyone walks wherever they can get space.
I think the biggest influence on ridership is another reason you pointed out: fares. That’s why people take autos or other modes – they’re cheap.
The other reason I see is the alignment, which speaks to why Indore has such low ridership – the opened section of the line’s built atop a dual-carriageway ring road with nothing around it, and the opened section covers maybe 45 degrees of arc. India being India, there’ll be high-rises there soon enough but that’s the reason ridership’s anemic.
Anyway, this is why it’s an interesting topic and discussion to me. I bet some lessons could be learned to inform policymakers, and there’s no language barrier to the Anglophone world at least.
The other super interesting country to me in the housing and transit space is Singapore. I’ve only been once, very briefly for work and I was incredibly impressed. But appearances can be deceiving, and costs might be high for their outcomes. I don’t know. I’d love to read more if anyone would like to recommend a resource.
Certainly India needs a better pedestrian and bus environment for connections to metro. But that will presumably come as the country continues to develop. Rickshaw use will decline as incomes rise and Baumol effect becomes significant. Fares will become affordable to more people as well.
In short, a system like Agra’s seems appropriate for where the city is going, and the cost is appropriate too.
Indore’s metro was only 6km long before a new segment opened (this week!) and those 6km was a useless circumferential segment in the outer suburbs, basically from nowhere to nowhere. Similarly, Agra Metro currently only consists of a stub line which appears not to reach the city center yet. (It does reach the Taj Mahal as well as Agra Fort intercity rail station, but apparently trains from New Delhi do not serve this rail station.) When the routes through the city center are finished, ridership will be far higher in both cities.
Eric, I agree.
My comments should not be read as disparaging Indian metros. My beef was with the NYT who published a puff piece out of Delhi Metro Rail Corporation without checking any of the assertions.
There are only 6 metropoles with about 30 millions inhabitants: Kanto, Shanghai, Delhi, Jakarta and 2 in the Pearl River Delta. Delhi transit has moved ahead of Jakarta and maybe can be said to catch up with others. It is just not leading.
I think the costs for the first two lines were fine and the later ones were higher, but I think they had problems with the first two lines with something.
It’s like the Victoria line where the two central stations they expanded (Euston and Oxford Circus) are “fine” – although Oxford Circus has issues at peak times and couldn’t be connected to the Elizabeth line but the others they didn’t and they later had to be improved at vast expense (Kings Cross, Green Park and Victoria) – so probably in the end not much money was saved over the far less modest Jubilee line extension – especially as that has exits at both ends at pretty much all its stations.
If you read Wikipedia they’ve had to replace the sleepers which were wooden, the third rail and they’ve replaced the signalling and I vaguely remember reading something about the power supply.
Plus if you read e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=North–South_Line_(Singapore)&oldid=117684564 it looks like they had 3 sets of rolling stock on the line by 2005 which doesn’t exactly imply they got enough to start with.
I have never been to India but I see a few problems in the NYT article.
The first one that the title “How the Delhi Metro became a leading transit system” almost looks like a typo. A 374 km Metro moving 6.5 million in a 35 million inhabitants metropolis is a lagging transit system. There are 7 million daily rides on the 195 km Tokyo Metro. Along with fellow rail companies JR East, Odakyu, Keio and Toei, Tokyo Metro serves Shinjuku Station whose 3.3 million daily users represent more than 50% of Delhi Metro’s ridership.
The article starts with “This metro sets a model for 21st century mass transit.” Yes, its relative success did set a model which, unbeknownst to the NYT, failed. Delhi Metro Rail Corporation became involved in the construction of new metros all over India, metros whose puny ridership, lead to their description as white elephants. Next, the NYT notes that the total cost in Delhi was “roughly $10 billion, less than NY spent to build a 3.5 mile tunnel”, bringing us back to the genesis of Alon’s endeavor.
There are two main reasons for the failure, cost and connectivity.
Cost matters but I can’t relate. I don’t know the struggle of low income Indians, the relative and practical costs of travel options for Indian commuters, and the NYT article doesn’t dwell on the issue.
I believe that connectivity is also crucial. My earlier comment about the impractical Delhi stations came from a Business Standard article by Mihir Sharma, an Indian economist, who can see a station, 150 meter away, from his apartment window. The line goes directly to his office but reaching the platform takes 20 minutes, the time a 3-wheeled electric taxi needs to reach his destination, for only twice the Metro fare. I think that Sharma needs Delhi Metro to work as a French métro, something useful for short distance trips. Despite its name, Delhi Metro works well, and much better than Indian Railways, as a S-Bahn/RER/commuter rail service. On longer trips, the relative inconvenience of station access becomes acceptable. By Indian standards, Delhi Metro connectivity is also good. Its 300 stations bring you relatively close to your destination, something that nascent systems in other Indian metropoles can’t.
You identified Indore Metro’s problem of being a small island of world class transit in a sea of car-based infrastructure. Its embarrassing ridership will, for the same reasons, be replicated by CA HSR first segment.
For Americans, whose country has forgotten how to build anything, this is a gigantic accomplishment. Perhaps the paper’s engaged in some needling here – if the so-called developing world, the world’s largest democracy can do it, why can’t we? But the Times is hardly that subtle these days.
I couldn’t help but laugh. I agree with the conclusion, but this comes off as an educated, middle- to upper-class individual kvetching about an inconvenient station placement (oh my God it’s ME!!)
There’s a lot of truth to this. Delhi lacks a suburban railway system as extensive as those which serve Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata, and so the Metro was planned in part to serve this market. There’s also a “regional rapid” system which connects Delhi to Meerut, with other lines planned for Alwar and Panipat. Delhi-Meerut’s ridership is respectable, although still short of initial projection. I do wonder if the predictions were mathematically sound.
It’s probably the security checks. Because 20 minutes to reach the platform is crap by any standards. You can do Gare du Nord to Gare de Lyon in 25 and that’s got some long walks.
Gare de Lyon is 4.7 km from Gare du Nord. I don’t think one can walk between the two in 25′.
Gare de Lyon to Austerlitz, or Gare du Nord to Gare de l’Est take 15′ at most. An underground passage between Gare du Nord, Magenta RER E and Gare de l’Est should save between 5 and 7′. Opening is expected in March 2027 along with the CDG Express.
Hah, so there is something to be gained from the CDG Express (for those of us too mean to pay and in any case want to use RER-B)! Unless the tunnel requires a CDGX ticket?
It would take about 45 minutes to walk. I suppose it could be done in 25′ or less on a
Limebike … and if one took a few too many liberties trying to meet a train the hopital St Antoine ER is close to Gare de Lyon …The underground connection between Gare de l’Est, Magenta and Nord will be open to a large number since the daily foot traffic between these stations is between 150 and 200 thousand. The need has been obvious for decades and especially since Magenta opening in 1999. Its Rue de l’Aqueduc exit is only 60 m away from the rear end of Gare de l’Est and the passageway towards Château-Landon métro station. However there are foundations, the aqueduct, and utilities serving hospitals along the way. The digging was postponed until the connection was identified as crucial for the CDG Express appeal.
Yes, I was being facetious. Although if it was London they may well try to hit pedestrians with a charge (eg. between HS2-KingsCross and HS1-St Pancras?) but it would be impossible in Paris. I am familiar with that zone because for years I walked it to pick up the English Sunday newspapers from the international vendor in Gare du Nord.
Hah, print media for the news … a bygone era.
Japanese train congestion rate was largely defined by ease of reading folded or unfolded newspapers. They gave up on the method in 2024.
I mean walk from the Eurostar to the RER wait for the train, take the train, and then get off the train at Gare de Lyon and walk up to the concourse.
Michael this is just extreme anti-British prejudice as if that happened people would go via the street which isn’t significantly further.
Of course, it’s my MO doncha know? But you Brits do love a surcharge … And this stuff is built for the right class, those with expense accounts etc. Not the hoi polloi crossing between the two stations for ordinary trains! And London does have poor doors in some of those fancy hi-rise apartments forced to have some “affordable” units. Similar principle. Don’t those uber-luxe Hyde Park One apartments have a private tunnel across to Harrods? Ah no, the tunnel is to the Mandarin Oriental next door … and mostly for hotel staff to deliver room service to HP1 residents.
OK Michael, let’s say I am building an apartment block in London with luxury apartments that come with a concierge, a swimming pool and a gym which means the service charge is £5,000 a year. I am required to build let’s say 30% affordable homes on site as well.
How exactly should this situation be handled?
Affordable units means the help has someplace to live. Otherwise their employer has to rent market-rate for them.
If they do build the “affordable” it’s – in the U.S. anyway – temporary. Even if temporary is decades long. If they don’t rich people move into all the units. The units they moved out of don’t evaporate and other people move into the vacant units. The units those people vacated get occupied. Building luxury apartments in neighborhoods poor people can’t afford eventually frees up units in neighborhoods they can afford.
No. That is just real-estate hype, and I’m surprised you fell for it. To this day, a huge number of the very expensive apartments in the new towers in both NYC and especially London remain empty, merely serving as security for cash for the international uber-elite (and robber barons). The most notorious is The Tower apartment building at St Georges Wharf:
Perhaps worse is the effect on the rest of the market, because it has driven up the price of all housing and of course has done the opposite of relieve the housing shortage, instead it is a prime driver of the shortage. The notion of “affordable” is also a creation of the industry: it means 80% of market rate, which makes them all but unaffordable to the vast majority of Londoners who are affected by the housing crisis.
How about not build them at all? Not only is it making the housing crisis worse but it is building in a sterile kind of anti-urbanism in these districts.
@adiron, not enough social rent really unfortunately but the government is trying to change that. Here’s the situation in 2023 – https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65324c4fe839fd000d86727d/Fact_sheet_9._What_is_affordable_housing.pdf
The rent isn’t too damn high
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_Is_Too_Damn_High_Party
the pay is too damn low. Benefits expended on employees are subsidies to their employers.
OK so let’s not really focus on the registered voters because most foreigners aren’t allowed to vote – or they can only vote in local elections, nor are people who are using it as a second home. Plus even when people are entitled to vote they don’t necessarily register – this is especially true for the poor.
With regards to 62% of the homes being foreign owned, that doesn’t necessarily mean that those homes aren’t being lived in, or that they aren’t second homes for people working in London a significant part of the time. Now yes the homes at Battersea Power Station are worth like £4m, but thats still cheaper along with a 300sqm home in the Cotswolds than having a reasonable sized family home in central London – plus you can sell it when you retire.
There’s no evidence that building luxury homes increases the price of non-luxury homes and frankly it goes against basic free-market principles that increasing supply reduces costs.
Labour is changing it so many more of them will be at social rent which is genuinely affordable. Good work from Angela Rayner I think.
This is basically a cop-out because you are accepting that for the affordable units its unreasonable to make them to pay for the luxury facilities – or for those luxury facilities to be partly funded by the state. So again this is really a problem with no real reasonable answer.
Whew! I disagree with every single point you are trying to make!
It is puzzling how you think that only building luxe housing in a growing city does not impact the price of all housing. This is one factor that does trickle down! Especially when that sector is taking all of the most convenient areas including old brownfield sites; often destroying affordable or social housing in the process (eg. 2,500 apartments in Elephant & Castle’s Heygate Estate) and mostly not for Londoners! It is similar at the other end, ie. with little soc housing being built it creates pressure on what housing is built and so all prices rise. Yes, another marvellous Thatcher effect.
Stratford should have been a good and easy solution to relieve at least somewhat London’s housing crisis, especially with its superlative transit connections. But mayor Boris changed the original plan of 8-10 floor Euro-blocks to the usual shit, expensive hi-rise or modern terraces with zero affordable housing. Much less overall housing, no affordable housing, less housing convenient to transit, and lousy urbanity due to poor density and:
I’ve said it before, if they build on Green Belt they’ll do the same stupid thing. And the new NewTowns schemes. Build the UK equivalent of suburban sprawl, terraces if not semis, and cater for one fifth or less of the potential. As a consequence any housing there will inevitably be very expensive too, especially as it will be on transit. Of course it is driven by the developers and their political proxies. The worst thing is that people like you are supine.
I’m sorry but your understanding and approach is why the UK doesn’t solve these problems.
Michael you’ve literally been arguing that it’s bad to deliver affordable and non affordable homes in the same place.
I absolutely support more homes for social rent to be built.
I think you have pretty persuasively made the point that Paris style housing is nearly as dense as Manhattan and with its advantages around acceptability to existing neighbours it’s obviously the way to go.
That said I’m pretty sure Manhattan is still (slightly) denser than Paris and so near a major transport hub I am not sure that high rise is bad. Certainly it isn’t worse than Paris style housing anyway.
Terrace housing is much closer to what people want to live in though, it’s difficult. And modern terrace housing is pretty dense.
The French model does work in part because middle class people who live in Paris also have access to grandmothers house in the countryside that is massive.
Not if you have a good chunk of it available for social rent, and another good chunk available to buy at a discount. Both of which can be done.
You’re showing that British confusion again. It is indeed the problem with high-rise (unaffordability) and something that doesn’t happen to low-rise (Haussmannian), or at least is not obligatory the way it is with high-rise. And the only “affordable” high-rise, namely the post-war project soc-housing built around the world (obviously including Paris) in the end turned out to be false economics, as well as false “high density” (it wasn’t). Now, in London, it is being demolished to be replaced with luxe high-rise … that is largely empty!! Brilliant.
On social housing I remain in mixed opinion about the UK. On this Adirondacker is correct: housing is unaffordable to the working class, and these days all except the seriously wealthy because they aren’t paid enough. Too much of the wealth flows upward. Some soc-housing will always be necessary but most working people should have incomes that allow home ownership. Vienna is the exemplar of how to do it.
Except that Manhattan has the same problems as London: unaffordable except for the v. wealthy! And remember I predicted that Manhattan’s density will probably decrease because these high-rise are displacing real housing for real New Yorkers yet fewer people live in the luxe apartments if at all. See Michael Sorkin as an informed long-term New Yorker who has criticised those developments (alas he died during Covid). The recent ultra-talls are even worse in this regard.
That is absurd cliche. Paris has vastly more mixed class than the equivalent area of central London, especially after four terms of Socialist government (now on its fifth term). Oh, and its ≈30% affordable “social” housing is actually affordable for ordinary working Parisians.
You are right about preferences but we can’t all have our druthers. Instead give ordinary Londoners the choice between affordable and conveniently located Haussmannian housing in lively neighbourhoods versus unaffordable whatever in Outer Bumhole with a long commute on expensive (>2x Paris) transit. Both the quality and value are superior to anything high-rise (or should be but the Brits …).
I know you all want to live in some Cottagecore dreamscape but reality
has toshould intrude. But even when you have that kind of development (and which was once affordable by ordinary workers) it is not as great as advertised. I mean look at Milton Keynes: it has about a quarter of a million residents spread out over 64km2 which is ballpark Paris size (89km2) yet with one tenth the population, and thus ≈one tenth the density. As a consequence it has one of the highest vehicle-km driven per capita in all Europe! Of course these days even housing in Milton Keynes is unaffordable to most. This is why I am very sceptical of Labour’s new New Town schemes.A commenter (yes, the Grauniad) got it right:
Nevermind gawping at the Bayeux tapestry, you hapless Brits only have to take a short (HSR) train ride to see how it can and has been done 🙂
@Michael, I also think that the Battersea Northern Line extension is an example where Alon’s cost argument is the weakest given how you had to connect it to the existing Northern Line, and probably also one of the more difficult to work out what the reasonable percentage of affordable homes that the developers should be made to build.
In contrast I think green field terraced housing near a station outside London should be pretty straightforward to price up and work out what a reasonable share is. Whether the local councils are well enough run to do that is another matter.
According to Wikipedia the building you cite has 224 apartments. Out of the millions in Greater London that even less than a rounding error. There are other buildings. Occupied by residents. And unless you want to ban rich foreigners from owning pied-a-terre, they are going to buy something somewhere. That displaces a resident.
You can always opt for becoming Detroit.
It was just one building as an example. But it appears to apply, more or less, to almost all the new high-rise built since Boris (or in fact latter years of Red Ken’s mayoralty) in the city, along the river and in Docklands. Simpler and quicker assessments are done by observing how many apartments are lit up at night (and some go to finding out water consumption as a sign of occupation). It appears to be the case for much fancier developments than St Georges Wharf, for example at The Shard and at One Hyde Park.
Instead of building housing for Londoners it was building for the international ultra-wealthy to park their money in a stable asset. It meant developers were not interested in ordinary returns by building ordinary apartments for ordinary Londoners, especially given the scale and profit margins in one versus the other. It is the notion, by default, that it should be left to the market and this is the very obvious result. This was a decision by the city and national government and was made because the big-money interests alway get their way in the UK. Oh and is part of the financialisation of everything; remember most of the money financing this stuff is from non-UK sources, eg. Qatari Investment Bank for 1 Hyde Park and The Shard. These two buildings by themselves are not so important but the type represents a lot of all the “housing” built in London. Why do you think there is a housing crisis, and housing is so ridiculously expensive in SE England?
FYI, architect and writer Michael Sorkin has written how very similar practices have caused the same problems in Manhattan. It is what happens when the interests of the citizens and residents is replaced with those of investors.
If you can afford a multi million pound house in central London a) you probably work long hours and/or b) you will go out a lot.
Good to a point, but for second homes it will be lower and it will also be lower for people who work long hours and/or who socialise a lot.
Michael, my DPD driver owns a house. All of the trades who have done work on my house own houses too. So clearly it isn’t impossible for working class people to buy a house.
I don’t disagree that housing is a disproportionate share of peoples living costs – especially for the working classes, but let’s not get too carried away. Do not forget that in the UK the average house price is the same as 2005 adjusted for inflation.
OK I will give you the Shard, but they haven’t sold those because the Qataris who own the building can’t sell them for the price they want to sell them for. If they reduced the price they would sell them, and people would likely live in them.
You’ve no real evidence to back this up.
There’s probably more empty homes in Paris than London because France has a much much higher level of empty homes than the UK does.
Milton Keynes was also voted the nicest town to live in by the way – so it’s not all bad. And it definitely doesn’t just have vape shops in its centre, so clearly it’s dense enough.
And yet they voted for Brexit. Their town’s namesake would be appalled.
Among the confused Brits who can’t tell what’s in their own best interests.
……………………
I didn’t say it was all bad but:
It has some good features but was a victim of its era, and so was turned into a car-dependency. At that low density it could hardly be anything else; even the cycle paths are mostly recreational and not used for anything else. One wouldn’t design such a place today.
Except that is what they are doing, in both the new New Towns plans and the Greenbelt, in the unlikely event they get off the ground. On top of the vehicle dependency they will also be, like suburban sprawl everywhere, “bland, rigid, sterile, and totally boring”.
The U.S. Census Bureau gathers allllll sorts of intriguing information and then publishes it. 87 percent of the housing units in Manhattan are occupied. Take that with a grain of salt because lots of people claim to live in low tax jurisdictions but spend the majority of their time in Manhattan. Very intriguingly, if I’ve done the arithmetic correctly, the occupancy rate for the U.S. as a whole is 87 percent.
I’m going to assume the U.K. and France gather similar statistics. I’m not going to look them up because I’m not the one making claims that London is overrun by more billionaires than the worldwide supply. The size of the worldwide supply doesn’t change that rich people who want a….. stable… address will get one. If they are getting one in a new building that means there is a vacant old building someplace.
@adirondacker12800, the UK’s long term empty rate is 1.06%. The short term rate is 4%.
It’s probably likely that more than 1% of these luxury homes have been bought as an investment and aren’t let out etc.
I just don’t think that someone taking a photo, presumably on a Friday evening in December, showing the lights on in only 20% of them means the others are all empty, rather than their residents being out either at work or having fun – or at their home in the country.
Gawd only knows what “long term empty” means. Or short term. I don’t care.
It’s increasing. It’s unlikely it will ever be as dense as it was at it’s 1910 peak of 2.3 million but it has been increasing since 1980.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Manhattan
Doh, that is the past. A prediction is about, you know, the future. The effect of these super-luxe developments is net negative because they demolish a lot of smaller more dense residential with much larger and barely inhabited new stuff. The displaced either leave NYC or move to Brooklyn or LI etc. Cities and districts go thru cycles. People are deluding themselves if they believe the explosion of superluxe property in Manhattan and London represents anything other than a decay part of the cycle.
To be accurate my prediction was that it would either stabilise or even decrease over the coming decades. Get back to me by about 2036 and we’ll see.
If there had been a Frexit vote in 2016 it would have been 52:48 for remain, and outside Paris France would have voted in favour of it.
No they don’t. The stereotype, in Manhattan, is that the developer buys “air rights” of shorter older commercial buildings and reassembles the height into one property. People don’t live in commercial buildings or in the air above them. I don’t care anymore, you can have your fantasies about the unlimited supply of billionaires and displacing people who don’t exist.
You are right about air rights but the displacement you deny has recently been described in front of London Housing Committee : “The people who would be living in luxury houses – stockbrokers, partners – now cannot afford to, so they get pushed into a nearby area, and that’s what causes this ripple. In the most affordable part of London there are no empty homes. In the least affordable end you see much higher rates of empty homes.”
Recent changes like mansion tax and non-dom taxation have put a brake on the top-end sales. At the other end, the ripple turned into a wave since London housing construction is insufficient, with private-sector starts falling from 33782 homes in 2015 to 5547 in 2025. Getting a permit to build anything is maybe too difficult in England.
NYC is a different market. Foreign buyers were numerous post 9/11 and after 2010 but foreigners have been net sellers since 2015, with a seller to buyer ratio above 3 in 2021 and 2023. In the mean time, Dubai, Lisbon, Tokyo and Miami have seen high volume of real estate sales to foreigners.
That reminds me that Mohammed Atta, the prime instigator of 911, was a trained urban planner, whose thesis was on the damage to the historical fabric of Aleppo by modern construction.
As spectacular as his deed was, far more damage has been inflicted by the likes of earlier urban planners such as Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus crowd.
And it all the fault of those dastardly billionaire furreigners buying multimillion pound condos in Mayfair. Both of them.
FYI: a news story today:
90 supercars, one weekend.
It’s just awful the way the place is so attractive rich people want to show off their playthings there. Terrible. They don’t have that sort of problem in Cleveland. Or Manchester.
The big flaw of this article is that it goes against the point that has been made a lot on this blog over the years about “cultural cringe” between e.g. the British cities outside London and London being the main problem.
I certainly don’t think the headline fix for construction costs for both is the same.
For London the headline fix is broadly “do what you did in the 1990s”, but for the rest of the country the headline fix is broadly “do what they do in French provincial cities”.
Do not forget London is the main place where infrastructure hasn’t been built with enough capacity in the UK with the prime examples being the Victoria Line, St Pancras International and the M25.
I agree. I don’t think there is a natural unit of policy analysis. There is a traditional one, which may indeed be based on nation-states, and I doubt it is optimal.
French provincial cities at times ignored Paris advice. Lyon rejected the SOFRETU i.e. RATP consultants’ advice of relatively deep métro platforms and narrow Paris-gauge trains. They dug the first lines by cut and cover over the water table which is only 5 to 6 meter below ground level, crossing the Rhône on a bridge instead of tunnel. That was cheaper and allows faster access to the trains although one needs to use the right entrance since most stations lack an underground connection between up and down platforms. Lyon métro later became the first one to introduce full-size driverless trains. Local engineers founded a consultancy. Among others, it is active internationally since many countries, inexperienced in modern railway technology, are open to foreign advice.
Nearby Grenoble said no to the Tramway Français Standard pushed by the Transport Ministry by asking for a then innovative low floor design. Paris only followed suit 19 years later on its T3 tram line.
I’m not sure when we were boring tunnels in the 1890s that this is politically possible but the provincial British cities should probably in general build their metros cut and cover.
They typically don’t have London levels of traffic.
Not really. Most retain their medieval roads/cowpaths. The only reason why cut&cover was possible in Paris was due to Haussmann.
Since I first lived there in the 80s I thought Brighton should have had a tramway along the front. The road is wide and straight and would serve a very high percentage of residents and visitors in this largely linear city (Brighton-Hove-Worthing) perhaps with a few spurs inland. It would decongest this typically car-strewn (and bus-strewn) place. But like the endlessly discussed rebuilding of the West Pier, never going to happen. Reminds me of this photo that, with the decrepit West Pier falling into the sea in the background and the Surfers Against Sewage protestor in the foreground, is a perfect emblem for today’s UK:
[commentisfree/2021/oct/26/what-does-a-stream-of-raw-sewage-symbolise-broken-brexit-promises-for-one]
Oxford, the other place I lived, is worse still. Because the land and rights-of-way are owned by the colleges the city has few options to improve transit or transport. All suggestions over the last century rely upon new roads through college land and so they all fail. I suppose they could do cut&cover through those parklands but 1. cost and 2. most of it is waterlogged or floods regularly (the reason it remains parkland). The existing roads are quite inadequate and twisty. Again, they could put in a tramway –probably a Y to serve Cowley & Headington in the south– but would need to severely restrict car use. Not going to happen and as a result, like most smaller English towns, it is a continuous car sewer. The main high street is Cornmarket (not the street actually called High Street) has been closed to traffic except buses for 4 decades, but the buses are more than enough to trigger the pollution detection so often that they have to turn them off during peak hours. It could greatly benefit from a north-south tunnel but the cost …
The pollution has largely been fixed with battery buses – https://www.oxford.gov.uk/downloads/file/3692/air-quality-annual-status-report-2024
Finally, yes, but note mostly from 2024.
It seems that Cornmarket had excluded buses some time ago. For most of the time (from the 80s?) it was pedestrianised but still had buses which meant it was horribly polluted, as well as not very nice to walk. Every single bus that served Oxford passed through it. The air was constantly in the red zone for pollution particularly PM25 (diesel buses & taxis). When that happened, in principle they were supposed to stop the buses running but they actually just turned off the air monitor! As you read in that report this has been a major issue for at least 5 decades.
Also, earlier you talked about most bigger towns retaining their historic main streets but this wasn’t true of Cornmarket which was a drab ugly place that looked just like other British main streets, with the usual fast-food joints, modern fronts of Barclays, WH Smiths, Boots, etc. I was amazed it didn’t contravene their UNESCO listing terms. The actual High Street retained its original character but it doesn’t get many people however it is where the promotional videos (and Morse) can be shot. Maybe they have improved Cornmarket’s appearance too? Or maybe it is worse with hideous vape shops and empty shop fronts –like the 30 on London’s Oxford street which has been proposed to be pedestrianised since I first lived in the UK (and probably for decades before); it too was always horribly polluted by buses and taxis.
Anyway, slightly off-topic but not really, because this (following), at various degrees, is reflected throughout UK governance structures which even Oxonian Borners will admit, and is why the UK has so much trouble with almost everything: (from “Lost Cause” by John Kay who resigned as the designate head of the Said Business School during negotiations over its construction and operation): (emphases are mine)
No wonder that the world’s greatest fantasists are from Oxford, from Lewis Carroll, CS Lewis, Tolkien to Phillip Pullman et al. But of course so are all those PPEs who dominate politics and business everywhere in the UK …
This shambles can be charming at times. Until it isn’t and you’re just choking on PM25 or spending £106bn (€125bn, US$138bn) trying to build HS2.