There's a cracking article in The Daily Mail, written by the son of the woman who lives in this house, which, as you can see, is built right next to a main road. The woman is complaining about a new railway line which is going to be built two hundred yards away.*
* Or possibly a mile or two away, depending on whom you believe. If I understand correctly, the article is supposed to put pressure on the government to increase the amount of compensation that this woman, and others in her position are going to get, rather than prevent the railway being built.
Saturday, 14 August 2010
NIMBY Of The Week
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10 comments:
I can recommend living near a railway. When I was a boy, in the age of steam, a train crash sent large bits of red hot metal to land in our garden. The excitement!!!!
The railway also meant that we had a convenient bridge by which to cross the river illicitly. In Boy's World, a railway is a fine thing.
A main road? Where? The road in the picture looks to be single carriageway as it leaves the left of the picture, it has no lines on it anywhere and there's grass growing in the gutter.
That hardly looks like a main road to me. A village street more like.
As someone who lived about 25 yards away from the Paddington to Bristol mainline for the first 16 years of my life, I have to say I wouldn't recommend it for peace and quiet. If you are outside and a train goes past you have to stop talking, as the noise is too loud. The whole house rattled, especially at night which the heavy goods trains rumbled by.
The house I used to live in made the finals of a national 'competition' to find the noisiest house - the living room wall was about 10 feet from a very busy A road, and the railway was immediately on the other side of the road.
I do feel sorry for people whose lives and houses will be blighted by this sort of thing. Even the ones who will get full compensation will have to endure years of uncertainty, employ expensive lawyers and valuers to fight the State to get full value through the compulsory purchase system.
I personally reckon there should be no compulsory purchase system at all. If you can't convince property owners to sell voluntarily, the scheme should die.
And if there HAS to be a compulsory system, the State should be limited in the money it can spend on lawyers/advisors etc to the same as the private individual. Put them both on a level playing field.
D, I doubt whether a high speed rail line 200 yards away going through flat countryside has the same appeal.
TFB, I used to live in a house on a residential street, the back garden backed directly onto the Central Line, a train in either direction every two or three minutes from morning 'til midnight, and behind that was a motorway.
None of this bothered me much - you get used to the buzz of the motorway and conversations in the back garden just had to pause for fifteen seconds every two or three minutes - but at least it was quiet in the night time. The only thing that was really annoying was cars driving past in the middle of the night at high speed and/or with loud music playing.
S, the line is two hundred yards away - she will hardly hear a thing! And it stops in the night time, and is nowhere near as annoying as one motorbike whizzing down the lane at two in the morning.
And if we follow your logic through, we should shut down all existing roads and railway lines to protect The Hallowed Homeowner. It's not going to do much for the economy, is it? Further, would all these Hallowed Homeowners be prepared to pay the tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds in compensation for the supposed increase in the value of their houses? Nope, I thought not.
And as it happens, even though the motorway behind our house on the other side of the Central line was originally announced in 1954, it wasn't opened until 2000, and so we got our house in 1998 at a discount because of the railway and the pending motorway - and the Highways Agency still fell over themselves to send us a compensation cheque for £16,000!
I am watching a TV programme on Discovery at the moment which features an electric train in Germany that travels at 300kph. Being electric, I expect it is far quieter than the alternatives, although knowing British investment we will probably get some mediocre version.
This is why over the years I have become opposed to too much Direct Democracy. There are just occasions sometimes when the long term interests of society have to overrule the interests of the individual.
Looks a pretty pointless railway line to me- it doesn't go through anywhere of any size. Where are the stations going to be? Or are they not going to have any to prevent those pesky passengers making the train late. I can't see whay they couldn't stick to the route of the old Great Central further north and simply have a longer spur to Birmingham. That way, it could run mostly on existing disused routes and cost a lot less. OTOH the Tories' friends in the construction industry wouldn't make so much money.
Also if you look at the map in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:High_Speed_2_route.png) you can see that the new rail line is about two miles from Chipping Warden, the other side of the A361, the main Banbury - Daventry road, from the house of the NIMBY. However, it is the Daily Mail, after all.
TM: "This is why over the years I have become opposed to too much Direct Democracy. There are just occasions sometimes when the long term interests of society have to overrule the interests of the individual."
That depends on who is allowed to vote, doesn't it? If you allow people in London & Biirmingham to vote, then it's a shoo-in. If you only allow these people in 'solid Tory constituencies' to vote, it's a non-starter - they are like modern day highwaymen who demand a high price from those who wish to pass through their 'turf'.
Apart from that, agreed.
B, excellent research, I have updated!
Mr W, why can't you just admit that your description "main road" is patently wrong?
Perhaps standing for election turned you into UKIP's version of Gordon "I was right on everything every time" Brown.
TFB, OK, if you have any evidence to suggest that
a) no cars or motorcycles ever drive down that road in such a manner or at such a time of night as to cause inconvenience or annoyance to the occupant of that house;
and/or
b) that the sound of a high speed train wooshing past a mile or two away every half an hour during the daytime and evening will cause far more inconvenience or annoyance to the occupant of that house than any such disturbance caused by (a)
then please present it.
Until you do so I shall continue to refer to this as a 'main road'.
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