311–320 of 374 posts
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I've lived in and visted many other cities in Europe. Public transport is often much cheaper than London, but there's few examples where I'd really say it was /better/. Can you think of an example?
Anywhere in Germany? E.g. Frankfurt has much higher density of subway lines and trams.
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Thin air? It was delivered 3 years late and cost £5bn more than it should have. While projects like HS2 to the North are scaled back. The UK uses other parts of the county as a piggy bank to fund London projects. I have a dog in this fight as I'm quite close to the public transport industry in the North and it's pretty disheartening to see politicans use us as some sort of "policy win" and then never follow through w…
> What is also interesting is that London's productivity growth is falling compared to Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool. So those cities that aren't getting the fancy new train lines are actually performing better. What data is this based on?
https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/how-productive-a...
https://data.london.gov.uk/blog/the-state-of-london-report-2...
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I disagree, NYC was OK but LA and SF specifically, the average quality of food was pretty bad. There were absolutely good options, plenty of them, but on average, just walking around, seeing something that looks good and checking Google Maps reviews (including reading them), had 0 guarantee of the food being of any quality. Compared to London and Paris where you're guaranteed a good meal in any random place as long a…
Wow, my experience is so different. The two most disappointing places I’ve ever been food wise were London and Paris. Spent 2 months in Paris, nothing stuck out except for one home cooked meal at a friend’s as Tyler Cowen says, Tokyo has the best food in the world, and the best French food in the world. https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/david-brooks-2/ Tokyo has even won best pizza as judged by the Italian…
This is simply not true. Are you sure you were in Paris, France? French people absolutely adore East Asian, and especially Japanese cuisine. There are the meh fast food options, yes, but the majority are definitely sushi places. And you have tons of others like Korean, Korean barbecue, more traditional japanese, etc.
The Japanese restaurants are concentrated around rue St Anne; the Chinese ones around rue Volta. But not exclusively.
As a fun exercise, Japanese is the highest represented origin (country) category in the Michelin guide. After that is Italian with slightly less. (The first category is "modern" which can mean anything).
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I feel that these shouldn't be alternatives. Calling something startup is up to the definition that we use; one that I like is the following: A startup is a temporary operating model designed to discover a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business. A friend of mine used: A company that just started that can scale to 100M evaluation in less than 5 years. From these point of views, there are a lot of wonderful SMEs…
To me a startup is something that's not yet profitable
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> Not as bad as the Glasgow one, which feels like travelling on a 2/3 scale model of a subway with alarmingly narrow platforms. For anyone who's not aware, the Glasgow Subway is literally smaller - the track gauge is 4ft (85% of standard gauge), and the rolling stock (trains) is similarly scaled down, to the point that you probably have to duck if you're over 6ft.
Budapest subway is something similar, too.
The three modern lines are spacious and high-capacity.
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It's a pretty extensive system and the pretty new Elizabeth Line is great. But if you take something like the Piccadilly Line in from the airport, you probably shouldn't have a lot of luggage because a lot of stations just have stairs and platforms are often at a significant offset from the underground cars. (The double decker busses also work pretty well although they're not generally my default.)
The Piccadilly Line was opened in 1906 for gods sake, forgive them for not catering to people with 3 suitcases very well! That's part of the reason we built the Elizabeth Line, to enable a better transport option for people coming into heathrow.
In 1906, people travelling with three suitcases would likely have servants carrying them, and no one cared particularly about comfort of servants.
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The Piccadilly Line was opened in 1906 for gods sake, forgive them for not catering to people with 3 suitcases very well! That's part of the reason we built the Elizabeth Line, to enable a better transport option for people coming into heathrow.
It is interesting how infrastructure silently reflects society of its time. In 1906, people travelling with three suitcases would likely have servants carrying them, and no one cared particularly about comfort of servants.
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> Its cultural diversity is a plus for most people Cultural diversity is not a draw. Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia are all culturally and ethnically diverse. No one moves to any of these places. The primary draw of a city like London is economic prosperity, which is ironically usually only made possible by ethnic homogeneity. This is the case in Britain’s former colonies (USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand…
> This is the case in Britain’s former colonies (USA The USA was never a colony of britain. The american colonies were. > The primary draw of a city like London is economic prosperity Then tokyo or singapore or dubai would have been even greater draws. But they are not. What becomes a "tech capital" is primarily a political decision. If london is a major tech center, it's because of political decisions within britain…
This is inane.
> Then tokyo or singapore or dubai would have been even greater draws. But they are not.
This doesn’t logically follow, but even if it did, Tokyo is an attractive destination for immigrants, even with the Japanese being notoriously xenophobic. Japan is homogenous and economically prosperous, the difference is that it restricts migrants from entering. Singapore has a huge population of day laborers that live in Malaysia and commute to Singapore. The majority of Dubai’s population is comprised of foreign laborers.
> If london is a major tech center, it's because of political decisions within britain but primarily outside of britain ( the US ).
And how do those decisions get made in the absence of a cohesive society capable of making them?
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I feel that's more "US public transport being bad"
Right as an American this reads like "American who's never been to large Asian cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing etc..
30% of all Americans have never left the North Western hemisphere.
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I feel that's more "US public transport being bad"
A big problem in America is the entrenchment that is happening. People are becoming so polarised there is no common ground left for discussions and people aren't open to new ideas or thinking. I genuinely feel I can't even discuss this with many Americans. They stalwartly believe car culture is superior in every single aspect, any deviation from this narrative is simply met with 'you don't understand'. I recall in Ir…