KHOODEELAAR! evidential update on the suppression of information by the London EVENING STANDARD that has been acting as a corrupting tout for Xrail

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The anti-roads lobby always say that if you provide a road, then traffic will in time fill it, and negate the short-term improvement; they're right.
Is the same not also true of railway capacity? Given the universal assumption that no private developer would provide Crossrail as a profit-making scheme, should we not stand back and ask why not, rather than assume that the public purse should provide it instead?
Why is it assumed that economic activity, especially in this time of instant communication, consists always in packing in more and more people from a bigger and bigger area into the same small space? If I can do business with my bank online, why can't the bank?
My humble suggestion would be to legislate that contracts of employment made an employee's journey to work a cost of the employer: we'd soon see a radical reassessment of where businesses should be located, and where they should be recruiting their staff. Head offices would downsize, and enlarge their back office functions further out into the suburbs, making life easier for job-sharers, and working mothers. If we could reduce the average commute by one-third, the social gain would be huge with no loss of wealth:family life and local voluntary culture of all sorts would revive.
Crossrail has the feel about it of feeding an addiction,or alleviating a symptom, rather than fixing the disease.

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