NEW: we need to talk about the dire state of British transport infrastructure.
Of the 52 UK cities with 250k+ people, only 8 (15%) have a tram or metro.
In France & Germany it’s 80%, Poland is on 60%.
Even *American* cities are better served, and the US hates public transit!
It gets worse.
US cities are poorly served by public transit, too car centric, but at least you CAN drive to/around them.
Euro cities (+ London) are the inverse: a pain to drive in, but great public transport.
Other UK cities are screwed: 💩 public transport AND bad road infra
European cities (+ London) have their successful transport model.
Even as someone who thinks the US is insanely car-centric and this has huge negative externalities, the US transport model does also do its job.
Most British cities outside of London are being failed by contrast.
Why?
There are many reasons, including how British government has prevented any of its regions/cities (apart from London!) from running things themselves, but another is this:
It costs more to build public transport infrastructure in the UK than ~anywhere else in the world (!)
This is true from big rail projects like HS2, to trams and metro, to less glamorous (that’s right, trams are glamorous 💅) but equally vital processes like electrifying UK railway lines.
According to research from @BritainRemade, Madrid built 47 miles of new underground lines for half the cost of extending one London Tube line by 10 miles.
In France, Besançon built a tramway for £29m/mile. Manchester's Second City Crossing tram extension cost £252m/mile.
@Sam_Dumitriu has a startling and comprehensive run-down here of quite how expensive this stuff has become in Britain (and the US), and the many factors that had led to this point
One thing that has contributed is good old fashioned Nimbyism.
Objections create delays, call for expensive (and almost never useful) consultations, thousands of pages of costly environmental impact statements, and often result in re-routing roads and rail at huge cost.
And the best part?
Quite often, the very same people who devote themselves to tirelessly campaigning over noise or aesthetics, end up saying "you know what actually it was fine" 🙃
One study found that Nimbyism directly adds huge cost to transport infrastructure projects by causing routes to be made longer and fiddlier to accommodate local objections over environmental impact
This adds millions, and then people acknowledge that actually it didn’t matter 🤦♂️
Ultimately, British people and British cities outside of London are getting a rough deal, this is constraining British productivity, and it’s all due in significant part to Nimbyism and our exceptional transport infrastructure costs.
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about rising graduate unemployment.
I dug a little closer and a striking story emerged:
Unemployment is climbing among young graduate *men*, but college-educated young women are generally doing okay.
In fact, young men with a college degree now have the same unemployment rate as young men who didn’t go to college, completely erasing the graduate employment premium.
Whereas a healthy premium remains for young women.
What’s going on?
At first glance, this looks like a case of the growing masses of male computer science graduates being uniquely exposed to the rapid adoption of generative AI in the tech sector, and finding jobs harder to come by than earlier cohorts.
The number of people travelling from Europe to the US in recent weeks has plummeted by as much as 35%, as travellers have cancelled plans in response to Trump’s policies and rhetoric, and horror stories from the border.
Denmark saw one of the steepest declines, in an indication that anger over Trump’s hostility towards Greenland may be contributing to the steep drop-off in visitor numbers.
Corporate quotes are usually pretty dry, but the co-founder of major travel website Kayak wasn’t mincing his words:
Recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid 2010s.
What should we make of this?
Nobody would argue that the fundamental biology of the human brain has changed in that time span. People’s underlying intellectual capacity is surely undimmed.
But there is growing evidence that the extent to which people can practically apply that capacity has been diminishing.
For such an important topic, there’s remarkably little long-term data on attention spans, focus etc.
But one source that has consistently tracked this is the Monitoring The Future survey, which finds a steep rise in the % of people struggling to concentrate or learn new things.
NEW: The actions of Trump and Vance in recent weeks highlight something under-appreciated.
The American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west).
In the 2000s, US Republicans thought about the world in similar ways to Britons, Europeans, Canadians.
This made for productive relationships regardless of who was in the White House.
The moderating layers around Trump #1 masked the divergence, but with Trump #2 it’s glaring.
In seven weeks Trump’s America has shattered decades-long western norms and blindsided other western leaders with abrupt policy changes.
This is because many of the values of Trump’s America are not the values of western liberal democracies.