| Topic: | Re:Re:Escalating fury at Greenford Station! | |
| Posted by: | George Knox | |
| Date/Time: | 29/10/09 22:39:00 |
| What a breath of fresh air to have an experienced politician and member of the House participating on Ealing Today especially as the habit of writing letters on a regular basis to the digital Gazette seems to have fallen into abeyance. Please do not now disappear. And let us hope that your appearance will be a mark of strong leadership to the wishy washy covert wannabe politicians in the Borough. I regret I shall have to disagree with Chris, not withstanding that quite a few of our tube stations do very much need escalators or lifts to be provided. I suppose the argument is that young mums struggling and golden arthritic oldies hobbling up the stairs has been a feature for so long that lift provision will always find it hard to get to the top of the priority list. It certainly will not in a recession. Why do our legs need any more relief than those of our grandfathers? Indeed the improvements should have been done long ago. But when the issue is seen in the light of massive population expansion (a relatively new development) which to me seems to have accelerated enormously in the last 15 years, then the issue is to get the people to work, whether they fall or sprint upstairs. As the population continues unchecked to explode (which no party dares yet to address), there will be less and less room for cars (see Ian Gibbs recent blog on Drayton Avenue), and so we have just simply got to have a railway which gets people very efficiently across London. Where one might well be critical of Steve is that he both as a local government Ealing politician and then as an MP has not done nearly enough to create schemes or borough vision planning which incentivises new business start ups in West London. But then just the same can be said of Harry Greenway as well as the current local Tory administration – who with their slightly odd priorities do not seem to had great success with reducing crime or keeping graffiti down to within the targets of their main mission statement. So as West London is still not well enough served by new employers, we have just got to spend a lot of money in getting people much more mobile. If the Tories are to be believed that no extra runway will be built at Heathrow, and I just cannot bring myself to trust them on this at the moment, then Xrail is even more important. Once we get Xrail, its benefits to the economy will last forward into the mists of time. Relieving my arthritis or heavy shopping bags will not help the economy. |