LogFAQs > #978905810

DarkDoc posted...

Yeah, I've been to Amsterdam perhaps 8 or 10 times.

In London you basically can't fit on the roads because of all the busses, vans and SUVs. And then you have to watch out for the stabbings and muggings.

I'm not saying cycling is a bad mode of transport. I'm saying it's suited to some areas more than others. Same with walking or jet skis.

Completely agree. The failure is the intentional development of areas in ways that are unsuitable for anything but car travel.

I took public transport for 35 years. In London it's now 350 per month. In the end I got fed up and switched to the car. Trains are simply too expensive and too unreliable. Not to mention complex. In Chester, northern England, you can get to quite a number of destinations. Depending on where you're going, and sometimes depending on the route you take, you travel with, I'm gonna guess, one or more of around 6 different train companies, all owned by different people. It's just a mess.

And when I was a student I had to fly everywhere because I literally couldn't afford the train. We have low-cost airlines but not low-cost trains. That's when you know somebody messed up.

Yeah, British trains are a fucking mess. I think the worst part is that quite a lot of them are at least partially owned by foreign state companies, so we're effectively subsidising them. Privatisation has been an absolute disaster for the British people, the service has gotten worse while costs have just skyrocketed.

Buses can be a different story though. I don't wanna doxx myself beyond the South, but you can get a 30 day bus ticket that covers where I live and all the surrounding towns and villages for just under 100. If you only need to travel within my town, that drops by a third. The buses are reliable and the routes more than sufficiently the area, although obviously the outer buses are a little less frequent. Unless you wanna haul some big items, you can absolutely get by without driving here. I do appreciate that this is the exception rather than the norm.

It is? Stats are a bit skewed at the moment due to COVID and Brexit, but figures from a couple of years ago are that 10 million people don't have a job. That's a quarter of the workforce. It's very significant.

Figures from a couple of years ago from the middle of the pandemic would be pretty skewed compared to today. According to ONS, the unemployment rate for Oct-Dec was 3.9%. I don't have the pure number to hand but I feel comfortable in saying it's less than 10 million. I believe you have been misinformed here.

Good point. I was born in London and eventually moved away because it was shit. Main problems being traffic and cost. But still, it's a fundamental problem that there are too many people for the number of houses that we have.

I'm just saying there are too many people for the number of doctors that we have. It's not as simple as magically saying "just train more staff and build more hospitals". It's not that simple. We don't have the money or the space. You can't spend what you don't have. Sometimes you just have to admit that you can't afford something.

We have the space, we're just using it poorly. We haven't built amenities along with all the housing. Even if we ignore staffing (for now) there's simply not enough practices. It also doesn't help that as a country we've been way to slow to build houses for decades now. The other big thing is that we as a country need to move away from London.

Staffing is a slightly more complicated issue. It's expensive and time consuming to train doctors and the pay out the door is quite frankly shit. I'm paid about the same as junior doctors, but I didn't need to spend thousands of pounds and several years of my life in education. On top of that, doctors are in demand globally, so they can work pretty much wherever they want to. Not only are we not attracting foreign talent, our own staff are emigrating. Nurses have the same issue as do a lot of the support staff required to make the system work.

On top of that, staffing issues are increasing the workload on those that remain which just burns them out.