LogFAQs > #978948351

reincarnator07 posted...

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.

You can't build your way out of every problem. There's quite enough building going on (I moved in 2019, I looked at every new-build estate in a 50 km radius).

The issue isn't that we didn't build enough houses for the number of people. The issue is that we have too many people for the number of houses.

reincarnator07 posted...

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

I was at university for 9 years. In the end I turned my back on medical, for a whole host of reasons.

Either way, it's simply not sustainable to provide expensive treatment for every person in the country for every medical condition they think they have.

Smallville posted...

oh you are from london area? Isn't it still less dense than nyc area ?

London has about 1 million people more than NYC, but the land area is about double (ie London is less dense).

And yeah, the rest of the UK is nowhere near.

reincarnator07 posted...

Yeah, it feels like the government wants to fight a culture war in favour of cars, but the result is that people will have to drive more. This is reversible on paper, but we as a country need to take action now and I simply don't see that happening. Working locally needs to be more feasible for far more people.

Well, the reason there's a McDonald's and Starbucks on every street corner is because there's a big enough population to support them. Chicken and egg really. Not everyone can live and work on the same street because businesses simply have to be in a city centre, where housing is low-quality and/or unaffordable. An exception would be an out-of-town retail park, and nobody wants to live near one of those.

In my case, I work in a one-of-a-kind business, I literally have no choice on location, it's the only one in the country.

reincarnator07 posted...

it's totally feasible if you work from the ground up to make this possible, like the Dutch..

You're really making this sound exactly as I'm saying - ie the Dutch are an exception.

If you had 20 examples it might be a point. Like, Beijing is known for having bikes, but that doesn't mean it's not overpopulated.

reincarnator07 posted...

If you have about 20 minutes, I'd recommend this video comparing a bike trip from downtown to a hardware store in Amsterdam and Calgary. Obviously one fares better than the other, but it's a good example of what you can do to make cycling feasible..

I did. Well, I watched all of the Amsterdam part and about half of the Calgary part. It's interesting. But also highlights how expensive and impractical it would be to redesign an entire city.

I wonder if they're doing that sort of stuff in undeveloped African countries who will otherwise have hundreds of millions of SUVs in the future.

reincarnator07 posted...

The problem is people having to work in London in the first place.

Well there you go.

A lot of my family still lives in London, and there's one cousin in particular who's spent the last 30 years slagging off London, and I've spent the last 25 years telling him he shouldn't live there if he doesn't like it. Every time he visits me he comments on the cheaper housing and less traffic. But still he won't move, because reasons.