Heathrow expansion

jakarta said:

Because getting there is a complete pain in the arse, I can say that without fear or favour as I spend an awful lot of my working life travelling into deepest Kent and it is a good 20 minutes past Canterbury so probably the best part of a 2 hour drive out of London and has NO Railway Station.

No doubt transport links could be eventually sorted but it would be much, much easier to go for Gatwick or Heathrow.

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GT49er said:

I'm not really that bothered (and I'd never heard of Manston, other than as a wartime RAF aerodrome, until it was mentioned on this thread).

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Knotty said:

I agree but I'm impressed that you can do Canterbury to Manston in 20 minutes! I live on the Manston side of Canterbury and 30 minutes is good going!

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jakarta said:

I'm usually bypassing Canterbury on the A299 to get to lovely Margate or Ramsgate where my Clients have sites, I'm also usually doing this trip around 6-7AM so can, ahem, press on.

Sadly I got nicked for 57 in a 50 in Brooksend going to Margate last month so that's me £100 worse off and 3 points down. Nicked by a camera in a van at 7.15 in the morning....

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Knotty said:

Unlucky!

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beorhthelm said:

i know, its just Marston is the sort of alternative suggestion that annoys me because its a distraction. there is little virtue to the site except it already has a strip of tarmac. you could find any bit of land in the south east within a mile from a motorway and railway and it would probably be a better site.

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Heathrow is drawing up plans to build its new runway at least eight metres above Britain’s busiest motorway amid warnings of gridlocked roads and a £3.5 billion bill for the taxpayer.

The airport is preparing to scrap plans to create a tunnel for the M25 under the third runway, The Times has learnt, after senior highways officials complained that it would cause years of traffic mayhem. Highways England warned that the 650-metre tunnel would cause a national shortage of contractors, delaying road-building schemes nationwide and causing “frustration” among drivers.

Under the new plans, the runway would be built on a man-made slope climbing eight metres — more than the height of an average home — above the rest of the airport at its highest and passing over the M25 on a bridge. It would leave the motorway untouched.

The change of course emerged hours after Heathrow was given approval to build a third runway, ending at least half a century of delay. Approval from the cabinet subcommittee on airports will be followed by a year-long parliamentary process before Heathrow finally applies for planning permission and sets out full details of its expansion.

Chris Grayling, the transport secretary, said that the decision was “truly momentous” but it brought a backlash from senior Conservatives. Zac Goldsmith, the MP for Richmond, southwest London, resigned and triggered a by-election. He called for the vote to be “a referendum on Heathrow expansion”, although Theresa May ducked out of an electoral challenge by announcing that the Tories would not field a candidate in his constituency.

The former chancellor George Osborne welcomed the decision but called on the prime minister to show “political will” in the face of opposition to “avoid another false start”.

Details of the £17.6 billion plan were quickly mired in confusion, however, particularly over the cost of building road and rail links to the expanded airport, combined with the economic benefits of the scheme.

The airports commission said last year that access upgrades at Heathrow would cost £5 billion; Transport for London has put the price closer to £18 billion. Ministers said that the airport would pay “up to £1.5 billion” for three road schemes, leaving taxpayers with a £3.5 billion bill for the rest.

Mr Grayling told the Commons there were “question marks about what schemes are actually part of the surface access” costs to Heathrow. He ruled out making the airport pay for an upgrade to the M4, which runs close to the airport perimeter.

In a further disclosure, it emerged that Highways England had concerns that the new runway would cause gridlock on roads around the airport. The M25 widens to six lanes in each direction past Heathrow — the busiest stretch of motorway in Britain. Under the present scheme, it will be diverted for 2.5 miles and tunnelled for 650 metres under the third runway.

However, a letter from Ginny Clarke, director of strategy and planning at Highways England, said that the tunnel would cause “disproportionate disruption to traffic flows” when built. Her letter, buried in a report released by the Department for Transport (DfT), also said that the runway would “involve significant disruption during construction”. The Highways England report said that the plans would “place significant pressure on . . . contractors’ resources”, with “growing national impacts” on other road-building schemes.

In response, John Holland Kaye, the chief executive of Heathrow, said that the tunnel plan might now be ditched. He told The Times that the airport was considering building the runway on a man-made hill using spoil from the construction project. This could rise up to eight metres above the rest of the airport at the point it crosses the M25.

“An alternative is for a bridge over the existing M25; that’s something that’s been done in lots of other places and lots of other airports actually.” He said that the plan would be developed during consultation, adding: “What you do is you have the runway on a gradual slope; and I think the highest point is eight metres above the current grade.”

The move is not without precedent. A new airport in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is almost 16 metres higher at one end than the other to allow a freight railway line to pass beneath. Charles de Gaulle’s runway also passes over a road.

The government also appeared to admit that the economic benefits of expanding Heathrow may have been exaggerated. In a report, the DfT said it had ditched estimates that suggested a third runway would benefit the nation by £147 billion over 60 years. The department put the benefits at £61 billion.

The government insisted that landing charges, which add about £20 to the price of every flight, would be kept as “close as possible to current levels”. Heathrow’s shareholders are expected to shoulder much of the £17.6 billion, but a DfT report published online admitted that the costs “over time could eventually be passed through to customers [airlines and potentially passengers]”.

Strings attached
Heathrow will be forced to add at least six domestic routes to the existing eight and ringfence future landing slots for internal flights.

Night flights will be banned, with no plane movements for six-and-a-half hours, probably from 11pm to 5.30am.

Noise targets will be imposed, with guaranteed quiet times every day.

Planning consent will be refused until the air around the airport meets nitrogen dioxide requirements.

Most air travellers — 55 per cent — will be expected to use public transport, up from 41 per cent now.

An ultra-low emission zone will be established around the airport, meaning that owners of diesel cars will face stiff penalties for driving too close to Heathrow.

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beorhthelm said:

intersting point... so used to "impact" in negative sense at work doesnt occur to me it could be otherwise.

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Norman Baker suck my lozenge said:

Because it might be a peace loving religious type with a boot full of weed killer.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

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Mellor 3 Ward 4 said:

It's not just the airport itself that is the issue, it's the infrastructure that goes with it.

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boik said:

If it's weed killer then no-one needs to worry. No-one will mind a few weeds getting killed.

Fertiliser on the other hand.........

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Si Gull said:

Was an expansion of a northern airport ever considered? Could have been the spearhead of the Northern Powerhouse initiative. Oh, hang on, that was just political bs wasn't it. Successive governments have failed to invest significantly other than in the SE with a resulting widening of many aspects of the N-S divide not to mention the casting adrift of much of the SW.

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Seagull73 said:

Without wishing to sound like I am picking a fight, yes Northern airports were considered for expansion. There is a reasonable concentration of airports in the North starting with Manchester (that already has 2 runways), Leeds/Bradford and Doncaster. Even more so, there is Teeside and Newcastle to the North of them, as well as East Midlands and Birmingham to the south of them.

My personal view is that expanding Heathrow before giving Gatwick a 2nd runway is an absolutely barmy decision, and one that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. But given the relative capacities, I don't see that any of the Northern airports would be expanded before Gatwick on the basis of the current capacity utilisation, and the relative populations around those airports (and the fact that both easily access London, which, however hard you fight it, is where you will get the vast amount of inward investment starting).

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