CTO and co-Founder @TheDataCity. Did data @OpenInnovates and @imactivate. I block anons for even the slightest rudeness.
Leeds, Yorkshire, UK
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Incredible to think that many Americans will look at this photo and think "poverty".
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At some point in Aldi you just have to concede that you don't understand trademark law.
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Good to have some proper industrial history commentary on the timline, in the form of a joke.
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As a Brit I accept that I don't have American style freedom of speech.
But I do have the freedom to hang my washing up outside, unlike most of you Americans with your HOA rules.
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That Indian railway electrification number seems to check out. Coloured = electrified. Black = not electrified.
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None of the barbers near The Barbican are called The Barbercan. We used to be a country.
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How often do you think about how Denmark is building a railway tunnel to Germany that will reduce travel time for people by two hours and massively decrease freight distances? Under construction now and due to be finished in 2029. More or less than the Roman Empire?
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"why do train drivers earn so much more than bus drivers?" is a great economics question.
Train drivers are paid significantly more than bus drivers, but 70% of Britons think that being a bus driver is the harder job to do - only 12% think being a train driver is harder
yougov.co.uk/topics/travel/s…
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The University of Hull is to close its chemistry department.
It said student numbers were "so low that these courses are no longer sustainable".
The chemistry department was rated the fourth best in the UK in The Guardian's University Guide 2024. bbc.com/news/articles/c14l3e…
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Ciabatta was invented in Italy in 1982 to stop French baguettes from taking over Italian bakeries.
Ploughman's lunch was created in the 1960s by the British Milk Marketing Board to sell more cheese.
Fondue very similar.
What other invented foods are there I should know about?
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"Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems" on the UK government's official website linked to the output of a "National Drought Group" is fantastic stuff. Just a complete trust in government exploder.
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I'll be the thousandths to say this. But. Who in the Tories thinks this is an attack ad, not a promotional one? She looks cool as fuck. We all like her. She's fixing a problem for a friend. Loyalty. Under pressure.
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I learn via Reddit of a fantastic new poster campaign in my local area. teddit.net/r/Leeds/comments/…
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I hope our King has texted Starmer last night saying "great work with the cagoule, you've made the King of Spain look like an absolute muppet in that pack a mac. Never been able to beat him in a dress-off before, we did him over last night. Good lad".
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England has two potential megacity urban areas. Both about 20 million people. Both 200km across. We've already built the blue circle, centred on London, a very strong economy. We could built the red one if we wanted. Currently it's a very weak economy.
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Every now and again I remember that in Edinburgh there is a road called Bellenden Gardens and the little cul de sac is a bell end.
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In 2015 I wrote quite a cynical piece about HS2 in which I argued that it was probably all about using Manchester and Leeds to build a business case for increasing rail capacity between Milton Keynes and London. And actually it wasn't cynical enough. Lesson learned I suppose.
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The Motability story is a Chagos-style "£18bn" story. Numbers are just too big to process. Hard to believe. Hard to internalise the scale of it, if it does turn out to be true.
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"Why Microsoft Excel won’t die" > because it has long been, and remains, the best piece of software ever written. I am always deeply sceptical of Excel haterz. economist.com/business/2024/…
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The Chagos Islands for £18bn things is so ridiculous that I can't even process it. I can't even begin to think about whether it's true or not, or good or not, because is just so big it can't possibly be right.
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Asked Bing to design a city hall for a new North English capital city. Absolute banger.
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Just spent a whole, very interesting, day in Birmingham thinking about why the UK struggles with economic growth and productivity, especially in its second cities (which are unusually poor). I got one of these trains down. I'll get one of them back. It is embarrassing.
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In 2003, Bordeaux had no tram.
In 2003, Leeds had no tram.
In 2020, Bordeaux's tram will look like this, the dotted lines complete.
In 2020, Leeds will have no tram, no metro, and not much else.
We are bad at this in the UK. It makes us all poorer than we could be.
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Good video for the "why can the French build railways much cheaper?" ponderers here. Safety is one part of it.
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I do now have a genuine Chagos take I'm afraid. I am quite surprised that within our de facto constitution that "Parliament is Sovereign" we can relinquish sovereignty over a place without Parliament being directly involved.
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Shout out to the FT for not just the best coverage of UK inflation, but also the best creation of UK inflation.
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The bus use graph in the FT bus article is fantastic. Contains the absolute minimum information to make the correct point clearly and honestly. ft.com/content/cce1749f-c50f…
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Wool has been central to Britain's economy for thousands of years. It is enshrined in our constitution. The Lord Speaker of the House of Lords sits on a (tarted up) sack of wool to this day. So this is sad in lots of ways to lots of people. What should we do about it?
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I like the British English word jobsworth. Do other languages have a good equivalent? Does American English?
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The data seems to suggest that the UK is getting older, sicker, less able to work, and less productive when we do work. And except for the older part, we don't really know why, or have any plan we can stick to fix it. Pretty much. That seems really quite bad tbh.
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TIL that Montréal (about the same population as Manchester, UK) is opening this year and over the coming four years a 26 station, 4 branch, cross-city, fully electrified commuter railway RER-style system which will be completely automated and driverless. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A…
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Siri, show me a visual metaphor for the power of national vs. local/regional government within the UK.
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Quite a common question I get on this very website is "why trams not buses?" and the answer is, I think, quite simple. Trams are cheaper to run. Not to build, oh they cost lots and lots and lots to build, but once you've built them, they can actually make money.
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I employ three people who live in Nottingham. It's useful to get them to come to Leeds a couple of times a week. And it shouldn't be that hard. Nottingham is 60 miles away. Similar distance as, say, Eindhoven to Rotterdam. And both pairs are connected by a direct train,...
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Because the UK central government mandated paper straws for McDonald's milkshakes are so bad, they now give you two. There's some lesson in that probably.
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I wanted to actually go in and see it with my own eyes. Sometimes twitter is uncharitable. I wanted to see it for myself. And it's really there. It really does talk about extending Metrolink to Manchester Airport. Metrolink to Manchester Airport opened in 2014.
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The road connecting Sheffield and Manchester compared to the road connecting similarly* sized and distant Austin and San Antonio.
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Hundreds of financial officers at councils across the country will be grateful for the help here. This will probably be the first time in a decade they've considered cutting wasteful spending.
The Chancellor will extend a freeze on fuel duty and warn councils in England to cut 'wasteful spending'.
On #BBCBreakfast chief political correspondent Henry Zeffman had more details ahead of tomorrow's Budget
bbc.co.uk/news/business-6835…
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Good luck to Copenhagen -- a city slightly smaller and less dense than Leeds with an economy twice the size -- with its newly confirmed fifth autonomous metro line project which will provide excellent connectivity for the land at Lynetteholm in the process of being reclaimed.
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Put the kettle on just before half time. Keep the national grid nerds on their toes.
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I know all the data. So there's no surprise. Never drawn it this well I don't think though. Great stuff FT graph people.
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Part of the solution to Oxford, Cambridge, and London lab space being so expensive would be to move the UK's scientific excellence North. It wouldn't be that hard. There's just one problem.
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For all its growth, for all the shiny towers, for all the feeling of progress, both Manchester and Greater Manchester still don't generate enough prosperity to pay the bill for their own public services. Which is, for a country's second city, very much "doing things differently".
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I'll remember when you opposed and successfully blocked the establishment of North English universities. An early act of political interference and intellectual protectionism which you continue to this day. 😘
nobody will remember:
- your salary
- how “busy you were”
- how many hours you worked
people will remember:
- that you're so old, your 'new' college was founded 397 years before the United States 🇺🇸
(Sorry for showing your age, @NewCollegeOx 😅)
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We must ban. Britain's missing motto.
We must ban solar farms on prime agricultural land.
Solar panels are for roofs, not for farmland.
Our countryside and food security is precious.
telegraph.co.uk/politics/202…
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So,... there's an amazing plugin for QGIS from Japan (sponsored by Toyota it seems) which takes GTFS public transport timetables and creates frequency maps with no work and I loaded up the GTFS format GB railway timetable (which I obviously have hanging around) and wow.
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I got the GDP/person data for all the OECD cities in The EU and the UK with more than a million residents. And then I removed Dublin (because the data's daft) and then I made this graph. And now I'll get back to reading British writing/opinions about our cities "pulling ahead".
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Gonna cross a road without mechanised permission later. Might even go wild and cross at the crossing while the man is red.
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A few weeks some internet anon suggested I go to The County pub in Rotherham and speak to some people about industrial electricity prices. So today I'm here at The County pub in Rotherham to talk to some people about industrial electricity prices.
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Lord Moylan may have made an excellent point about the North of England needing to understand that its low population density and small cities mean it can't expect transport as good as London's. We need to cut our cloth and settle for something like the Low Countries.
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Classy move by Liz Truss's campaign. She's miles ahead, but Britons prefer a close contest to a landslide and proposing a *checks notes* pay cut for *checks notes* nurses and teachers in *checks notes* everywhere but South East England is certainly a way to even up the contest.
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A mod for City Skylines called "England" where you zone the land but then all the existing residents block development and all the advisors at the bottom of the screen just say "it's more complex and nuanced than that, probably interest rates".
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I always enjoy how the different language versions of Wikipedia give different victors for major historical battles.
The Spanish Armada,
In English - English and Dutch won.
In French - Inconclusive.
In Spanish - Inconclusive.
In Dutch - Spanish lost.
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The anti-anti-immigration arguments that worked reasonably well at 250,000 Eastern Europeans are not going to work in the aftermath of a couple of years of 750,000 mostly not Europeans, two decades of economic stagnation, and a failure to build enough homes or infrastructure.
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"Birmingham City Council has confirmed it will raise council tax by 21% over the next two years as part of £300m budget savings.
Street lights are to be dimmed, waste collections are to become fortnightly, while burial costs will increase."
Ooooof. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bi…
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I'd have assumed that US cities had better air quality than British ones, due to the much lower population density across the whole USA. But some replies to my drying thread have got me wondering. When I dry my washing outside it smells lovely. Americans say it would stink. Why?
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Buses stuck in traffic while the largest city in Europe with no mass transit system builds build builds. Sums up both the failures and the opportunities for North English growth to me.
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Right up there with the worst tweets of all time this. So many facets to its wrongness and what it says about Britain.
It's OPERATION ROLLING PARTRIDGE!!! Liz Truss is going to hit BBC •local radio• stations this morning where a bunch of sleep-deprived non-expert presenters will throw her soft questions, while she dodges the heavy hitters. (h/t @politico )
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It feels quite meta but I've tried for a day now and I can't charitably understand how somebody can't understand why people are voting for Reform.
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The decline in French alcohol consumption is just astonishing. The average French person drinks less than a quarter as much wine today as they did in the 1960s. And look at that cidre decline.
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"only in London would you be able to jump off the train and hop straight into a pub within seconds" > sure Jan.
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We've got one of them "it's an old street so we'll help you do ye olde signs" streets in Leeds. The concept of a ye olde Vape Hut never ceases to amuse me.
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Taxes paid in London fund ever more of Britain's public spending. Twenty five years ago the English Midlands were net contributors to the Treasury, now they are more dependent on fiscal transfers than Scotland.
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Most of these are transport and planning and while it's almost always "a bit more complicated than that" with devolution, I'm pretty sure that transport and planning are both very heavily devolved. Or am I missing something important?
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I think we should respect the democracy of London. They don't want growth, so the UK government should stop funding it there. British Library, ARIA, Alan Turing Institute all need moving to somewhere like Manchester with spare capacity. Back growth, stop subsidising decline.
I remain opposed to a new runway at Heathrow Airport.
My full response to the expansion proposals for a third runway:
ALT I remain opposed to a new runway at Heathrow Airport because of the severe impact it will have in terms of noise, air pollution and meeting our climate change targets. Despite progress to make the aviation sector more sustainable, I remain unconvinced that you can have a new runway delivering hundreds of thousands of additional flights every year without a hugely detrimental impact on our environment. I will carefully scrutinise the new Heathrow expansion proposals - including the impact these would have on people living in the area and the huge knock-on effects for our transport infrastructure, which would require a comprehensive and costed plan to manage - and I will keep all options on the table in how we respond.
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Just realised I started sending these flippant tweets while eating a giant crumpet with marmite and affordable European butter which I had toasted in a powerful toaster. And drinking a cup of tea, which I made using a powerful kettle. Simply incomprehensible to most Americans.
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My Labour electoral reform take? Don't talk about it. Put a very vague reference in the manifesto. Something like "we will strengthen our Parliamentary democracy". Then do whatever you like if you win. That's what the Tories did on changing voting system for Mayors. Do the same.
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Labour are, I suspect, very sadly, right not to promise to uncancel HS2. The earth is being salted, the wells are being poisoned. It's probably over. Try again in a decade or two. Hope I'm wrong. Don't reckon I am.
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On the positive side --- I think this is an excellent graph in the FT on the breakdown of taxation in the countries of the OECD.
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One of my strongest unfounded opinions is that there's a lot of this type of thing in the NHS, even if this example feels a bit too good to be completely true. Same in lots of publicish services. Huge space for big improvements.
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A fun thread on one of the many areas for improvement in the North's infrastructure. A fun bonus fact I suspect Tom will come on to is that this train connecting huge cities can only ever be two carriages long. No longer. Because of capacity constraints at Leeds.
Early start for the Leeds to Nottingham train. This service connects the West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire and East Midlands conurbations which have a combined population of £6.3m and 3 core cities along a 70 mile corridor. The journey time is around two hours. Ave speed: 36mph 🧵
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Meanwhile in Australia: huge local infrastructure investment in one of its Manchester-sized cities will open two years early. theguardian.com/australia-ne…
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Identify the location of the junction in the pipework for your central heating with this one weird trick.
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Everyone's dunking on the EU but who else has managed to achieve complete political agreement across the whole of Great Britain and Ireland in the history of ever?
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Popped out for a rooftop drink in Leeds. Sad to think this is a right denied to most Americans.
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Incredible new map of possible England regions and flags just dropped on Reddit. teddit.net/r/england/comment…
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How bus use has changed in London and in big cities outside of London since deregulation. (from which London was exempt).
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Don't get all these people going to Kings Cross to see an imaginary train. There's usually two dozen a day at Huddersfield.
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Right, I'm going to now walk 5 minutes to the shop and buy some zero-tariff stuff at a near-zero risk of crime.
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"archenemies". What a day for us. Gutted for the USA taking the L.
The British prime minister Rishi Sunak has arrived in Kiev to sign a “historic UK-Ukraine Agreement on Security Cooperation.”
What would Western public say, if the British representatives happened to be bombarded with cluster ammunition in the centre of Kiev, just as was the case with our innocent civilians in Belgorod?
And I also hope that our archenemies, the impudent British understand that officially stationing their troops in Ukraine would mean declaration of war against our country.
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Fare evasion being knobhead-coded in Europe vs. fare evasion being social justice coded in some of the USA is a big Euro win. We must retain this advantage.
fare evasion is honestly total loser behavior.
$2.90 to get almost anywhere in the city is an incredible value, and fare evasion just defunds the MTA and makes the system worse in the long run.
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My best guess is it's the low spin speeds on their washing machines. The best selling washer in the USA only spins at 660RPM. So the washing comes out still pretty wet. Which means it may not dry quickly enough outside which would leave it with a bad smell. Ours spin at 1400RPM.
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I think the UK needs higher taxes (unpopular) and that we should mostly increase them on middle earners (extremely unpopular), you have never debated anyone like me because I was told not to bother coming to the hustings as even my friends weren't going to be voting for me.
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One of the most powerful datasets that the UK government could release would be the full loading data for the railways including number and price of tickets. The old excuse of "commercial sensitivity" should be gone along with nationalisation.
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