Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz

This 70s sunglasses retro-look inspired by our very own Victoria Beckham, “posh”, and America’s greatest exhibitionist Paris Hilton, is starting to become annoying. Strikingly similar to a fly’s eyes, generally esthetically unpleasant sunglasses are taking over London this summer. People covering their eyes with black lenses of the size of satellite dishes. Men and women, alike, being fashionable human flies.

I had never seen flies in the London underground, until now. A pest of human flies with big dark black eyes has taken over. Strange looking aliens from the X-Files are invading the tube.

I wonder if the devil still wears Prada.

It should not be a surprise by now to see lawyers and politicians arguing bizarre things about the Internet. First, it was the infamous Senator Ted Stevens and his “series of tubes“, and now it is the Spanish Authors Association (SGAE) proposing to charge the ISPs and operators for illegal P2P downloads. Sort of a road-tax, but on the ISPs.

The challenge with SGAE’s proposal is that it is highly short-eyed and not understanding of the nature of the internet. It sadly follows the current trend across Europe, which makes our politicians think that they can fix any problem by imposing additional regulation.

If European ISPs were charged such levies on P2P downloads, it would be naïve to think that they would stand still looking at their decreased margins. First, the ISPs would certainly pass the cost onto the end consumer by increasing monthly broadband fees, with the terrible and unfair side-effect of making lawful citizens pay for committing no sin.

Secondly, every single ISP would start charging content providers for the usage of their networks. The media groups would not only need to pay their normal hosting and data centre fees as they currently do, but they would also have to pay every single other ISP in the country for the bandwidth used to connect end consumers to content.

The interesting thing is that those big media groups are the likes of Universal/Vivendi, Sony Music, EMI, which all co-share production costs with the news groups of CBS, CNN, Canal+ and Prisa. So at the end of the day, SGAE would end shooting itself on the foot.

In summary, the suggestion made by Pablo Hernández of SGAE is ill-conceived and hopefully will not see the light.

The British policy makers seem to have a tendency to first develop land and then put suitable transport infrastructure in place. Obviously, a significant factor for people choosing their next residence is road infrastructure and, to a lesser degree, public transport. Current government plans include creating over 100,000 new houses in regions like the South East, partially to release some pressure from the already overcrowded London. In cities like Ashford, in Kent, the local job market is almost non-existent, and the only population that can potentially be attracted to these new developments are London commuters which move their residence but keep their jobs in London.

The authorities seem to forget who they are really promoting housing for: without suitable public transport, London commuters will not chose to live in Ashford; without an inflow of public money and incentives to businesses to relocate to Ashford, there won’t be any job creation. The government policy is however to invest in infrastructure only after there is housing demand. Obviously there won’t be any housing demand since there is no infrastructure for the London commuters.

To be completely fair, some level of investment is being made in road infrastructure. Road construction creates local jobs and gives a huge inflow of construction money to the regions of Britain, boosting local economies with public money, and providing a fertile environment for new businesses, thanks to public money and modern transport links. Altogether, road infrastructure investments create significant public wealth and are a powerful vehicle to redistribute wealth.

Road infrastructure investments however result in increased flows, and surprisingly do not reduce traffic jams but in the very short-term. Quite the opposite, new motorways end up creating more traffic congestion, measured as person*hours of wasted time to the economy. While road infrastructure investments have clear benefits for local and regional development, they don’t quite help to attract new population since road infrastructure does not make a commuter’s journey significantly shorter.

The British authorities should consider investing more in public transport, and less on motorway expansion. Without better public transit, it will prove impossible for the authorities to introduce the planned road pricing and ramp metering changes; at least not without becoming a political suicide.

Most London commuters use trains, often their only choice. The railway system offers very poor service levels due an ageing and undersized infrastructure, and it requires multi-billion investments to be fit for purpose. Unfortunately it’s not only a matter of money: the railway system is very hard to scale around London given the scarcity of land. It proves to be a very unpopular choice to demolish a voter’s house!

Giving these constraints, British authorities should really look of infrastructure as an instrument for local and regional development, and they should clearly consider alternatives such as High-Occupancy Vehicles, Fast Lanes, Commuter Bus Services, and potentially faster rail commuter services.