On Fri, 19 Aug 2005 09:26:04 -0400, "Michael Lawson"
wrote:
"Andrew Oakley" wrote in
message ...
On Thu, 18 Aug 2005 17:02:00 -0500, wrote:
prices are too high.I Believe in parking all vehicles (including my
Well, in the UK we pay 91p a litre (US$6.17 per gallon) and our
economy is doing just fine. Then again, our biggest island is only
700 miles long, so you run out of land to drive on after two tanks
of petrol (gasoline).
There's also differences as far as public transportation
usage as well. As the suburbs developed with the
help of the car, it's become harder to backfill the
suburbs with public transportation like light rail. The
suburbs were designed with the car in mind, not with
rail or other forms of mass transportation.

Yeah. Our main problem isn't suburbs (which in our case were generally
built in the early 1900s when rail was the most common mass
transport), but historic towns. Pretty much anywhere you build in a
town, there's at least a thousand years of historic buildings you've
got to bulldoze; sometimes two thousand years.

For towns such as London or Cirencester which were built by the Romans
around 200AD, the Romans put in a pretty good trunk road network, with
roads hundreds of miles long and straight as a die. These Roman roads
have remained pretty much unbuilt-on and these routes form several
trunk road / motorway (expressway/interstate) and rail lines today.

For towns such as Birmingham or Bristol, which were built mainly
during the Industrial revolution of the 1600-1800s, it's a mess. New
road and rail links have to go in via tortuorous winding routes in
order to preserve historic buildings or parkland.

There's also a problem that a lot of towns were built in the Medieval
and Dark Ages periods, for defensive capability, such as upon steep
hills. These towns are almost impossible to plan around (you can't
just move six hills) and many of them are depopulating due to lack of
good transport links.

In the 1960s and 1970s we did have a go at building new towns such as
Milton Keynes and Telford. Milton Keynes (1960s) was considered a
failure because of overuse of concrete and loss of countryside,
despite good road and rail links. Telford (1970s) was more of a
success because it incorporated several spread-out villages mixing
with countryside - kind of like a collection of small suburbs linked
via trunk roads / expressways, rather than a solid town, with plenty
of space for new roads and rail. However even this was considered a
waste of green countryside, and with land being a scarce resource on a
700-mile long island, these kinds of projects were abandoned in favour
of "filling in" disused gaps in existing towns, called "brown field
sites". That new policy of "brown field sites" is also now coming
under attack since many of these sites are old industrial sites which
are heavily polluted.

Basically we've run out of land in the South East of England and
people are too scared to build on the rest of the country in case it
all gets swallowed up too.

Going back on-topic, being on an island only 700 miles long makes
radio transmissions a lot easier - for instance, we can have one
transmitter covering the entire nation (eg. BBC Radio 4 on 198kHz AM
Long Wave). It must be quite odd living somewhere where you have to
re-tune AM depending on where you are.
What about FM?? Is it strictly local, or do some BBC stations
occupy the same part of the dial all over the place??

Generally it works like this:

87.5-88MHz - Commercial event stations
88 - 95MHz - BBC national stations (Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4)
95 - 98MHz - Mostly BBC local, some Commercial local
98 - 99MHz - BBC national station (Radio 1)
100-102MHz - "Classic FM" national commercial radio station
102-104MHz - Mostly Commercial local, some BBC local
104-105MHz - Mostly BBC local, some Commercial local
106-108MHz - Mostly Commercial regional and event stations

In large cities with more stations, especially London, these rules are
frequently not observed.

Typically the national stations will have twenty or thirty different
transmitters and frequencies within their band. Using RDS your car
radio retunes automatically (and usually unnoticably) as you drive
around. For instance, I drive 25 miles to work down a valley;
listening to BBC Radio 4, my RDS car radio retunes three times (92.7 /
93.4 / 93.0 MHz). You have to remember that most of the UK is a pretty
hilly place, but well populated enough to make the transmitter
infrastructure worth the money.

BBC local stations are generally based on counties and may have
several studios with one main studio in the county capital (usually
the "cathedral city", ie. administrative town, often only 50-100k
residents). Commercial local stations are generally based on large
urban cities and usually only have one studio, although there are a
handful of rural stations which have been set up by enthusiasts (often
more an eccentric ego trip than a profitable business, but they make
for truly *fascinating* listening). Some commercial stations join
together at various times of day for regional output, notably
overnight, but this isn't as common as it is in the US. Overnight on
BBC local radio stations there is either regional output for
speciality music (eg. Folk, Jazz, South Asian music) or a stereo
rebroadcast of the otherwise mono MW station BBC Radio 5 (a rolling
news/sport station).

In general there is more local news on the BBC than on commercial
radio. Also you are more likely to get live outside broadcasts on the
BBC than on commercial; although commercial local stations are well
known for providing huge mobile trucks which act as both stage and
mobile studio for large events such as fireworks, exhibitions etc,
whereas the BBC generally have several smaller LandRover/Jeep type
vehicles.

Examples of BBC and commercial stations covering the same area:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/england/radioshropshire/
-- very obvious community/news link to rural county of Shropshire
-- "fill-in" FM transmitters on seperate frequencies for areas with
poor reception such as Ludlow which is behind a huge hill

http://beaconshropshire.musicradio.com/homepage.jsp
-- much more music oriented, tied to the more urban town of Telford
-- does not even attempt to cover poor reception areas, ignores Ludlow

"Event" stations are things like a radio station covering the
Cheltenham Gold Cup horse race, Silverstone Formula 1 motor racing -
typically these stations broadcast for only one or two weeks per year
and have a range of only 1-2 miles (although they are pretty easy to
pick up from further afield using a decent directional antenna). The
kit for these can be rented as a complete package, with mobile studio,
transmitter, engineers, delivery etc. included.

"Regional" stations are a pretty new idea. The first one is Kerrang!,
a heavy metal radio station from the industrial city of Birmingham
which has an extremely powerful transmitter and a very well positioned
antenna, covering the whole of the centre of England (the "Midlands")
with one frequency (105.7MHz).

There is also commercial local radio on AM-MW but this is increasingly
rare. BBC local radio on AM-MW has almost died out entirely - I can
only think of one BBC local station still on MW in my area, and this
is to fill a specific FM reception blackspot. Generally the commercial
MW stations are "goldien oldies" stations.

What I found really different about radio in the UK to the US is that
US MW stations seem to be mostly single-point-of-view politics. In the
UK you are not allowed to present a political show from only one point
of view, you have to provide "balance" or you loose your licence. The
problem is that a lot of UK political shows become very bland as a
result, I actually found the US political radio shows much more
interesting listening because they actually discussed one point of
view in *depth*, rather than having to cut over to the other side all
the time. Most UK political shows degenerate into a shouting match
between the two sides within a few minutes, whereas US political
presenters have the power to just cut troublemakers off.


--
Andrew Oakley