I'm heat pump curious because it's cool technology and I want instant hot water but lol, no way with that ratio.

You’d have thought it would be bigger.

There are small wins of course. Apps have made the taxi market more efficient. I suspect that some of the logistics stuff (Amazon process innovations, online food shopping) has increased productivity a bit. But bigger cars, less road space, and more congestion probably eats it.

Last but not least,... and returning to transport,... I think it's quite interesting that the "productivity" of our transport system has basically not increased in thirty years. We've got all this new technology. Buses and cars all on the internet, tap to pay, and no improvement.

@thetrainline You'll note on that screenshot of the Trenitalia website, they don't advertise French TGV trains on the route. And on the French TGV website,... they don't advertise the Trenitalia trains. These are competitors, not friends. But, because of EU regs, The Trainline shows both.

@thetrainline This is already working pretty well. It is because of EU regulation, not the independent generosity of France's national railway, that Trenitalia run trains from Lyon to Paris now, greatly reducing the cost of tickets on the route.

They're going to regulate so that, • You can use the same app (current market leader is UK @thetrainline) to book tickets on all operators in every country. • Trains from one country can operate much more easily in other countries with much less national regulatory overhead.

The Spanish are just about to complete their high speed railway from Madrid to San Sebastian,... again because they want to. These are overwhelmingly national projects of two sovereign states funded by domestic mixes of public and private companies. So what is the EU role?

The rest of the map looks the same. Paris to Madrid in six hours? The French are expanding their high speed railway from Bordeaux (built by a public private partnership) to Biarritz and then the Spanish border because the French want to,...

The tunnel will largely be self-funding. The toll will be €73 for a car. Much more for a truck. Enormously more for a train. The Danish put the market in market socialism.

On the German side, the Germans are doing the same. Typically of Germany, they are doing it slowly and probably spending too little, though that should now change with the Merz stimulus. There is a small amount of EU top up money, but overwhelmingly it's national funds.

The Danish government is massively expanding its roads from Copenhagen to the South in Rødbyhavn where the new tunnel is being built to as we speak. It's also hugely upgrading its railways along the route, both for passengers and for freight. This is almost all Denmark.

Is the European Commission going to bring down train travel time from Berlin to Copenhagen from 7h to 4h? Of course not. The Danish government are going to do that. With a new road and rail tunnel that reduces the distance from Hamburg to Copenhagen from 450km to 290km.

I decided to read the European Commission's high-speed rail action plan. I can't see much link to the excitable headlines about it (which I would dislike). It just looks like more very boring market-building and neoliberalism to me. Which is good.

For a similar but much better "let's just do something" output, do check out Open Safely. I don't know the details well enough to say what. But I'm nearly certain that it's like something within the NHS ecosystem that's costing 100x as much and is worse.

ps. this raw data is what lets us do the "Birmingham is a small city" type analysis that we pioneered for the whole of Great Britain. We have tools where we can explore that on a small subset of the data in Yorkshire and North West England. https://t.co/5xcQKvd6Ov

You'll be able to see a gap in the collection. That's where we had a power cut for a few minutes and I forgot to turn the computer back on. Upgrading this project from a £1k one to a £1M one would avoid that. Fixing edge cases is expensive and that's sometimes right to do.

People don't have to tell us when they download the data. That's always one of the trade offs you make when you reduce friction to zero with data. But people, big companies, researchers, etc... do often tell us that they're using it and how useful it is.

It's here if you like. I don't really think it's much of a "public sector vs. private sector" productivity story. It's more a big vs. small story. But not something I've got my head round well enough to write about. Yet.

So we just started collecting the data every 30s ourselves and put it on the web. It's a 1TB archive now. It costs us basically nothing. It's on my £41/month home broadband, on a £100 old computer I had lying around running Linux, put a £500 SSD in, and it just works.