Fancy ideas, these.
Visions of 'airport style' escalator walkways - one up, and one down - through the vintage town-to-harbour tunnel in Cornwall's most sinful of towns, Newquay.
Don't get me wrong, I love the place. I live there.
But assumptions like '1.16 million people [paying 30p a pop] would use the tunnel every year' are unfounded and unrealistic. That’s over 3,000 people a day, as one commenter on thisiscornwall cannily points out.
That's certainly not the pull of Newquay town at the moment, and the infrastructure is far from ready to deal with the purported 'cruise ships' these walkways would attract.
And since when did society get so lazy that a mechanised walkway taking you a distance of less than a mile (all be it, up) would change your mind about visiting a town?
150 years ago it existed as a rail line to transport ore to the harbour. Back in the days when manual labour was just that. Our forefathers would be rolling in their graves at the idea this old tunnel will be turned into a glitzy escalator for the unenergetic.
Please mind your step.
