HS2 yay or nay?

[BloodyHellKen]

With the recent discussion re: HS2 all over the news I've been wondering what the general consensus is and MN seems like a good place to start.

Do people feel it should:
a) have been stopped years ago
b) stopped now
c) completed

Personally I think it should have been stopped years ago as I always suspected it was a lot of money for very little gain (in fact I wouldn't even have started it). The money could have been better spent elsewhere IMO (eg a reliable service from Liverpool to Leeds via Manchester) and I don't understand why both Labour and Conservatives have been so wedded to it.

Anyone?

For the life of me I cannot understand what the point is of another direct train to London that will be no doubt extortionately expensive to use. The UK desperately needs affordable, reliable cross country / spoke type rail services taking in small cities and towns and starting with the North of England.

It’s been a fucking stupid idea from the start and executed in the worst of all ways.

A).

But it’s going exactly as the southern Tories expected it to? So I am not sure what people were expecting. As others have mentioned, if they were serious about finishing the project they would have started in the North, and then connected down. This would have levelled up the country, properly, and then if necessary you’d connect to London. Or you’d create a more balanced country where all roads (and train lines) didn’t lead to London.

Last time I checked we live in a capitalist country, yet London is favoured time after time. Surely it’s a big boy, it could have handled being looked over once?

It’ll be interesting how long it takes estate agents to stop telling foreign property investors that their new development is “close to the new HS2 station at Piccadilly”. They haven’t exactly added the caveat that it’s currently now 2040, or that it’s above ground and the trains will whistle past said development, but who cares about details!

It’s an utter waste of space for us.

we live directly along what would have been the Leeds line. Would have been able to see it in the middle distance behind our house.

currently we can walk to our nearest station, and be in King’s Cross in 1 hr 50, with trains every half hour.

hs2 the local service would be drastically reduced to a couple of times a day. I would need to drive 30-40 mins to Leeds, park up, then hs2 takes 1 hr 40 to get to London.

so it would take me longer and be much less convenient to get to London.

also the current main London line also takes me straight to Edinburgh and Aberdeen, or south to Plymouth. So those places would be less accessible as well.

usual shitty design with no thought to the practicalities. Just “oh you can get to London faster”. Yeah, no.

I've always thought A, it never made sense to me as it was clear that people would start holding more online meetings and travelling less - the pandemic just accelerated the uptake.
They've trashed swathes of beautiful countryside and planned it to run through (i.e. destroy) several (25 at the last count I think or 20 hectares) ancient woodlands which are irreplaceable and precious and rare - all in a country with some of the most depleted biodiversity in Europe.

It would have made so much more sense to use some of the money to better connect cities and towns in the North and the Midlands to each other and not make everything about London - we should be focusing jobs and investment away from the South East given it's high population and the resulting pressures on resources and infrastructure (especially water).

This is what a lot of people were saying at the time but to our various politicians, vanity projects are far more important.

So as A is too late. I go for B

Every other country in Europe has decent high speed rail services. The UK is completely left behind.
There are bits of the West Coast Main Line that are 200 years old - physical infrastructure lasts a long time, the benefits accrue over multiple generations.

It should have started in the north and worked down. However, I also think that improvements to E-W connectivity in the north are just as important, possibly more so! Many of the cities up here already have rail lines which can get you down to london in 2 hours, so I'd think there are other more pressing projects.

The other big problem in this country is when you declare you have deep pockets, suddenly everyone charges more, or their land is worth more, or there is suddenly some other expensive issue that now exists.

Tories being fucked by Toryism. But really, the proper Tories (not the scab northern ones) wanted this scheme to fail, once Brum had been declared as London’s newest commuter city.

Yes to improved rail links but this one has had such a negative impact for what looks to be very little benefit. The thought of the improvements that could have been made for the same amount, and served far more passengers... And now we've got Sunak and Shapps trying to frame the northern phase as an extravagance when the southern section has been fine by them.

A) Stupid idea, the money should have been spent improving rail connections in the north, particularly E-W. I say this as someone who used to live in the NE and currently live in the SE and can see the works for HS2 out of my back window. Last week they were out there tearing down ancient hedgerow. It is quick to get from Birmingham to London anyway. And that is into central London, not somewhere random on the outskirts. So now I am all for B.

@Teddleshon the reasons were partly driven by an ambition to separate long distance, freight, and local commuter traffic. It frees up space for more short commuter trains, and means you can get freight and commuter cars off the roads.

The fact that is has been poorly implemented does not mean it was necessarily the wrong thing to try to do. I know nothing about how contracts were let for HS2 but I have worked on similar projects. The money wasted on those because the design and installation programmes were not integrated properly when they were awarded to different contractors was horrendous. There are legitimate costs that are hard to estimate, though: Structural surveys, wildlife surveys, archaeology, consultation periods for closing level crossings, neighbours holding the project to ransom by demanding huge sums to access the track, the requirement to ensure that footpath and road access is maintained, the costs of thefts of materials, and so many more things that aren’t discussed in the newspapers - that’s part of the reason why our projects cost so much and take so long.

It would really help if our long-term transport planning was done independently of party politics.

I was against it in the first place and thought they could have used the money in other ways to boost transport links but once they had made that decision they should stick to it.

What I do find slightly depressing is that other countries in Europe seem to build fast train infrastructures quite successfully whereas we always seem to do it the hard way, Crossrail was years late and way over budget.

To be fair, didn't HS2 first emerge in the early 2000's as an idea and from what I can see Labour are just as keen on throwing away money on it.

Should have started from the north with a proper connection/upgrade from Manchester to Leeds. Then worked down from Manchester to Birmingham. However, that didn't happen.

The delay at Euston was a bad short term financial decision to make. The delay will cost billions in the long term, due to restarts, new contracts etc, It's a building site and residents have to now put up with it.

https://www.geplus.co.uk/news/hs2-confirms-euston-tunnel-delay-as-third-london-tbm-launches-14-04-2023/

HS2 has had cross party support from the get go. The regional mayors are also strong supporters.

c. Not at any cost though. I think the more serious question is why do major infrastructure projects like this struggle to actually get built - always £millions if not billions spent on endless consultation and to-ing and fro-ing whether stuff gets eventually built or not.

I live in Manchester and agree that trans pennine links should be given more priority though.

I think it should be completed. If you stop road projects such as the tunnel under Stonehenge and others which might save people a few minutes at a few weekends a year or minutes of the day, funding can be found.

I would not have chosen the route concerned but given how far construction has got, do not think it should stop at Birmingham.

Why? What advantage do you think it will bring if it‘a completed?

a few people will be able to get to London more quickly. A lot more will have their services cut both to London and the wider country.

and what for? So a handful of rich Londoners can buy cheaper northern properties, driving the prices up for locals, and commute to their London jobs?

I basically see it as a drain to funnel work and jobs from the north into London.

if you’re a single mum in Leeds, now priced out of housing and good schools, what good is being able to get into London 10 mins quicker going to do you? Not as if you can commute is it?

I am against it as it counts as part of Wales' infrastructure when we won't benefit from it at all. They mention capacity being reduced on other ones with the introduction of HS2 but it is a rather loose benefit.

HS2 was never about getting people to London quicker - the press have just led with that for years; there are a myriad of benefits that are still valid, if poorly implemented! As for those saying Europe does infrastructure projects quicker - that’s because they don’t have such robust Environmental Impact Assessment guidance so just ride roughshod through assenting their projects (not all, but a lot) which we can’t do due to our guidance, hence the time and costs going up in the UK. We are decades behind Europe in terms of public transport and freight; if we stop this now, we will continue to fall further behind (and costs to users will continue to increase)

I think it should go ahead now and just be completed; however, it should have started in the North!! And northern East West routes should have been included and prioritised.

I don't know if I'm entirely honest - I don't know enough of the detail to make an informed judgement. I do think that the rail infrastructure is in need of serious investment and improvement, but I'm not sure that HS2 was the solution that was needed. I absolutely agree that the North and the Midlands need to be better connected to the South, and I also agree that East to West services need to be better.

So maybe it should never have been started, but we have invested so much now, it seems a colossal waste not to finish it - what we have so far is of no use to anyone anywhere as far as I can see. And yes, I know, there isn't much point in throwing more money at sunk costs etc, but at least if it was finished we would get at least some benefits as originally envisaged. Rather than a half arsed, half finished project that is no good to anyone.

A. There was so much that could be done with improving the existing lines and services - spending so much on a completely new line with such limited appeal (only saves 20 minutes Birmingham to London, no stops so you have to depart/arrive at those specific stations).

It's going to end up like the M6 Toll - a massively expensive, environmentally destructive project that will struggle to turn a profit, and won't solve the 'problems' it was supposed to.

The fact that they started with the southern leg was utter madness too.

It’s probably the most embarrassing thing to happen to this country in weeks.

Idk as I haven’t looked into it much but I do think the whole thing about 20 mins ignores the green benefit of getting millions of lorries of the roads a year

That should be a lead message

Stopping now is bloody ridiculous, the worst of all worlds. The Tories have completely mismanaged this project.

We must build it.
We're building it.
We're building most of it.
We're building some of it.
We're building hardly any of it and it's the bits that won't make any difference.

Geniuses, led by Head Genius Sunak