To think that spending billions on UK transport infrastructure is crazy?

[YarkYark]

God, my AIBU sounds like I'm a journalist (I'm not) but this drives me crazy.

During and after the pandemic this country proved pretty adequately that business can carry on pretty much as usual without endess face to face meetings. I used to go to many of these, both in the UK and abroad, inevitably it meant hours or days of travel and associated costs, often all for the sake of a few hours where little would be decided - except the date of the next jolly. Actual decisons would likely be done over the phone the next day.

So why, why, why does this country need to be investing is super high cost projects like HS2 and a third runway for Heathrow. Why will there continue to be a need for people to travel to do business when we shoud be investing in a world leading internet infrastructure and cut out all the travel nonsense and associated issues?

What am I missing?

YABU: Of course UK needs to improve its transport links, otherwise we'll never grow as a country.

YANBU: You're right, we're thinking like its the 1990s, get with the future, Britain.

The concept wasn't about speed, the name should have been changed to High capacity 2 . Many people have said the same but it was designed because the east and west coast main lines are full . This was to give those lines extra local and freight services. The speed was just a byproduct of newer technology. I could have been constructed at a much lower cost but politicians got involved.

Every major city in the UK should be linked by bullet train lines.

one of the areas I work in is getting people into employment and improving people’s well-being ( access to leisure and socialization and health opportunities). Lack of travel infrastructure is universally acknowledged to be one of the biggest barriers to achieving our goals in these areas.

We are rapidly becoming a third world country in terms of infrastructure. It's embarrassing. Please for the sake of jobs/the economy/horrible congested road BUILD MORE INFRASTRUCTURE

OP there's 80 million people in this country. We can't all work from home ffs

Good article here
about the benefits investing in the Elizabeth line has brought.

Great answer to a really weird/dumb post. I think they confused France with... Russia?

The apocryphal story is that standard gauge rails are as wide as Stephenson was tall!

People are being forced back into office or at least hydbid. Public transportation has gotten insanely expensive, and the train keeps skipping a lot of the smaller stations, so getting to the cities is getting worse

Yup, I think it's only Russia and Finland who have different gauges to the UK and most of Europe who are all standardised at the same 4' 8.5". Perhaps the previous poster was thinking of the very old Great Western/Brunel gauge which was 7' but phased out I think over 100 years ago.

We invest nowhere near enough in infrastructure. Ironically, that's why projects are so expensive and costs run out of control.

Travelling across the UK is shocking!

YABU
Physical infrastructure is essential.
Public transport is essential.
Broadband is essential.

Britain should be spending on all three. The either/ or (scarcity) mindset is detrimental to economic growth.

We are always poor at controlling costs. That’s because they are always hugely under estimated in the first place. Then inflation spirals costs.

HS2 was supposed to be about speed (hence the name). If we didn’t want speed, improve the lines we have for longer trains. It was always about speed and big boys’ trains. Capacity could have been provided without a new railway to the suburb of Birmingham. Railways already go there! This leaves east - west in the north very poorly served. We can only guess what ticket prices might be. We did not need HS2 above other rail improvements. It’s gobbled up far too much money and decimated the countryside. It’s utterly dreadful. As for more high speed? Why? It’s only ever a few minutes saved and half the time, the end station isn’t where you want to be anyway.

Travelling off peak in advance is good value. Travelling last minute in busy times is not. So largely business pays the high prices.

It really wasn't built with speed in mind , the name probably came from some consultancy. By people who know , I've read it's not really possible to add much capacity to either west or east coast line.
Costs are never accurate because if the true costs were known nothing would get built and politicians get involved in decision making, in this case adding tunnels where none were needed.

It’s not just the north. I’m guessing public transport doesn’t work outside of London. Google maps say we are 6 miles from Southampton city centre. We don’t have buses. DC takes a school bus to and from her secondary. If she stays for an after school club, we have to drive to pick her up (otherwise it is a one hour walk). They cancelled the bus from us to the 6th form college.

There used to more bus services. They have just all gone with all the council funding cuts.

Probably Spain rather than Russia, in Spain the AVE network has been built to Stephenson gauge rather than the 5'6" used there and in Portugal so it's completely incompatible with the existing infrastructure. HS2 (particularly in its truncated state) will have through running onto existing lines to send trains north to Glasgow, Edinburgh and Manchester. Sadly any improvements to services in Manchester won't come unless the government actually builds HS2 in full because Manchester's railways are so congested.

The width is the space required to fit two horses. Take a tape measure to Pompeii and measure the wheel ruts, Roman carts were built to the same width.

It wasn't really well suited to locomotives, 5' would have been better and of course Brunel's 7' was vastly superior in technical terms, just like Betamax (look what happened to that). But because standardisation is convenient we're stuck with measurements defined by horses' arses. You can see the issue, there used to be through coaches from Moscow to Madrid (the USSR ran many through trains across Europe for the benefit of its diplomats) which would have to swap wheels twice en route, taking four hours each time. Stephenson gauge is spreading, I've already mentioned Spain but there's also the Rail Baltica project linking Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland.

Believe it or not, French railways drive on the left hand side, thanks to the British influence. Until you get into Alsace where things swap sides because those railways were built by the Germans.

Don't forget Spain, Portugal, Ireland and the Baltic states

@Thisiswhathings Ive no idea what you have read but a lot of additional costs have been incurred due to the high speeds affecting design. DH is FICE and HS2 design is greatly affected by high speed requirements. This includes tunnels, camber, bends etc. All are affected by high speed.

You might not know this, but the design is continually being amended. Water tables, drainage, all sorts of things are being changed as they go along adding to costs. Even bridges. They have teams of engineers doing this. Plus they over engineer. Umpteen wider bridges on C roads and all sorts of lax cost controls have allowed spiralling costs. They haven’t even got the money to get it to Euston at the moment. Old Oak Common anyone? All this for saving 15 minutes on a rail journey . Other lines could have been improved or the north E-W improved. It was a nuts decision to spend £100 billion on this.

Bollocks. It was always about capacity. The project started as a Stafford bypass. We have squeezed everything we can out of the existing lines and the result is very fragile. They tried upgrading the WCML in the early 2000s and it bankrupted Railtrack - trying to upgrade an active railway is very disruptive and very expensive. Having done that you end up with a route still constrained by the interests of Victorian canal owners and landed gentry who didn't want the line cutting through their estates. At some point you have to stop tinkering with Victorian infrastructure and start afresh.

A basic look at supply and demand will show what will happen to ticket prices. HS2 will drastically increase the number of seats out of Euston and an increase in supply will allow the current inflated prices to drop.

If your husband is FICE then he will probably be able to answer if all 65 miles of tunnels are needed for the train to run or they are there for other reasons. I think politicians listening to NIMBYs. A 10 mile tunnel wouldn't have been cheap , especially because of it's geology. There is also the extra ongoing maintenance of a tunnel.
It wasn't built only to save time , it was built for capacity, not sure where you read it was. It could have easily been built for less.

The reason that costs spiralled was that the contracts were let to the big construction firms on a "cost plus" basis. So their profit margin is a fixed percentage of the cost. The biggest cost is concrete. Who effectively sets the price of concrete? The construction giants. The more materials cost, the more they get from that fixed percentage.

Meddling by politicians doesn't help either, with them randomly chopping and changing bits on a whim because they need to give a conference speech in the morning. Yes, Rishi, I'm looking at you.

Building high speed is more expensive but not that much more on top of the costs of building any line at all. Slab track is more expensive than ballasted track but it needs less maintainance so you save money in the long run. Running at a slower speed means less efficient utilisation of rolling stock so you need to order more rolling stock which costs money. We also need to reduce short-haul flights which means that trains need to be properly competitive with air travel. Four hours is the tipping point but the lower the better. As the Channel Tunnel, LGV Nord and HS1 were progressively completed, Eurostar gradually became more competitive on time with air travel to the extent that there are almost no flights between London and Paris any more. We need to see the same on the London to Edinburgh route.

They have concrete making plants every 3 miles. There is a need for a tunnel to get out of London. Depends what you think about spoiling the Chilterns AONB and how you get under other structures and ground levels.

Anyone who believes this was just about capacity is deluded. You don’t need 200 mph trains for this. That’s just not needed. Rolling stock is way cheaper than HS2 design. If anyone thinks high speed doesn’t cost more to design is absolutely deluded. Of course it does. This track was not needed and we are just going from London to Birmingham! Nowhere close to the north.

If anyone wants hs2 near them I’d love to hear from them. No one wants a big infrastructure project near them, be it roads, Airports or railways. Concessions are made and of course they cost but how much ruining of the countryside do you actually want?

Politicians are in charge of transport policy - it’s their job to be involved. We have been utterly stupid in not improving other lines and spending money to boost the north.

Also - who can build large projects? Local builders? Of course big construction companies do it. Who else has the expertise? Oh. The Chinese.

DH is also FIStructE. Some of what’s written here is laughable. Essentially this has been a design on the hoof project based on cartoons m. So the price is subject to massive inflation. The price of concrete is a side show.

Looking forward to ticket prices going down. Oh wait a minute! The train does not stop. I won’t be on it. I do think it will be a premium service to get from Birmingham airport to London. I also find it unbelievable that this protect is seen as worthwhile when no one can get from Liverpool to Newcastle in a reasonable time. The north has had appallingly complacent leadership.

I don't think a train passing though a few times a day justified a 10 mile tunnel, I assume trains run elsewhere in the Chilterns. It was designed with extra capacity in mind , also speed was a factor which the press focuses on. I can see why people think it was about speed. The issue with politicians is they are thinking about tomorrows daily mail headlines not what the country needs. HS2 should have started in Edinburgh then I can guarantee it would have been completed in full. It was said for years it wouldn't go the full length or anywhere near the north.
Money has been spent on other lines in the north , trans Pennine upgrade will have had billions spent on it.

Spending on transport infrastructure generates growth which we desperately need right now. It should pay back the amount invested and more.

The only solution to the capacity problem was a new line to supplement the congested WCML. If you're going to build a new line you might as well do it properly and build a 21st century piece of infrastructure.

Case study time. London to Manchester is the same distance as Paris to Brussels and serves a slightly higher population. The French and the Belgians jointly built a high speed line which was completed in 1997 - nearly 30 years ago.

Say you want to get from Paris to Brussels tomorrow morning. You can have a first class ticket for £108.50. Train takes 1hr 20m.

Want to get from Manchester to London tomorrow morning? Standard class will set you back £184.70. Add £80 or so if you want the equivalent service to the European route. Such is the effect of supply not being sufficient for demand. Oh, and don't forget to set your alarm an hour earlier because the journey will take an hour longer.

and we are just going from London to Birmingham! Nowhere close to the north.
The truncated route does serve the North West of England as well as the Scottish Central Belt. Not as well as it would have if it wasn't for Rishi's fag packet of course, but the London to Scotland time is still brought below the four hour mark even with just phase 1.

The blatant lies you use discredit your argument too. This one for example makes me wondering if you've been using the Trump manual on numbers:
All this for saving 15 minutes on a rail journey
London to Birmingham reduces by 37 minutes which is rather a lot more than 15 (you know, how Zelensky's approval ratings are rather a lot more than the 4% Trump claims). On the subject of journey times, London to Manchester reduces by an hour. If the Tories hadn't cut the North East out, Birmingham to Leeds would have reduced by 1 hour and 9 minutes, and seating on this heavily overcrowded route would have more than doubled.

Looking forward to ticket prices going down. Oh wait a minute! The train does not stop. I won’t be on it.
You give yourself away with this. Your motivation is NIMBYism.

DH is also FIStructE.
So he knows about building bridges. Great. If I want to learn about bridges I'll ask him. If on the other hand I wanted to know about the economic benefits of transport improvements, I'll ask KPMG. If I wanted to know about capacity issues on Britain's railways I'd pop down to Milton Keynes and visit The Quadrant where Network Rail's planners work.

Who else has the expertise? Oh. The Chinese.
The French, the Germans, the Spanish, the Japanese, the Italians...

I also find it unbelievable that this protect is seen as worthwhile when no one can get from Liverpool to Newcastle in a reasonable time.
The Transpennine Route Upgrade is ongoing. We can accomplish more than one thing at a time. There was a scheme to improve services between Liverpool and Manchester, but it relies on sharing the HS2 tunnel under South Manchester. Until that's built there will continue to be severe congestion through Stockport and Piccadilly.

By the way, the total number of passengers travelling from Manchester to London in the last financial year was 1,645,885. The total number of passengers travelling from Liverpool to Newcastle was 51,103. Funnily enough there is going to be more priority given to the greater number of people - 32 times as many people.

This is absolute tosh, if needed a Eurostar train could travel from Inverness or Penzance to Barcelona, Naples or Warsaw. The rail gauge is the same on high speed and normal lines in Western Europe, the difference here is the loading guage which means trains are narrower and shorter than some on the continent, due to most of our network dating from Victoria Times and existing bridges etc that would need to be raised (or track lowered) if we matched the continental loading guage