AIBU to think HS 2 is a monumental waste of money?

[cloudtreecarpet]

So I heard people discussing HS2 on the radio today.
Apparently when it's finished it will have cost around £100 billion and it won't be completed until 2029!

Am I being unreasonable to be absolutely shocked and horrified by this and see it as a huge waste of money?
Labour began the idea in 2009 & successive Governments have continued it.

But will it actually be of value in the end and is it worth the money?

These are genuine questions and I am prepared to be enlightened by those who maybe know more about it because tbh at the moment it looks to me like a massive, expensive con.

Have you only just realised this? It’s been a massive waste of money since it startedu and we’ve destroyed swathes of countryside for nothing.

But a point of correction. The current scheme is not even as useful as original plan. They aren’t building the planned ‘top end’, which reduces the (minimal) benefits even further.

A pointless plan decided before Microsoft Teams was a thing.

YANBU -it’s pointless.

Later than 2029 🤔
I think it's 2039 for West London (Old Oak Common) to B'ham and 2040-2043 for connection to Euston.
And of course it will be further delayed.
And of course the price will rise again.
It literally cost less to send Artemis II to the moon and back.
Madness.

YANBU

Totally agree. I think it’s going to take even longer than that, to not going to the original destinations. What a shitshow.

I literally took a project management course 3 years ago where the primary example of failed project management was HS2. This isn’t exactly news.

This. Yanbu.

Without a doubt.

I feel sorry for anyone blighted by this farce of a rail project. People losing their homes for absolutely sod all.

Sadly I doubt anyone will be held accountable for the monumental cock up.

Absolutely insane amounts of money. I drove from Birmingham to London recently and passed by so many huge pillars that are just connected to nothing, nowhere near completed at all and no works were even happening.

I live in Staffordshire near where it is being built and it's already caused chaos for years, homes and businesses were taken by compulsory purchase, traffic regularly diverted for weeks at a time through small towns and villages.
Dual carriageways that used to be 60mph are, for months at a time, reduced to 40mph and down to one lane which makes commuting awful.

I don't know a single person who thinks it's a good idea.

Sorry that was a typo, I knew it was 2039 but thanks for pointing it out though. Makes it even worse!

No I haven't just realised this, I have always thought it was a ludicrous waste of money but for it to be still continuing I just began to wonder if I was missing something.

So why hasn't it been stopped??
Maybe that is what my AIBU really is - why keep going with something that is clearly a huge money pit?
It seems like the definition of madness to keep doing something everyone knows is crap so why hasn't someone just put a stop to it?
That's what I don't get?

Anyone?

Because too many people are being paid stupid amounts of money to apoear to be doing something. Which is how the world works now apparently. I'm an old cynic and ask why things like this go on every day, and always it's down to funneling money around. Only money matters. As a species we appear to be fucked.

Typical of our country though. 'oh 'ets get to London 5 mins quicker'. We are more then just the inside of the M25.

I mean this is my suspicion - that vested interests have too much to lose - but I am often accused of being cynical or blinkered so I thought I would see if there is another side to this that is more positive.
Seems not.

We should be on the streets about it really, shouldn't we??

It’s the sunk cost fallacy, apparently politicians are too stupid to have taken any business courses 🤷‍♀️

Plus they’ve given the money to their mates to make their mates richer as billionaires are so great 🧐

Not only the sheer cost, the ever-increasing timescales, and not even going North of Birmingham, they've now even reduced the design speeds, so it's not even going to be the "fastest in Europe" as originally planned for. And, of course, it was also stupid that it didn't directly connect to HS1 which would have actually been really useful.

They could have just laid a "Normal" railway line at normal speeds for a fraction of the cost that would have solved the capacity problem at the bottom end of the West Coast main line which is basically the only remaining benefit.

While taking to the streets is very tempting, too many people seem to think that those with stupid wealth behind them are a class of demi-Gods who we need for their entrepreneurial skills regardless of the human cost associated with their "brilliant wheezes".

Been commenting on a couple of threads about the COL crisis and the alleged impossibility of taxing the growing numbers of billionaires to achieve some sort of sensible wealth redistribution, and the resistance and sycophancy is quite astonishing.

Apparently questioning the effects of late stage capitalism on the future well being of ordinary people is akin to heresy, and anyone being proactive in doing so is a dangerous naive socialist or Communist. The days of revolution appear to be long gone...

The current zeitgeist is extremely worrying on many many levels. And nothing is Elon's fault.

Absolutely.

Textbook sunk money fallacy.

Assuming no leaves on the line, no strikes, no bad weather. The 100 billion will shave 20 mins off the old train journey.

So yeah, worth every penny. Especially when WFH is being pushed and the way business is being done now isn’t how it was being done when the thing was planned.

And they slaughtered countryside and forests for this madness.

Came to say this but you put it very succinctly @MistressoftheDarkSide

My DH is convinced that vast swathes of the public sector solely exist to keep people employed (I am public sector).