HS2 isn't worth it

[Globules]

I'm having a holiday in the Midlands.

I know the area pretty well, so have been appalled at the way HS2 has carved up the landscape. It looks awful.

Now that I've landed in my hotel, I've been reading up on HS2.

The minimum projected cost is £87.7 BILLION.

This is an absolutely shocking amount. What is the benefit? Is it that important that people arrive in Birmingham about 10 mins earlier?

Do you think we should cut our losses now and stop throwing cash that our country doesn't have at this money pit?

YABU - it'll be of huge benefit to the country
YANBU - we need to stop the work now and try to repair the damage already caused.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cz6e0vplgldt?app-referrer=search

The vast majority of the country won't see any difference in the train network and as for the argument that it will mean more trains...I very much doubt it, nobody will be able to afford to travel by rail soon due to the ridiculous ticket prices so the rail companies won't be able to afford to run extra trains.
The whole thing is just a waste of money, time and effort.

This is an absolutely shocking amount. What is the benefit? Is it that important that people arrive in Birmingham about 10 mins earlier?

It was mostly about capacity, not speed

I guess HS2 fell out of my brain as I hadn't seen it.

I appreciate the point of view of saying that the motorways I drove to the Midlands on also were criticised and carved up the countryside.

HS2 seems like a spectacular spend though. If the increased capacity means cheaper rail fares, then I can see some benefits.

I remember when the QE2 bridge was built - tolls on that were supposed to stop when it was paid for, but that never happened, and never will.

The investment and cost to the countryside just doesn't seem worth it to me.

Should never have been named HS2. High Capacity 2 perhaps. All the local trains that get delayed from having to share track with the west coast mainline would have been able to run better. Then we could have more freight on trains which takes trucks off roads.

The idea is good. Terrible execution. However I still think they should build it up to the North.

How many of these major infrastructure projects get looked back on and people say 'what a waste of money that was!'. Channel Tunnel, M6 Toll, even the Elizabeth Line is very popular now and will be for decades and even centuries.

0.3% of GDP is about £7.5 Billion. Imagine if we had ringfenced 0.3% of GDP for major infrastructure projects since the 80s how the UK would look today. HS2 built out to original scope, northern powerhouse rail, Tunnel under the Peak District connecting Sheffield and Manchester, A1(M) dualling complete all the way. Underground/Metro rail in our biggest cities. Cumulative economic affects would be huge for just 0.3 of GDP outlay.

It really wasn't. It was politically folly right from the outset trying to build the fastest railway in Europe. Just why for such a small distance on a small Island? Utter folly. And everything else came from that flawed basis, i.e. route, tunnels, bridges, etc.

@Globules Come and have a look along the Misbourne valley and the mess at the southern end of the AONB near Wendover. It’s like the Somme with bridges over it. No one can think that’s worthwhile and the money should have been spent in the north. People like Burnham and others just didn’t get it!

It wasn't Boris. The original planning was started under Blair/Brown and Labour in the late noughties. They're the ones who wanted the fastest line in Europe and HS2 was named and designed for that.

It was also planned and started long before Boris.

The North was desperate to get to London and back quicker. I remember Pete Waterman going mad for it. The fools didn’t realise they needed the railways better in the north! The rest of us don’t mind driving to Birmingham. It’s barely going to make a difference to the routes already serving Birmingham

No they really weren't. Right from the outset, we knew that travel times from our town to London would actually be longer under HS2. That's because we currently have direct trains to/from London. Under HS2, our main line station would lose all of it's direct London trains and we'd have to get local/slower trains to Preston or Manchester to then get routed onto the HS2 line after a period of waiting at the station to change trains - the "waiting" time and the slower local trains took more time than the modest saving in time on the forwarding train using HS2 line.

Yes, it would improve speeds for those living in the major cities like Preston, Manchester, Leeds, and then Glasgow, but some of the reduced time, especially at the North end of the west coast main line was cutting the number of intermediate stops North of Preston!

I live in an area affected by the building of hs2 and absolutely fed up with the constant crap of road closures and disruption. It is costing an absolute ridiculous amount of money which the country can't afford for very little benefit.

Here you are. The AONB.

Will the fares be higher on the HS2 route?

And more. Concrete manufacturing plants every 3 miles. New access roads and Corten steel viaduct! Those who actually think this is ok, come and have a look.

Know very little about engineering and train lines, however I know a lot about traveling in China, Japan and Korea. We look like muppets. They laugh at us all the time they are sitting in their high speed trains…

Ditto everyone who mentions it is about capacity rather than speed.

But many solutions were already built and could have been reopened at the fraction of the cost. But, no, the big boys wanted a new train set to play with.

Alternatives include:

Manchester/Buxton/Matlock through to London main line. It's still there, a big double gauge heavy duty railway. Now used as a walking/cycle class. Compared to HS2 this would have been cheaper and faster to re-open.

Great Central line linking Sheffield to London. Reopening it would add capacity and provide a diversionary line when existing routes are busy or blocked.

Woodhead line Manchester to Sheffield/Leeds. Tunnels now used for electricity but could be used to increase capacity between Lancashire and Yorkshire.

Waverly line from Carlisle to Edinburgh. Reopening it would restore a direct rail link between Scotland and northern England, adding capacity.

There are lots and lots of alternative routes that are still there, in the countryside, waiting to be rehabilitated. All far, far cheaper than HS2.

Of course. They have to pay for it somehow.

It's gonna blow your mind but initially it was going to SCOTLAND. Apparently, this is an impossible dream and it was quickly dropped. Tho the price never went down!

Dont get me started on the payments for river crossings in the East

None in the West.

Its discrimination against the poor.

@Sunnydaysforevernow The Chinese don’t care what’s destroyed and they have a much bigger country. Japan has had high speed for decades but it’s a very different set of circumstances - and people live alongside their railways.

The engineering is a big problem. It has been designed for very high speeds until that was costing too much. There was a report submitted about all of this waste around a month ago. Indecision, bad decisions and over engineered solutions that are then ditched have cost £billions. That’s where we are stupid. This is now just saving 10 mins from London to somewhere near Birmingham. It’s still not funded past Old Oak Common in London either. They are looking for business investment!

I know, I live near Euston and the whole thing is a farce.
Sure, the Chinese don’t care, the Japanese don’t care, the Koreans something else, in the meantime they live in the future and we just throw away money and get no result. Whether this should have been done or not should have been decided then. The fact that the budget is not even remotely similar to what it was at the beginning is ridiculous. We know they wouldn’t be able to achieve it, and here we are.

well if the ‘carrot’ was “quicker” then surely they’ll struggle. No-one is going to pay extra for “capacity”

The England and Wales project that has active disbenefits for Wales? Yes I am not impressed. I really hope that Rhun ap Iorwerth goes in hard to bat for this - which his previous statements indicate he will do. We received no automatic funding uplift, unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland plus we've still got the crappy Barnett Formula but that's another argument for another day that Burnham apparently now he's approaching leadership is suddenly fine with.

Who what that Del Boy chancellor we had for five minutes who 'forgot' to pay his tax? Nadhim Zahawi. Who first said that Wales was getting a major terminal... and when told that the nearest hub would be Crewe, which isn't in Wales, responded with "It's near Wales." Not in Wales though is chum? Someone can waft £1m in £500 notes in my face but unless it's in my bank account then it's not a thing is it. And then Crewe was scrapped anyway.

The tiny little redeeming feature is lots of really good archaeology - I worked for one of the organisations that unearthed some brilliant stuff, we were on Dig for Britain more than once - but offset this against compulsory purchases and wide scale environmental damage... then maybe even the social history aspect is not enough of a compensation for the destruction.

Those new roads near Stoke Mandeville are terrifying, just pure desolation. And I still want to cry driving the A413 from Amersham, I remember when they first started digging. It's just unbelievable. And the worst thing... the fencing on the A404 to disguise the vent by Amersham hospital, tastefully decorated with all they have destroyed Whielden Ln - Google Maps. I just can't believe anybody would sign off on this sick joke.

Japan had their own equivalent nightmare trying to get their maglev built. Very cool idea in their, held up for years and years and massively over budget. Largely due to local politics etc
Its moving forward now and will be very cool when completed. Yay for Japan. But in general most countries aren't looking at other countries infrastructure projects and laughing at those countries. They have their own shit going on. That doesn't make unnecessary overspend ok or means we shouldnt hold governments to account over it. But the "X is laughing at us" narrative is a classic sign of low self esteem. Ironically more likely to come from the types who think their culture (je British/Western/Japanese/American) is inherently the best. It leads to emotional thinking and poor decision making.

They should have started in the North and built south. Or started midway (eg Manchester) and built in both directions. That would have meant that at least the cities that weren't London had a chance of being connected to each other.
But it's a vicious circle. Worse infrastructure outside the South East means lower growth, less money and industry there. Lower growth and less industries gives the impression there is less demand for infrastructure than the South East. So less justification for improving infrastructure. So everything gets more and more concentrated in one corner of the country which hurts the people living there as well because house and rental prices are wildly out of sync with the rest of the country and it keeps getting more crowded as everyone piles in looking for jobs. Which leads to even more demand for infrastructure in the SE at the expense of everywhere else. And repeat.

Exacerbated by the fact that we left the EU which, for it's faults, did have schemes designed to help poorer regions. And did this with a very South-Easy Centric Tory government (see Rishi Sunaks boast that they were sending money back to the affluent towns there).