Exactly, and air safety is actually better than rail safety in any case.
HS2
- Thread starter matherto
- Start date
The chairman of the High Speed 2 rail project has reportedly warned that its cost could rise by £30bn.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49048823
Value for money.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49048823
Value for money.
David Cameron was a complete disaster.
It's the same with all government projects. When it isn't your money there's little incentive to be on time and on budget.
Huge waste of money IMO. Yes, it would have some benefits, but is reducing the time from Manchester to London by something like 30 minutes really going to make such a big difference?
Also, they say it will cost approx 56Bn and be finished by 2033. Projects ALWAYS finish late and over budget so we are likely talking 70 or 80Bn with a completion in 2040. That's 20 years away!
In 20 years, this form of travel will already be seen as old and dated technology. If we want a major transport project then invest in local transport for Northern England and Scotland cities. Failing that, try to get ahead of the curve on Hyperloop (Or something similar), this is what other advanced cities will have in 20 years time.
Also, they say it will cost approx 56Bn and be finished by 2033. Projects ALWAYS finish late and over budget so we are likely talking 70 or 80Bn with a completion in 2040. That's 20 years away!
In 20 years, this form of travel will already be seen as old and dated technology. If we want a major transport project then invest in local transport for Northern England and Scotland cities. Failing that, try to get ahead of the curve on Hyperloop (Or something similar), this is what other advanced cities will have in 20 years time.
It'll make a difference to the pockets of the contractors who stand to make shitloads of money for themselves, but yeah that seems to be about it.
Very true, You'd still have this impact by spending 10bn in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Glasgow, Newcastle and Stoke though. Spread the wealth and make a much bigger impact.
The north has been neglected for too long.
£86bn? Christ, and I thought we were bad for wasting money. Give us some of that to build a proper metro will yiz.
If HS2 cost similar per mile as HS elsewhere in the world maybe it could be justified.
It's about 4-5 times as much though.... HS2 should be cancelled and an investigation launched in to the whole project.
It's about 4-5 times as much though.... HS2 should be cancelled and an investigation launched in to the whole project.
Absolutely this. Technology will render HS2 somewhat redundant before it's even fully commissioned. Autonomous vehicles and projects like you allude to are far, far more likely to revolutionise travel than a slightly quicker train.
The government would be far better off offering a wide range of private sector tax incentives for development of these new innovations so that we're at the forefront of these technologies.
Hurrah! A post on the Café that somebody agrees with
Moving even further into the future, we should be trying to find ways to stop people needing to travel for daily work. Work from home schemes and better video conferencing. Having thousands of people commute from Birmingham to London every day by train cannot be a good thing for the environment no matter how good your train is.
It's utterly pointless, I'd guess 70% of people that travel to an office every day have basically no need to be there.
If you want to scrap HS2 in favor of hyperloop you might as well get used to staying where you are...
86 Billion is a lot, but there'll be an actual benefit for it. It's 86 billion taxpayer money that the tories will have a harder time just passing to their cronies.
86 Billion is a lot, but there'll be an actual benefit for it. It's 86 billion taxpayer money that the tories will have a harder time just passing to their cronies.
What benefit though? If I travel from Manchester to London once a month, every month, I might save 10 hours in my year. Hardly an earth shattering change to anybody's life for 86 billion quid.
The benefit is making the trip when you wouldn't have done so before (to visit football, family, friends, love, business, whatever). The benefit is (marginally) less congested motorways because it's a no brainer to go by train, and less polluted skies because flying is hardly faster. If done right other lines will have more capacity too. In a larger societal picture it makes a neighborhood out of distant cities. It will be easier having a office in Manchester to service customers in London (and hence spread the wealth a bit, hopefully).
This word keeps coming up but I'd like to see a detailed explanation of how HS2 is going to help business. Is the 30 minutes saved going between London and Manchester going to suddenly turn the North into a powerhouse? Are management going to stop using telecommunications (20 years into the future at that when we're using holographic imaging with multi screen manipulation) and jump on an HS2 train? What freight is realistically going to be transported on a passenger line?
The other bolded part is a MASSIVE if. Rail in this country is an absolute joke, leaves on the line cause delays ffs. Nothing works as it is never mind a sophisticated high speed line.
Imagine all those influencer selfies on a sleek new HS2
On a more serious note the thinking is that connected cities act more as a common marketplace. Services that might not be worth offering in just 1 city might be worth offering if you can offer it to customers in multiple city centers. The larger the market the more specialization is viable. Higher specialization leads to higher efficiencies, eventually whatever they specialize in may even be exported.
A little less abstract: Imagine you had all your travel times freed up to either work or use as you choose. You'd be more productive in the time you work and would probably consume more in the time you choose not to. HS2 won't do that but it'll get us a little bit closer.
The last 200 years do not support the theory that better communication leads to less travel (in my opinion). Both have developed side by side. Fancy holograms etc. will never be as revolutionary as the telephone (or email/Fax). They may become standard and used all the time, but people will still want to meet. Especially once AI is at a point where you can't tell if that hologram is representing a real human or not.
Well yeah, any benefit will only happen if it's done right. Rail service won't improve if nothings done though, that's certain. Sinking the 86 Billion into all other rail lines could be the better alternative, but I think we all know that isn't going to happen should HS2 be scrapped.
They need to make getting to the north east and south west a less monumental task. Massive pain in the arse getting to Sunderland or Newcastle to see mates (and insanely expensive). Same with Portsmouth/Southampton/Bournemouth.
Agreed again. The state of internet speeds in this country is criminally poor which is a prohibitive factor in the lack of video conferencing. In some parts of the countryside you can barely stream worst quality Netflix, let alone take part in conferences whereby clarity and continuity are of the utmost importance. My boss for example has to pay for a leased internet line (c. £500 a month) from his personal address as his internet speed is well below what he'd need... That's fine for a director of a mid 8 figure enterprise, but impossible for the dozens of members of staff who work for him.Hurrah! A post on the Café that somebody agrees with
Moving even further into the future, we should be trying to find ways to stop people needing to travel for daily work. Work from home schemes and better video conferencing. Having thousands of people commute from Birmingham to London every day by train cannot be a good thing for the environment no matter how good your train is.
It's utterly pointless, I'd guess 70% of people that travel to an office every day have basically no need to be there.
The issue is that government is simply too wasteful and ignorant to be able to correctly implement the required infrastructure projects. When private enterprise is patently at the forefront of all these innovations (electric vehicles, autonomous vehicles, space travel, underground travel, green technologies etc), then the obvious way to promote these is by embracing these businesses via tax incentives.
To give credit to the government the reduction of benefit in kind tax next year to 0% for fully electric vehicles with a lengthy range is a positive start. That tax break makes it a no brainer for businesses to start to move across to a fully electric fleet, which in turn forces car manufacturers to invest more aggressively in this technology (Jaguar having just announced their UK plan for battery manufacture in the UK is an example of this). However we need to be far more aggressive... We should look into corporation/NI tax amnesties for new UK businesses investing in green technologies for a period of time. All green technologies should also be VAT free to the end user.
Was reading that world average high speed rail cost is about. $22m /km. This is more than $50m. Whpever signed this off is a criminal.
No it won't. Even after 40 years nobody has come even close to running even a normal speed Maglev line profitably, and Hyperloop technology is still just a pipedream. Anything that replaces rail is a long, long way off.
People get too hung up on the high speed element of HS2 but that's the icing on the cake. The existing railways are completely full. A new rail line of any type between the North and the South is an absolute necessity.
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Imagine all those influencer selfies on a sleek new HS2
actually feck it, pump another £20B into it.Forgive me as I have the attention span of a I forgot what my point was, but how does a slightly faster train create all of this?
I can watch one less episode of The Simpsons then? Feck that!
The last 200 years have included basic technologies like the telegram and audio phone. We're already in the digital age where services that as Office 365 provide you with a platform to meet all of your needs - remote collaboration of documents, picture in picture video conferencing and weens of digital storage. If your organisation is not using cloud based services then you're quickly becoming a dinosaur. In the space of five years we've gone from having to dial up on a LifeSize Team MP conferencing system that needs sys admin and network engineers to set up to being able to call into a conference room in Beijing from your iPhone as you take a shit. 20 years from now the only people who will realistically need to meet face to face will be those who have hang ups about using technology who will, frankly, badly need to be retired by that point.
I know all I'm saying is heresay - and maybe I'm biased as my job is developing digital learning solutions - but I just can't get my head around why spending so much money on physical rail travel is going to help businesses in 20 years more than improved network infrastructure and a proper adoption of IoT would. I just think it's an incredibly short sighted vision from a bunch of dinosaurs who don't understand that technology is how we progress, and ignoring trends is a surefire way to make sure that you're left behind.
As mentioned in a previous post, if this is true (Which I don't believe it to be), then the solution is to have less people travelling every day when they don't need to. Prevention is better than cure.
Anyway, If you go to Germany, they don't have loads more rail lines than we do. Just the ones they have are much more efficient. The one I've used most is Munich to Augsburg, the train is every 15-20 minutes and very usually bang on time. It's also usually pretty busy. In comparison, If I go to most of my local stations in the UK, the platforms are empty outside rush hour, the train comes once an hour and often doesn't even turn up.
No expert but I believe we could run more trains on the lines already available to us if we organised them better and had more people using them (Which only happens if they're more reliable). The selling point of HS2 has definitely been the speed factor and not to do with capacity.
> As mentioned in a previous post, if this is true (Which I don't believe it to be), then the solution is to have less people travelling every day when they don't need to. Prevention is better than cure
That's never going to happen, and you are just going to end up with more people in cars.
We need to push trains to encourage people to walk. £86bn is a crazy figure though
That's never going to happen, and you are just going to end up with more people in cars.
We need to push trains to encourage people to walk. £86bn is a crazy figure though
That is partially true but the mix of slow and fast trains and the stops they need to make means the current tracks can't handle much more, and the cost of upgrading the existing lines to take additional traffic would be the same as building a new line. Even if you did do that, it wouldn't be a 100% capacity increase like you get with a totally new line and at the end of it you would still be stuck with old, low speed trains and stations.
The main goal of the programme is not about reducing time. Its always been about releasing capacity on other train lines which are already nearly full. It could be possible to upgrade the infrastructure on other lines, with signalling improvements, but it would be a huge inconvenience to the users of that line and may require modification to existing trains or purchasing new ones and all this for a fraction of the gain that would be had by a new line. Also, the money for HS2 may not be available for other projects - some may come from the private sector who have a commercial interest for the HS2 line to be built and may not have the same interest for infrastructure upgrades on existing lines.
The trains are actually already "organised" generally quite well. A timetable is decided, which needs to take into consideration conflicts (where tracks cross), braking speed of trains, dwell times at stations etc. Its no easy feat. Yes, some areas could be improved, but people want more trains, faster trains, this that or the other. Timetabling is a monumental job.
The extra £30bn is an estimate and even if this lowers the Benefit to Cost ratio (BCR) of the project, those BCR's don't always mean a great deal. I read on another forum that the Jubilee line extension in London had a very low BCR yet it was still built and is now one of the most important routes into the financial district of Canary Wharf.
The UK absolutely needs more train lines to be built. I understand disagreement about the alignment of the route and what cities are served etc, but this idea that its a waste of money is bizarre. If anything, the country needs more ambition for its infrastructure.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...ched-over-whether-rail-project-should-proceed
HS2 could be scrapped as critic gets role in independent review
Government needs clear evidence before going ahead, says transport secretary
HS2 could be scrapped as critic gets role in independent review
Government needs clear evidence before going ahead, says transport secretary
Rebrand it being about capacity... Drop it down to the same speed as the French high speed rail and take a chunk off the cost.. call it Boris rail
It will no doubt get scrapped and to be honest I don't see it as essential anyway.
What would actual make a big difference to the northern cities, is a quicker train link between Liverpool and say Leeds/Newcastle.
I know this was originally meant to be happening, but haven't heard much about it for a long while.
What would actual make a big difference to the northern cities, is a quicker train link between Liverpool and say Leeds/Newcastle.
I know this was originally meant to be happening, but haven't heard much about it for a long while.
Said before in the thread that a bunch of my mates are working on HS2 as archaeologists. Spoke to them today about it considering the news and they all reckon that it will still be going ahead and the murmurings amongst most people are that if anything, some parts of it will be scrapped rather than all of it (the North if anything). I hope for the industries sake that it will still be going ahead otherwise a lot of archaeology companies are gonna be fecked.
Its not about saving time, its about releasing capacity on the local networks. The saving of time is like the cherry on a rather big cake. In this case, several direct routes in Manchester from London would go onto HS2, allowing more local (stopping) services to run in Manchester.
At this rate we'll be crashing out of Europe with no third runway or HS2.
What i find slightly surprising is that Labour are all about massive infrastructure projects to stimulate the economy. Why is this Labour peer against it? Does he really disagree, or is it just because it's a Tory project.
What i find slightly surprising is that Labour are all about massive infrastructure projects to stimulate the economy. Why is this Labour peer against it? Does he really disagree, or is it just because it's a Tory project.
Tomorrow and tomorrow but the jam never comes.
Labour want to nationalise the railway, so the cost would be fully on the tax payers. Obviously if they can scrap it they can say they've saved the tax payers money.
The capacity argument is a bit null & void really, the current West Coast Mainline has bundles of capacity. If it was about capacity then HS2 wouldn't be a solely high speed line.
Though they have just finished the W10 works on wcm so it's now ideal for freight... But how do you put more freight on there without having more capacity
Only half of the freight paths on the West Coast Mainline is actually being used currently, there is plenty of capacity.
Do you have any evidence for this?
Yes because of the 9 billion that was spent on the upgrades about a decade ago... But freight has already doubled and is expected to do so again especially as it's now W10 gauge and there is a big push to put freight on rail to alleviate greenhouse gas from road transport
And certainly by 2030 when HS2 will be ready even a few % a year growth would have taken all that capacity and more
Take your pick there is plenty of evidence out there, but from a crude calculation on passenger related numbers...
https://beleben.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/friday-capacity-to-spare/
Even Network Rail themselves said in 2018 that only 50% of the freight capacity is being used.