HS2

[Phil1965]

Is HS2 the biggest waste of public money ever? I think so, people are not travelling for work anymore, it can be done easier via a pc. Why would you spend a whole day travelling for a one hour meeting?

[Jacko51]

Indeed it is. 

[Fosse69]

Purpose is to  take traffic off the roads and short distance traffic out of the air over the next 50 years, as well as to keep civil engineering firms in business. 

[philpvfc]

5 minutes ago, Fosse69 said:

Purpose is to  take traffic off the roads and short distance traffic out of the air over the next 50 years, as well as to keep civil engineering firms in business. 

Far better ways of doing this than spending the billions of pounds on HS2 which will save 15 minutes on travel time between Birmingham and London. 

[Fosse69]

8 minutes ago, philpvfc said:

Far better ways of doing this than spending the billions of pounds on HS2 which will save 15 minutes on travel time between Birmingham and London. 

Saving in time due to faster trains not the reason for building HS2, the immediate  reason for HS2 is capacity between Euston and Rugby on the West Coast line. which then allows more freight and slow local services on the existing track. 

[Andyregs]

My biggest issues with politics is that it’s often short term thinking. Looking towards the next election rather than the next 50 years (of course some things need dealing with now, but the bigger issues need to be sorted for your children’s children , not for us). I presume they would have looked at it, but for something like this they should be looking at how we will be travelling in 30-50 years time. Surely by then we will all have self driving cars. Will there be such a need for train travel then? Will we be commuting to offices at that point? 

[Fosse69]

10 minutes ago, Andyregs said:

My biggest issues with politics is that it’s often short term thinking. Looking towards the next election rather than the next 50 years (of course some things need dealing with now, but the bigger issues need to be sorted for your children’s children , not for us). I presume they would have looked at it, but for something like this they should be looking at how we will be travelling in 30-50 years time. Surely by then we will all have self driving cars. Will there be such a need for train travel then? Will we be commuting to offices at that point? 

The alternative to HS2  would be 2 more M1 s  creating just as much disruption to cater for road traffic. HS2 should have been built in the 80s but that is another story. 

[Andyregs]

4 minutes ago, Fosse69 said:

The alternative to HS2  would be 2 more M1 s  creating just as much disruption to cater for road traffic. HS2 should have been built in the 80s but that is another story. 

Lol i forgot that even if people moved to self driving cars, they would still need to use the roads more. I’d suggest people need to stop breeding but it’s not the birth rate that’s making it go up. 
I’m more agnostic towards HS2 to be honest. Even environmental arguments can be made by both sides. Though its a lot of money out of infrastructure budgets and won’t finish until 2040 at the earliest. However, train systems in places like France seem like they are decades ahead of us.

[Fosse69]

23 minutes ago, Andyregs said:

Lol i forgot that even if people moved to self driving cars, they would still need to use the roads more. I’d suggest people need to stop breeding but it’s not the birth rate that’s making it go up. 
I’m more agnostic towards HS2 to be honest. Even environmental arguments can be made by both sides. Though its a lot of money out of infrastructure budgets and won’t finish until 2040 at the earliest. However, train systems in places like France seem like they are decades ahead of us.

And the continentals seem to build them faster and cheaper even when linking through the mountains between France and Italy

[Playa Amodores]

We definitely need more railway line and I think that we need to leave something for future generations. They’ll be paying for Covid and definitely no chance of retiring and possibly no old age pension. I have a friend who works for network rail and as much as we’d like something similar to the Bullet, we’ll never have that as our train lines aren’t on straight tracks and have numerous bends. Plus a lot of the current railways are Victorian

 

[Santa]

We do need to make improvements to the rail network but I'm not convinced that the answer is this. Anyway, it's too far gone to be stopped, it would kill a huge amount of contractors and other businesses if the plug was pulled now.