Two miles from my home, HS2 has carved a scar across the landscape, across which trains might eventually take passengers between London and Birmingham more slowly than they do today.
What’s surprising is that, despite a local village effectively being cleaved in two, one sometimes could find, if not wholehearted support for HS2, at least shrugging acceptance that people needed to go places and that maybe it would all be for the greater good.
Not anymore. Given its stratospheric cost rises, which have spiraled from an estimated £30 billion in 2011 to more than £100bn since the project started, it’s currently unclear whether HS2’s Birmingham to Manchester leg will ever be built. Or whether the line will end in Old Oak Common, rather than central London.
The leg to Leeds has already been scrapped. If you were to go looking for any goodwill for this shambles locally, you would find that it had evaporated.
Not just locally, in fact. This week, Lord Hague called the project a “national disgrace” and the director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson, told Times Radio that it was always “obviously” going to be of “little gain relative to pretty much anything else you could have done with the railway or transport system, whether that’s making rail connections across the north vastly better or actually building a bunch of bypasses and improving the roundabouts in the road network”.
There’s the nub. Next time you’re sitting near a town centre you would’ve rather driven around, adding to local congestion and making life worse for residents but having the kind of day in which you couldn’t take public transport if you wanted to, just remember that every man, woman and child in the UK will pay £1500 to build a railway from Birmingham to Wormwood Scrubs.
There’s a feeling that Britain is uniquely bad at infrastructure, although I find this offensive to a country that hosts some of the world’s finest engineers. What we seemingly do routinely is allow greed, incompetence and laziness, or a costly – and deadly – combination thereof, to be rewarded or go unpunished.
That’s how we’ve ended up with the cladding scandal, the Post Office scandal, the sewage scandal and more, all dragging by for years without those responsible being held accountable.
When I was much younger and a little more zealous about the automobile, I used to imagine Tarmacking over railways with a network of toll roads reserved exclusively for trucks and buses. One can easily wait for 45 minutes for a train holding 1000 people, which goes from somewhere you weren’t to somewhere you don’t want to go.
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I like the autonomous vehicle idea, I would actually trust autonomy on that kind of fresh, coherent and controlled infrastructure rather than the chaos of normal roads.
HS2 was the biggest white elephant ever, pushed over the line by Boris the Blustering 'Jazz Hands' Bafoon.
Maybe they should just skip the railway bit and just turn it into an interesting cycleway!
While the railway is not being upgraded and the resultant land grab is in full swing there is still the issue of providing an EV charging network infrastructure of some sort for the length and breadth of the UK which isn't going to be so easily cancelled.
Well, apart from one that goes through the centre of London that can run 24 trains per hour from/to multiple routes. That's driverless in the central section too.
Lots of reasons why HS2 is so expensive - some 'good' - massive speed, environmental credentials (once complete), capacity. And may bad of course - dire budgetary control, dire management, etc.