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Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

> there isn't all that much of anything in Birmingham that makes this worthwhile.

The UK has a weird chicken and egg thing going on. Everything is in London because everything is in London. HS2 is an attempt to break out of that. By developing better rail links across England we allow companies to start moving out of London.

> The idea that HS2 can make Birmingham airport competitive with Heathrow for Londoners is clearly wrong.

But that's not the aim. The aim is that we shouldn't have everyone in the country using Heathrow for all journeys. Currently we have about 80 million people going through Heathrow which is stupid if a chunk of them are only using it to get into the UK.

London doesn't just have Heathrow and Gatwick. London has six international airports.

Heathrow alone at 80m people currently carries the equivalent of Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Bristol combined. We urgently need to fix this.

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>Everything is in London because everything is in London. HS2 is an attempt to break out of that. By developing better rail links across England we allow companies to start moving out of London.

Despite the topic being divisive, this is an ill-informed comment and does not relect the real purpose of HS2 ─ which is to increase capacity and improve links in the North of England to stimulate local economy and reduce the burden on over crowded services.

I will leave you with a couple of articles, which do a good job at explaining some of the reasons behind the HS2 project; which also serves as a springboard for the Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR).

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hs2-logistic...

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2019/08/just-when-y...

> The UK has a weird chicken and egg thing going on. Everything is in London because everything is in London. HS2 is an attempt to break out of that.

One of the criticisms of HS2 is that it will just facilitate centralisation in London, by helping people get there more quickly!

It means that a business that needs to occasionally meet people face to face in London can instead be based in Crewe, saving £10k a month in rent and saving in salaries.

Except that it's more likely to have people saying why do we need a crewe office at all when people can be at the main office in an hour anyway.

It will just drag even more resources to london

Why would I, a business owner, want to pay extortionate rents for floor space in London when I could instead have an office in Crewe for 1/10th the price and still reach my clients when I need to?

Now what happens when the business needs to meet someone face to face in say Cambridge, home to a growing number of tech companies? Our current rail network is so London-centric that the fastest way to do that from Crewe is to go all the way south to central London, turn around, and head north again in almost the same direction you came from. One of the big advantages of being based in London is that you can get to nearly any major city in the country quickly and directly by rail, and HS2 just strengthens that advantage.

The expertise brown from HS2 needs to build Birmingham east to Cambridge/Norwich, and south west to Bristol/Cardiff, as well as Liverpool-Manchester-Leeds

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