The cost of bus travel in the UK is currently £3bn/year. For the same price as HS2 we could have about 20 years of completely free bus travel nation-wide.
There are a lot of things we could do with £100bn that would be better than reducing the time it takes to get to Birmingham by 20 minutes.
After HS2 is built we have an extrememly valuable asset which will generate returns for years to come.
Capital and current spending are very different, and it's quite unhelpful to compare the two.
I don't think it's quite true to say that after 20 years we would be left with nothing. If it encourages more people to take the bus instead of driving then it would decrease traffic and pollution. Although in cases where buses are already in demand, adding new routes or increasing bus frequency on existing routes would be a better use of money.
It's actually worse than that, because you've essentially taken out an unsecured loan of £100bn and spent it on something which neither increases ongoing tax revenue or asset value, so you now have to cut other spending to pay it off. Which is why governments and businesses separate capital expenditure (building things) from current expenditure (doing things) very carefully.
The lingering impact of millions of people realising that bus travel is actually a good idea and that cars aren't necessary in a lot of cases. How terrible!
It's for this reason that saying 'we could spend the money on making buses free for a N years' is meaningless. It would be more sensible to say 'we should spend the £Nbn we spend on maintaining the motorway network on free buses' because those types of spending are equivalent.
Its really alot more than that, inform yourself first before making sweeping statements.
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2019/08/20/taking-a-look-at...
Even a ridiculously low bar like "every town over 10k people should have at least one bus service on 10-minute intervals during peak commute times" will not be met in a lot of places.
However, other people have a very valid point that this is not just about latency but about bandwidth. It's not replacing the existing links but adding to them. And that will then improve "local" commuting to non-London locations.
Another time in Spain where they had a free public transport day based on some kind of green agenda.
In both cases the result was the same - absolute chaos.
[0] https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-01/free-buses-in-sydn...
Yes. It was over ten years ago though.
Where i live now the various bus companies have weekly tickets that basically enable people to take many short trips at no extra cost instead of walking. I'm talking about small distances here of less than one mile.
My experience is that when you offer something for no cost you soon become overwhelmed by the numbers of people who'll find any way they can to take advantage of it.