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Comment by tonyedgecombe | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing the expense we are going to to avoid building a railway across a few rich peoples land. Not that this is new, it happened during the steam age.

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Yes it's expensive, but a future where most infrastructure is underground, from mass transit to power and communications, allowing nature to return to the surface, for future generations to enjoy seems like a worthy goal imo, even just on the aesthetic merits, saying nothing of the ecology. Just a damn shame we couldn't build these boring machines in the UK, and funnel the spending into the domestic economy.

I actually like railways and think there is a need for more capacity up and down the country. What I don't like is the cost of this project. We could get a lot more bang for our buck.

Wholeheartedly agree! Giving back to nature is a very good goal. In the Netherlands, there is a growing problem of the "boxyfication" of the landscape (verdozing van het landschap), meaning that because of the growing trend of internet shopping, more and more warehouses and distribution centers are being built in the iconic farm landscape. Moving these structurally simple buildings underground would allow for more space for nature in the already densely populated country

you can have it both ways.

see japan: incredible surface transport options (that are also a sight to behold) and an incredible care for nature.

Shipping goods should be done underground.

It'd be nice if PEOPLE could remain above-ground.

Deduct from the cost the price they'd have had to pay for valuable land by going over-ground, maybe? I mean there's a reason the London Underground is underground.

There's a lot of tunnelling in Buckinghamshire and other counties with open countryside because the mainly Tory voting areas close to London object to HS2

If there's one thing I've learned from the Heathrow third runway, it's that "fuck the locals, the nation needs this (according to its supporters)" does not appear to be the way to get large infrastructure projects done.

And with the current electoral situation, if merely being a Tory constituency got you a tunnel, HS2 would be in a tunnel from the M25 all the way to the outskirts of Birmingham.

Or we could behave like China and just demolish homes without legal recourse. In 50 years, very, very few people will complain about it.

Even in Kent now, after HS1 has been around for 10 years, you'll be hard pressed to find anyone that complains about it.

It's also added £300m to Kent's economy over the last decade, and the bulk of that has been in the last 5 years as traffic has ramped up.

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/09/13/hs1-provides...]

Being serious?

No. But I would like it if, for national infrastructure projects the UK would be a bit more assertive. China's approach is too far the other way.

And being able to build hundreds of miles of high speed lines for single-digit billions of pounds/dollars tells you everything about wages, and compensation for home owners on the route.

I've seen some complaints about HS1, but not from people in Kent - just from NIMBYs in Buckinghamshire saying "HS1 was rubbish and nobody uses it and everyone uses it to go to London every dy so the towns it serves are now run down ghost towns"

Not respecting private property and victimizing rich worked extremely bad for our civilization in the past.

Sorry it's a DailyMail link but it's quite clear we chose to bore tunnels through open countryside to keep the Tory shires happy

Train lines don‘t take up much space and their impact can be mitigated with landscaping before we go to the expense of tunnels under fields

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2084959/HS2-Tory-sh...

At about £106bn for 531km, that's £200m a km. If the line were built out of a stack of twenty pound notes, it would come to about £100bn. So HS2 costs about the same as a 500km stack of twenties.

Only a million people live in Birmingham. That's £100k each.

Good job it serves far more people that Birmingham then

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