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Comment by BlackVanilla | Hacker News Reader

In the media, there's been a focus on HS2's ever-growing budget, bulldozing land, and massive delays. These are significant, if not more so than what I'm about to talk about, but it's worth focusing on an aspect frequently not considered: the positive externality of improving human skills.

With Crossrail (now Elizabeth Line) nearly finished under London, the Channel Tunnel, and now HS2 tunnels, the UK is exposing some of its workforce to some great tunnelling projects. The skill these workers must have aquired working on these large-scale tunnelling projects is impressive. The UK could even be developing a comparative advantage in tunnelling.

It doesn't solve the factors outlined at the start, but it's a side affect few discuss in public discourse when deciding to fund an infrastructure project like HS2. The positive externalities of SpaceX's work or of NASA's work are not limited to the end goal (the fact we fly something to space), it's also that now we have more people with better skills. This is something that the media doesn't focus on when big breakthroughs happen, whether privately- or publicly-funded, and I think that's a shame.

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The UK is exposing very little of its workforce to great tunnelling projects, because very little of HS2 is about tunnelling, and most of the rest of the technology is being bought in anyway.

This repeats an old pattern. The UK used to have a nationalised rail system with world-class R&D. The R&D was effectively given away when the system was privatised, and then the technology was bought in when it was needed later - from foreign companies which were now charging the UK for IP it had developed at home.

Even if that weren't true, the UK would be competing in a tiny space with even larger projects - like the Brenner Base Tunnel, which is currently burrowing through 55km of solid rock under the Alps.

The reality is there is very little real payback in terms of jobs and future opportunities - certainly much less than spending the money on world class broadband infrastructure and technology training.

The infuriating thing about HS2 is that it's basically just pork for party donors dressed up as a strategic and patriotic wonder - because the ruling class just can't deal with the fact that the 19th century is over.

Meanwhile the strategic areas the UK is actually a significant player in - including plenty of science and technology, and not a little engineering, but also the arts, finance, and law - are being starved of investment, opportunity, and effective management.

Sure, I tried to make the focus of my comment on the rarely talked about benefit of skilling people up as a positive externality, rather than to give credit to HS2 specifically, but I probably didn't do this well enough.

Skilling up people in the world of STEM, finance, arts are all as important, if not more so than tunnelling.

The thing that I find most humourous about British Rail - as a non brit, former colonial subject, who lives in London - is that they literally invented high speed rail, then lost the ultimate prize to the French (i.e. France ran ahead with it, electrified it then rolled it out. I find this incredibly amusing as there's still a certain portion of English society with a huge chip on their shoulders vis a vis France).

Also as a non Brit who lives in the UK, I've always felt that the massive chip on the shoulder was regarding the Germans not the French but maybe it's just the people I've met

We like to make fun of the French, but it's mostly a joke.

Mostly the English love to hear jokes against themselves.

Brits only have chips on their shoulder about two things: Countries they've won battles against, and countries they've lost battles against.

No chips against Andorra, Belarus, Bolivia, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Guatemala, Ivory Coast ,Kyrgyzstan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Mali, Marshall Islands, Monaco, Mongolia, Paraguay, Sao Tome and Principe, Sweden, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Vatican City, then?

So there's a (small) list on Wikipedia of "countries the UK has not fought"? Do they have a shorter list than anyone else?

(Am Brit)

I can't think of a country that would be even close.

Previous world powers came to pre-eminence when less of the world was known and later world powers are nuclear and haven't really directly invaded, fought or attacked like the British did.

This map brings it home more than most https://i.redd.it/75nqzhfp42r21.png and it only covers a single instance for many of those countries, the British (English first, rest of UK later) and the French spent most of a millennia beating each other up when they had no one else to fight - I mean Churchill gave orders to shoot French military if necessary months before the end of WW2 (between VE and VJ day) during the Levant Crisis.

Usually anywhere with a favourable tax regime for non-doms we're pretty ok with from a government relations perspective.

The UK makes fun of basically all Western European countries, the problem is about half of the population think it’s a joke, and half think it’s insightful analysis.

There's another humorous aspect about the British rail system: It really is mostly state owned and operated.

Just not (mostly) the British government (though the UK government also regularly has to step in to take over for failing operating companies...)

E.g. the Dutch, German, Italian, French, Quebec (via Keolis; a joint venture between French owned SNCF and a Quebec pension fund), Hong Kong governments all have significant ownership in UK rail franchises. Only a handful of franchises are run by purely privately owned operating companies.

It also runs with a third to a quarter of the relative subsidy compared to France and Germany, so maybe the UK is getting the better end of the bargain!

Also, these are only the train operating companies, the rail and infrastructure itself is owned by Network Rail, which is state owned (and by the UK, not France!)

Having used the rail systems elsewhere, I'd happily see an increase of subsidies far more extensive than that if it got us a rail system more fit for purpose.

Alas, no government since privatisation has wanted to increase subsidy, hence the continual above-inflation fare rises (though admittedly smaller than under BR!).

If by “the UK” you’re including the citizenry who use the rail network, then we are quite clearly not getting any kind of bargain whatsoever.

Not really, the TGV network makes a profit and the fares are about half the price of our shit trains. Also their most expensive line has about 50 bridges and tunnels through much more rugged landscape than the midlands and cost 5 times less per km than HS2.

It's purely semantics, but I think in this case it would be the "Quebecois" government. A side note, does anybody know what the name for that form of a country/culture/language is? ex: French for France or Italian for Italy.

Demonym

Differences in geography, making it harder to effectively lay down HS tracks? Further complicated by old rights of way, surrounded by built up environment, especially in the cities?

It's not like the French TGV/Thalys or the German ICE would run HS right into and out of the cities either.

Maybe in China and Japan, but hey, they are different.

all the European trains lost out to the Chinese trains

https://www.railway-technology.com/features/feature-top-ten-...

Am not impressed with the Transrapid-derivative they listed first. In Germany it failed for a reason. In Shanghai it's operating at a loss, has impractical cabin layout for the purpose (Airport shuttle, luggage/baggage) and hasn't been expanded as initially planned. Why is that?

Let's see how the Japanese do with their https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCMaglev on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen in a few years.

It's not awful if you'd need to build new rail links into the city centre anyway (e.g., due to capacity) and you have little onward long-distance travel. Tokyo–Osaka may well be a viable route for that, but there certainly aren't many.

(In the Shanghai case it's practically laughable, because it's such a short journey the top speed is practically irrelevant: it spends half its time accelerating/braking)

Nationalized rail was shit here come on.

> On [public ownership of] our railway, the East Coast line was run in public ownership from 2009 to 2014. It had 91% customer satisfaction and returned £1 billion to the Treasury. (Today, half of our rail services are run by foreign state owned companies.)

https://weownit.org.uk/why-public-ownership/successful-examp...

In 2015–2018, the three year period of VTEC, customer satisfaction was generally unchanged from East Coast (though went down at the very end) and £800m was returned to the Treasury. Per year, that's 30% higher than the nationalised East Coast returned (and okay, ~£160m of the £800m ultimately came from Stagecoach paying more money than VTEC had operating profit, but from a taxpayer point-of-view that's irrelevant).

(See https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmtr...)

What is different now compared to before? Fares have increased faster than inflation, trains are overcrowded, the seats are a lot more cramped, just as worn and dirty, no faster than before and the sandwiches are still as bad as the ones you get in petrol stations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transport_in_G...

Make of this trend what you will.

Increased car ownership causes congestion which makes travelling by car impractical for long journeys and increased house prices force people to commute from further out?

> Fares have increased faster than inflation

Fare increases have vastly slowed (versus inflation) since British Rail. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=vAlCWxoV1NYC&lpg=PA277&p... shows average annual fare increase and RPI for the last 14 years of British Rail.

Over the last ten years of BR, fares increased 102% versus RPI of 62% (thus increasing 25% in real terms based on RPI; CPI didn't exist till the final five years of BR).

Over the past ten years, fares have increased 40% versus RPI of 31% (thus increasing 7% in real terms based on RPI, or 16% based on CPI).

Most of the increases were during the tenure of a government that wanted to privatise the railways and believed they should be self funded and obviously would not want these price rises to occur once the railways were privatised.

I'm mainly annoyed about the rollout of HS2 because of the government's insistence of all projects starting/ending in London. A new trans-pennine rail tunnel from Liverpool-Manchester-Sheffield under the peaks, and Manc-Leeds-Hull would add vastly more value than a faster connection between already well connected cities. This is planned for 'HS3', but that could be 40+ years off at this rate.

The large-scale projects need to srart every 10 years or so... the UK is in desperate need of non-car infrastructure if it wants to be carbon zero by 2050.

That's a fair criticism. Why not both, I guess?

I think that criticism goes beyond the government. Parties of all colours have been far too London/South East-centric. I don't know of any infrastructure projects of reasonable size in Wales or the South West for instance.

Forgetting about places is a very effective way to keep generating forgotten about places.

> I don't know of any infrastructure projects of reasonable size in Wales or the South West

One of Europe's largest construction sites is currently in Somerset - Hinkley Point C.

You got me! I worded my comment poorly. I should've said I don't know of MANY, not any.

> A new trans-pennine rail tunnel from Liverpool-Manchester-Sheffield under the peaks, and Manc-Leeds-Hull would add vastly more value than a faster connection between already well connected cities.

I live in this area and do these routes frequently and yes I'd love them to be more connected too.

But realistically, like almost everyone else in the country almost all my travel is to and from London, because that's where most things happen.

Could this not be because of lack of said transport links on an East-West Axis?

I can't help but feel that if the trains had dedicated business carriages with reliable internet access, nobody would be all that fussed to get to London 20 to 30 minutes quicker

edit:

I don't mean First Class. I mean something like an all tables carriage or even just a fold down tables that can easily accommodate a 17" laptop (even if not many people have them, the space is what I'm after)

> Could this not be because of lack of said transport links on an East-West Axis?

The majority of the nation's key institutions are in London. How does improving an East-West axis improve access to them, or encourage them to move?

> I can't help but feel that if the trains had dedicated business carriages with reliable internet access

There are dedicated business carriages on London trains. The internet isn't fantastic but it's fine. But I'd rather not be on the train long enough to need it.

Could it not be that most institutions are in London _because_ of those good connections. The idea is to improve connects between different cities which will make it viable for companies to be located there.

This doesn't make any sense - for an institution to move from London to Leeds you don't need one line from Manchester to Leeds, you need a line from everywhere to Leeds.

Yep, and a good line from Liverpool and Manchester to Leeds would be a very good start. As then you good access to Leeds from many of the highly populated areas of the UK.

That depends, there are multiple considerations:

One is access for "everyone". Many don't need that.

The other is access to a large enough labour pool.

That said, the easiest way for government to use government departments for district development policies, is to simply move them.

E.g. this is where the Norwegian equivalent of Companies House plus assorted similar registries is located:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Br%C3%B8nn%C3%B8ysundregis...

If you zoom out you'll notice there are no major cities nearby.The nearest major city - Trondheim - is ~6h-7h drive South. It's smaller than Nottingham.

Norway has "just" relocated government departments out of Oslo as an intentional policy for decades, and it takes effort but it generally works quite well.

Transport policy then follows depending on how this changes transport patterns, rather than lead.

That depends on what institution is moving. Some just need a good link to Manchester, and so will be more willing to move. Some need to get everywhere and will wait. It depends on what the pros and cons of each city are.

As to if enough will move given any particular link, that is a hard question requiring complex studies and so cannot be answered.

> The majority of the nation's key institutions are in London. How does improving an East-West axis improve access to them, or encourage them to move?

If transport links are good between Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and maybe Hull then you have a significant pool of people available to work in any of those locations, though bigger pool is going to be Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds. This could encourage a move as the transport links to London are already pretty good.

> There are dedicated business carriages on London trains. The internet isn't fantastic but it's fine.

You might not have seen my edit, I didn't mean First Class. The internet access was, until 2018 when I was on the trains regularly, pretty, pretty bad, even in First class. Constant drops, issues sending emails, etc ...

> But I'd rather not be on the train long enough to need it.

It's not about need is about using the time productively. I could be on the train to London and use the close to two hours to catch up on emails and do a lot of admin. Essentially for me, it was the difference between attending a customer meeting in London, then spending the next day catching up and just having a normal day the day after the meeting.

One of my guys refused to work on the train as he would get motion sickness, so clearly YMMV

> nobody would be all that fussed to get to London 20 to 30 minutes quicker

I don't think people are that fussed. From QZ.com[0]:

"In the mornings, a train leaves London for Birmingham approximately every 15 minutes. The 7:23 am fast train leaves Euston and arrives at New Street station one hour and 22 minutes later, at 8:45 am—this would be shortened to 45 minutes with HS2.

The train is full of commuters and business travelers with a confusing range of opinions about HS2. Most point out that the journey from London to Birmingham is already quite fast. 'We have this train, so I question why we need it,' says Ben Brown, who commutes to Birmingham two to three times a week. 'It’s not as if the train that we’re in…is particularly slow,' echoes Damon Lacey, a human relations consultant from Portsmouth."

[0] https://qz.com/1803712/birmingham-shows-why-the-uks-hs2-plan...

Yes it goes to Birmingham, but it's not for Birmingham. It just so happens that Birminghan is on the route to the North.

> Birminghan is on the route to the North

It might be on HS2's route to the North, but it's certainly not on everyone's.

Birmingham will definitely benefit as it will mean that more local and regional trains can use the WCML when intercity trains move over to HS2.

Okay, now here's the next paragraph:

>Proponents of HS2 will point out ad nauseam that the point isn’t the journey time; it’s the increased capacity that a new railway will bring, allowing faster trains to shift on to their own track, and rendering the network more efficient. “We’ve been working off Victorian infrastructure on our national rail network and demand is increasing at an unprecedented scale, and we need more capacity,” explains Adam Tyndall, program director for transport at London First, a business advocacy group.

HS2 isn't about making journeys faster, it's about adding capacity. If you're building a new line, you may as well make it high speed; higher speeds mean more capacity since you can run trains closer together in time for a particular separation; and you require less machinery, staff and stabling space since each trainset can make more runs per day.

>if you're building a new line, you may as well make it high speed;

All things being equal, sure, but a high speed line is going to be more expensive, specially at the speeds required.

I'm not sure that any potential changes in working patterns given covid-19 will be taken into consideration but they should.

In any case, we'll no doubt fall into sunk cost fallacy territory soon and it will be £100Bn before this is done

Definitely agree — I suspect the (highly suspect) CBA that was used to justify HS2 would come out a lot less positive with the amount of extra home-working we can expect post-COVID-19.

Even if people work from home more, we will still want to shift freight from road to rail, and the WCML is full.

>if you're building a new line, you may as well make it high speed;

I think the thing to understand here is that mixing speeds is awful for capacity. There are some fast trains now, and everything else has to be scheduled around them, which means they each eat up many slots, to clear the line a safe distance ahead. There's lots of demand for more slow trains, which can't be run.

If you built a new slow line, you would still have this problem. And the slow trains want to stop many places, so you can't build the line through open fields, and building through towns is really expensive.

So you build a new fast line. And then it may as well go a little faster than the existing fast trains. But this increment isn't the main point.

Or at least that's my understanding. I don't doubt the price will grow. I have also heard there may have been other not-quite-as-fast options, refurbishing a disused line instead?

>All things being equal, sure, but a high speed line is going to be more expensive, specially at the speeds required.

It's actually not that much more expensive...

Possibly mixing causing and effect here!!!

Fast train routes in the north will allow Manchester to become a replacement for most things people go to London for.

> Possibly mixing causing and effect here!!!

This is an unhelpfully abstract way to look at things. It doesn't matter what caused London to be the centre of the universe for UK society. What matters is that it currently is.

> Fast train routes in the north will allow Manchester to become a replacement for most things people go to London for.

The problem you're missing is that you don't need fast routes in the north, you'd need fast routes to the north, from everywhere, as you currently have with London, if you want to compete. You don't one new train line to Manchester, you need the thirteen or so routes in London has.

And then you also need a serious airport.

> And then you also need a serious airport.

What is wrong with Manchester Airport ? It is the next busiest after Heathrow and Gatwick and already has two runways.

> What is wrong with Manchester Airport ?

It's a joke. Cramped, dirty, unprofessional. I'm embarrassed when I ask colleagues to fly into it. The terminals are packed with bloody fruit machines. Massive smoking areas blocking all the entrances. Weird half-shut-down roads to the terminals. No decent dining or bar options. The security screening seems to be done in a dungeon about three stories underground. The terminals were cut in half in a strange way to accomodate changes to international I think so they're now a depressing maze and you have to go down steps into a basement to go from one side of the corridor to the other. Most of the terminals don't have a proper business lounge. I don't think there's a BA first-class lounge at all! The flag carrier has no first lounge!

It's not even very useful - few serious international routes. It doesn't have direct flights to essential business destinations like San Francisco. There's not even a flight to Washington DC anymore as far as I know!

It just isn't a serious international airport. I fly to all these incredible places around the world and come back into Manchester (via somewhere else as nothing is direct) and every time I think 'wow what a grimy, amateur operation - how embarrassing is it that this is all we can achieve'.

Not joking - I sometimes recommend colleagues fly into Heathrow and take the train so they don't get this first impression.

I guess maybe it's third in the UK, but it's like 1% of what Heathrow is.

BA doesn't have a first class lounge because their only route out of Manchester is to London airports.

> BA doesn't have a first class lounge because their only route out of Manchester is to London airports.

Says it all, really! Even BA can't really be bothered with Manchester Airport.

But wouldn't you be entitled to use a First lounge if you were connecting via Heathrow in First?

> I don't think there's a BA first-class lounge at all

BA doesn’t sell any first-class seats out of Manchester, and hence there’s no F lounge there?

Normally if you are connecting onward from a hub airport with a First ticket you can use the First lounge from your starting point if your first flight only has Business seats.

And since Manchester is so terrible that you can hardly fly anywhere useful directly, lots of people are doing this.

Sure, that’s true, but I can’t think of First class lounges anywhere that the provider isn’t providing F seats from. I mean it’s pretty rare to have a dedicated F lounge outside of a hub airport in general for a carrier. QR — who are known for their luxury — only have an F lounge in Doha.

As someone living in London, I wish the government would stop spending money on transport to/in central London, and instead would invest elsewhere, such as the Leeds-Sheffield-Manchester triangle, and expanding the region around Birmingham to create better counterweights to London.

And to the extent any investment is done in the Greater London region that it gets limited to better connecting the circle of towns on the outer rim of London.

A bit self serving, as I live in Croydon, but one of my pet examples is that Croydon, Guildford, Woking and towns in between are all within easy commuting distance by train and there's track between them, but there's either no direct trains or nothing suitable. Committing to a commuter time-table between groups of towns in that situation for enough years to allow companies to risk opting for these towns instead of the centre of London would do far more to alleviate London of commuter traffic than the same amount spent on line upgrades.

But all of the upgrades in London just draw in more traffic until things are just as bad again, but even more expensive to fix.

Rail lines out of London are already very very congested - and the infrastructure is creaking.

The idea is that hs2 would be new track that would free up slots on the existing network.

"A new trans-pennine rail tunnel would add more value"

It always surprises me how many existing unused tunnels there already are under the Pennines. It's as if every generation is compelled to digg a train tunnel there as a rite of passage of something.

It is true what you say and demonstrated by where the TBM will inevitably start - at the London end.

There is a congestion problem at Paddington in the West and with St Pancras/Euston in the north of London. So even if HS2 only gets to do its work at the London end before politicians cancel it then this part of the north-west London will be done, unblocking access to London for express trains. If they started in Birmingham and got cancelled they would not get this bit done.

There is also property speculation to consider, already far out places like Reading are now more accessible for London due to HS2, driving up house prices. A half completed HS2 that doesn't get to Birmingham will have a similar effect.

> It is true what you say and demonstrated by where the TBM will inevitably start - at the London end.

The only significant tunnelling is at the London end, and in the Cotswolds. It doesn't really make much sense to begin in the middle.

The approach to Birmingham will be almost entirely on the surface.

Agreed.

I can't find the link but it was recent - it was something along the lines of: for every pound spent on transport infrastructure in the UK, in the South East the investment returns more than 10x the return of other regions in the UK.

So the money is 'well spent' in the South East. It's a vicious spiral for the rest of the country.

>A new trans-pennine rail tunnel from Liverpool-Manchester-Sheffield under the peaks, and Manc-Leeds-Hull would add vastly more value than a faster connection between already well connected cities.

"A faster connection between already well connected cities" HS2 is not.

Okay, well it is, but only as a side-effect.

HS2 is all about capacity; The West-Coast Mainline (WCML) is full.

Intercity trains have to compete for paths with regional and local trains (plus freight trains) which run slower and stop much more frequently.

Moving the intercity trains to their own dedicated track means they won't be slowed down by slower trains, it also means we can put more trains on the WCML.

This in turn means that, although HS2 is a North-South track, East-West trains will benefit. Hell, trains going in and out of Wales will benefit even though HS2 goes nowhere near Wales.

So why is HS2 high-speed if it's about capacity and not about speed? The simple answer is: Why not?

Building a high-speed track is actually not that much more expensive than building to the standards used on existing mainlines, but it does provide better long-term economic benefits.

---

Now, a dedicated high-speed East-West line in the North is also well overdue. Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR; aka HS3) is what's planned here but they can't finalise the plans until the detailed plans for Phase 2 of HS2 are themselves finalised.

Why? Because there's no use in building NPR if it won't properly join up (both literally and figuratively) with HS2 which is the most pressing infrastructure need.

Civil engineering has long been globalised. My dad and uncle were in the industry all their working lives; his career included the Drogden Tunnel as part of the Sweden/Denmark crossing and a copper mine in Chile, as well as London Underground. A lot of the work is ""remote"" in the sense that it's not at the physical site where the tunnel is dug.

Having said that, it's good that the work is happening; nothing is more corrosive to the long-term health of an industry than stopping all projects of a particular type. Some skills are embedded in the organisation rather than the individuals. This lost us much of our rolling stock industry, for example.

Upvoted. The backlash against HS2 is really annoying, yes it is expensive and some people think it won't benefit the country much - but you covered the reasons why we should be continuing with this project.

HS2 only connects together the largest city, the second largest city, the third largest city, the fourth largest city, the fifth largest city, the seventh largest city and the ninth largest city in the UK together on a single branched train line which will allow travel between them within an hour and a half. Who cares about such economic frivolity!

This highlights a flaw with the UK's infrastructure projects. The UK is focused on connecting cities with cities, not connection within cities and towns.

Asides from London, plenty of cities and big towns suffer from poor public transport. Getting from one side of town to another without a car should not be a struggle. Right now, I think this should be prioritised above city to city public transport links.

Considering I have to visit Cheshire every now and then to see family, the worst part of the journey isn't the Pendolino up to Crewe, but travelling to the train station out to where I need to be. Some of those stations are completely inaccessible without a car, there's no way you could walk it in decent time or without waiting for an infrequent bus.

Which stations? Nantwich has a fairly decent service aside from Sundays, Wrenbury isn't too bad either, and both have a fairly decent connection

The problem in south west cheshire is many places not only aren't on a rail line, they aren't dense enough to keep a bus service running, even with subsidies

> This highlights a flaw with the UK's infrastructure projects. The UK is focused on connecting cities with cities, not connection within cities and towns.

I agree, but HS2 will provide a huge benefit local and regional rail services rather than what most people assume: Faster travel in and out of London.

Frankly we need a lot more investment into light rail (trams etc.) and buses as well as HS2 and NPR.

HS2 isn't just about connecting cities it's about releasing capacity for more local services.

Midlands Connect say HS2 will improve services to 73 stations, 53 of which aren't connected to HS2 [1]

It also introduces capacity gains for commuter lines into Euston (can't find the link for that)

I'd encourage everyone to read Rail Magazine's take on why we should build H2S [2]

1. https://www.midlandsconnect.uk/publications/hs2-released-cap...

2. https://www.railmagazine.com/research-hub/comment/comment-sp...

I could well be wrong but this was never one of the touted benefits of HS2 when it was being (mis?)sold to the British public, which makes me very suspicious.

Furthermore, I would guess that the post coronavirus emphasis on remote work would make it less important, only time will tell.

> I could well be wrong but this was never one of the touted benefits of HS2 when it was being (mis?)sold to the British public, which makes me very suspicious.

At least https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16485263 talks about capacity a fair bit?

> Furthermore, I would guess that the post coronavirus emphasis on remote work would make it less important, only time will tell.

It's worthwhile remembering that number of people heading into cities has been rising year-over-year for a long time. Even if we see a 25% decrease in travel, any freed up rail capacity would likely just be taken up by people moving from road to rail. And with a larger decrease, while rail might drop away from being at capacity for a few years it's highly likely to increase again in future.

The capacity easing was always the main reason pushed to those in the know, it was easier to sell to the public based on some new top line figures though, so that's the reason that narrative was used.

HS2 is almost all about easing local commuter routes.

> I could well be wrong but this was never one of the touted benefits of HS2 when it was being (mis?)sold to the British public, which makes me very suspicious.

HS2's PR has been, frankly, awful. Hell, its name has been its biggest failure.

If you read any of the published reports into HS2 then you'll see that capacity is the reason for the project.

I am aware of that, I just think it stands easily without that argument. It is totally amazing and a clear potential competitive advantage for the UK to have so many of its urban centres connected with such short travel times. London to Birmingham will take less time than getting from one side of central London to the other, that is amazing. It’s also going to suck a lot of companies that would otherwise need to be based in London to be close to clients and suppliers out to other cities.

The issue with a high speed rail project like HS2 is that the people most affected by it are the ones who don't see much direct benefits from it.

If the line is coming past you then you have to put up with the noise from it and the building and land use change issues, but you don't get to actually use it as there won't be any stations for you. It's not possible to add stations mid-line as that would slow down the "high speed" aspect.

You can see this in the survey results where regions like the midlands have higher levels of opposition and those at the end of the lines:

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/transport/survey-results/daily/2...

> The issue with a high speed rail project like HS2 is that the people most affected by it are the ones who don't see much direct benefits from it.

>If the line is coming past you then you have to put up with the noise from it and the building and land use change issues, but you don't get to actually use it as there won't be any stations for you. It's not possible to add stations mid-line as that would slow down the "high speed" aspect.

Except that's actually nonsense.

Most of the benefit comes from moving the intercity trains off of the WCML meaning more local and regional trains can be run.

However the line itself runs through expensive Buckinghamshire villages, this line won't relieve the Chiltern main line much.

While those in Milton Keynes, Northmapton, Hemel Hempstead etc will love the extra services and space to London, and the increased services and reliability on the Rugby->Wolverhampton and Bimingham-Nottingham corridors will be great, those somewhere like Wendover won't see any benefit.

Some of the backlash could be a bit justified, but the various 'green' groups campaigning against it are strangely silent about the Silvertown Tunnel or the £27bn road-building programme...

Of course, the British were also the pioneers: Thames Tunnel in Rotherhithe was the first tunnel constructed under a river and must have been an amazing feat of engineering back then (1843). There’s an interesting museum there and the tunnel is still used, now by the Overground line.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tunnel

I wish there was more focus on costs. A cheaper project allows more miles to be built with the same money.

Obviously quality is tradeoff you need to be careful not to lose with cheap, but evidence is countries that don't speak English do this at much less cost and if anything better quality.

Not neccersarilly, if a project delivers 50% of the benefits for 75% of the money, it's less likely to be built.

What benefits? Do you count payment to consultants as a benefit - the consultants would.

If you define benefits as ability for people to get from point a to point b, often, quickly and safely a lot of costs are not needed. Note in particular I artistic stations are not a benifet to me - some would disagree.

We know that by my definition Spain is able to build rail for much less cost.

Note that I picked consultants arbitrarily as something to pick on. Unions have been blamed. EPA has been blamed (I'm not sure what the UK equivalent is). Bribes have been blamed. There is plenty more.

However benefits are defined

There are always costs to projects (money spent on wages to UK taxpayers, money spent on imports, environmental damage, political damage from nimby campaigns, opportunity costs from people working on this project instead of another one - say crossrail 2)

There are always benefits to projects (money generated from more passengers, benefit of more space on existing lines, movement of freight from road to rail, movement of passengers from air to rail, benefits politically from spending money outside of London)

This is the same no matter what project, or who is funding it. Musk presumably includes "being able to go to Mars in his lifetime" as a benefit of starship, as that's his stated goal.

You could reduce the cost if you said "we don't need to go to mars", but that would remove the main benefit, and Musk isn't going to put as much as he does into it.

Clearly if you can reduce costs without reducing benefits it will increase the viability of a project, but reducing costs on its own does not necessarily increase the viability.

Reducing costs gives two benefits. First the polical opposition has less to complain about. Second, if you reduce costs you can build more for the same money. In transit networks effects are critically important. The more places you can get to (given time, cost, safety, comfort...) the more likely you are to use it. Thus cheap drives better to a large extent.

Note there's a few sides to this:

One is the frequency of service (HS2 Phase 1 is built for 18tph in each direction, and post Phase-2 higher passenger numbers than almost any other high-speed line),

Another is the cost of land (especially at the London end), as unlike many other international projects a dedicated line is being constructed all the way into the terminal (in part because existing lines don't have the capacity),

And finally the increased amount running in tunnel through the Chilterns versus the original proposal (as a result of legal challenges, themselves costly).

The price difference is much less extreme if you compare like-for-like (i.e., compare urban construction with other urban construction, rural with rural), for example.

The cost per mile also includes major station works at Euston and Manchester, more work at places like Crewe and I assume on the east side of the pennines, and new stations at Old Oak Common, Birmingham Airport, Birmingham Curzon Street, Manchester Airport and Toton, as well as including new rolling stock

Most comparisons are with "track only" schemes.

It is generally believed (though it might not be true) that cost of "luxury" stations is a large portion of the costs. Whatever, if we could build cheaper we could afford to build more.

“the UK is exposing some of its workforce to some great tunnelling projects”

Honest question: does this actually involve lots of UK workforce for the core jobs? I would think specialized crews move wherever these tunneling projects go. I know that already happens with specialized concrete pouring in high-rise building construction.

That makes sense for both companies, who want to work with experienced personnel, and workers, who do not want to move to lower-paying jobs if there isn’t any tunnel being bored in the UK for a while.

> The skill these workers must have aquired working on these large-scale tunnelling projects is impressive.

Judging by the cost and speed of tunneling projects of the last century or so, one would have to conclude that we are in fact somehow getting worse at it. Nearly across the world, tunneling is happening slower and at greater cost than previously.

Why is HS2 going ahead at all now? It is not safe to travel by train anymore given covid-19. Stations are mixing grounds for infection. People are not kept apart with fresh air whilst travelling in the train. Random people constantly pass close by. Investing in shared train infrastructure is inappropriate

HS2 isn't scheduled to open until at least 2029. The current situation has no bearing on if it should go ahead or not.

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