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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

The final paragraph:

"Objects that have been unearthed will be preserved and many will eventually be displayed in museums. But larger finds will be bulldozed to make way for the new rail line."

So much destruction and expense for what increasingly seems like a vanity project.

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It's not a vanity project though.

It's to take load of the existing train lines to enable better (more frequent, faster) local services with longer distance services bypassing these lines.

Yes, one hundred thousand times this! The national government desperately want to cut bits of it to save money, so there's a concerted effort to paint it as an unnecessary boondoggle, and a lot of people are buying that. And they always say "why don’t we focus on increasing capacity on the existing lines?" - which is insane because HS2 is doing precisely that.

Or it would if they didn't keep cutting bits from it (cough)golborne spur(cough)

On the Golborne Link, I think they had a fair bit of help from the NIMBYs too

Very helpful too that one of the NIMBYs is a local MP who happened to be overseeing the no-confidence vote in Boris.

(I wrote the grandparent "vanity project" comment)

I do understand that hs2 is about adding capacity, not speed. And I agree that we need more non-car and non-aviation capacity.

What i disagree with is provisioning that capacity in the form of a single railway line that goes nowhere near almost all of the country.

I described it as a vanity project because politicians (particularly the current pm) like being associated with big, impressive, expensive infrastructure developments. An alternative world in which we spent the hs2 budget on improving the capacity and throughput of existing rail lines and rolling stock could deliver similar objectives while benefitting more of the country. And by being more distributed, it would be more fault tolerant. But it probably wouldn't create photo ops for politicians in hiviz jackets, or translate into votes.

And i hate the landscape and habitat destruction inherent in building hs2. Too much damage has been done already.

My taxes help pay for this thing. I dont think my scepticism and disgust is uninformed.

> I do understand that hs2 is about adding capacity, not speed

Great! Glad we're on the same page!

> An alternative world in which we spent the hs2 budget on improving the capacity and throughput of existing rail lines

Ok we are clearly not on the same page.

> Ok we are clearly not on the same page.

I haven't lived there for three decades, but I grew up in Hull. Nobody in Hull is talking about HS2: it's as irrelevant to them as Crossrail. Even if HS2 ever makes it as far as Manchester, its still a two+ hour drive to get the the nearest HS2 interchange - or slightly less on a diesel train via Leeds. (And it probably will still be a diesel in 2035-40.)

And HS2 is similarly irrelevant if you live in Norwich or Exeter or Carlisle or Newcastle. Or pretty much everywhere.

HS2 is an impressive bit of engineering that will be great for extending the commute capacity for London. It does little or nothing for the UK as a whole.

So much destruction and expense for what increasingly seems like a vanity project.

It's frustrating to hear this view being shared flippantly after such a long time. It's of course fine to have various views as to whether or not the project is worthwhile or not, but a blithe dismissal as a "vanity project" means you've not really seriously considered it.

I'd encourage you to read this article (from a few years ago now, but still applicable) which I think is a good summary as to the importance of the project generally. Even if you disagree, it will hopefully lead to more informed discussion: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/hs2-logistic...

> it's frustrating to hear this view being shared flippantly after such a long time. It's of course fine to have various views as to whether or not the project is worthwhile or not, but a blithe dismissal as a "vanity project" means you've not really seriously considered it.

I wouldn't say it was blithe dismissal. See my later comment up-thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31770221

As a reminder, the Japanese ministers who set up the bullet trains resigned in shame when the project overran, it was described in a similar way and generally derided, and is, of course, now a symbol of the nation and vital to the economy and general life for a lot of people there.

Infrastructure is expensive, hard, and takes a long time. It always will be, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. I'll take what little infrastructure that isn't car-centric we can get.

I live in a smallholding. When the Milford Haven gas transit pipeline was being layed just by the corner of my field they found a henge. Yep, a stone circle, or the remains of it burried right in my back garden, along with countless Beaker People artefacts. The archeologists came, measured and sampled, and the pipeline now runs right through the middle of it. (It did make a curve around a badger sett though).

This is a little but old island. Spit and you'll hit history which is pretty awesome but you've got to build for the folk who are living here now.

That really is awesome. How big is a smallholding?

I have several acres of trees in the states and there is almost nothing interesting out there. Some trash from hikers is the most I ever see.

> So much destruction

i don't want to be too philosophical about this, but:

i love history and it's lessons, but at the same time i prefer the future.

we tend to cling to the past, historical lessons, historical figures, but this usually hides our own insecurity about the future. i think there is a lot less to be learned from our past that can improve our future than many people believe. but we continue digging up our past, hoping to learn more about ancestors, when in fact we simply don't know the future, and this scares us.

> what increasingly seems like a vanity project

"climate change", "people working from home", "less cars", etc etc

> "climate change", "people working from home", "less cars", etc etc

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/hs2-will-never-be-carbon-...

It doesn't look as if HS2 will help towards climate change, even in the long run...

Not sure if the linked articles covers it due to the paywall, but according this article [1], the estimate that carbon emissions to build it would exceed emissions is possibly overly pessimistic. Such as predicting that air and car travel will get cheaper over time and rail travel more expensive

Although if the estimate is accurate I would still hazard a guess that it could be a net positive if it successfully increased capacity/speed to the point where people considered it a viable alternative to air/car journies and it was combined with policies to reduce the costs of rail travel/discourage air and car travel where possible

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/feb/02/will-hs2-rea...

I wonder if studies are systematically underestimating modal shift because it's impossible to quantify the cultural shift from a generation that saw car travel as a sign of upward mobility to a generation that sees unnecessary car travel as tasteless and harmful.

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