Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

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>> If you happen to come across any part of HS2 in some random village you've never heard of it's quite incredible the impact it's having on the locals. Locals who live miles away from the nearest station and therefore unable to use the line, by the way.

Because people inherently misunderstand the benefit of HS2, and how could they not if it's constantly being misrepresented by our media and politicians.

UK has one of the highest proportion of freight transported by road in Europe. That is fundamentally because our rail infrastructure is overloaded and unable to take any more freight. All non-perishable stuff that in other countries just goes on rail, in the UK is moved by trucks on our roads. Which as you can imagine, is causing tens of billions of pounds worth of damage to our roads, which we - taxpayers - pay for. All of these locals that live miles away from the train station are already affected by the lack of rail infrastructure - because every time they drive somewhere they have to contend with massive potholes and insane amount of heavy cargo traffic anywhere they go. If HS2 is ever finished, it will reduce congestion and our roads and reduce the wear and tear which again, is costing us billions in upkeep every year.

But according to our media, it's all about saving london commuters 2 minutes on a train from Birmingham, so every Dick and Harry is against it, because like you said - they live miles from the nearest station, why would they care?

It's not even about freight! HS2 will increase passenger capacity. The existing trains are completely full at peak time and run at the maximum frequency. Building a whole new line will allow a lot more people to travel. The demand is clearly there despite the price, because it's also pretty congested to drive anywhere inside the M25.

If we wanted to address the freight situation it would be along the route of the A428/A14 from Folkstone (where much of the freight is landed) to the Midlands. That road already has a cheery sign on it pointing out how high the accident rate is.

A problem with this argument is that it actually doesn't help most people on the HS2 route. If you live in a village on the outskirts of Aylesbury say, it's not much good to you personally that there's more local services on the WCML, because it's a 40-50 minute drive to the nearest WCML station; your local line will see no improvement. Freeing up space on the M1 has no impact either for the same reason.

It would of perhaps been an easier sell if we could of built it much closer to the WCML and told people, look this is to get rid of those horrible fast trains that wizz though your local station at 125mph.We'll use the space for more services so your commute to London from say Leighton buzzard is faster and less busy.

> if we could of built it much closer to the WCML

Knocking down half the towns that the WCML runs through to build more tracks carrying trains that aren't going to stop there would be neither easier nor cheaper than HS2.

There is a huge amount of countryside between the WCML and the current HS2 route. I'm not saying it should be literally parallel.

Do you think the people who designed HS2 have not considered these aspects?

You analysis is very narrow and only considered the benefits to a certain set of people.

HS2 actually follows reasonably closely to the old GCML. And for the same reason, its the best route to build a fast rail-line along.

I think your proposal complete ignores the additional cost of such a route change. And the cost alone, aside from anything else would make it unreasonable.

Many things go into selecting a route and in most cases where I think they made the wrong choice its usually because of cost concerns, like not building the needed tunnels into cities.

I actually don't think that's true.

The reason HS2 route cost so much money is because so much is tunneled. Why is so much tunnelled? Because rich people live there and won't accept a blot on the landscape, partially because they don't see a personal benefit.

If you can remove the tunnels it doesn't really matter that the route is slightly longer or has slowly less optimal geometry.

That not totally true. Yes, HS2 spend additional billions on tunneling. But even without that you don't magically solve all the issues and in some places where they do tunneling its actually not completely stupid. Tunneling accounts for a few billions, not many 10s of billions.

And you don't get magically rid of all issues with people complaining, because guess what, other people live on that other imaginary route that lives in your head, and they would demand tunnels too.

And its really the politicians fault, a few people who don't like the look of the train should not have the power to stop it, specially not in a place as centralized as England.

The reason you can't run as many other trains on WCML and other lines is because high-speed non-stop trains take so much capacity. Once you remove them, you can run many more local/regional trains with more stops and higher frequency.

The whole way HS2 is designed is to maximally reduce the amount of fast trains going north south on the existing network. Leading to a massive capacity upgrade on the existing lines. You can still run some express lines but likely much more lines that stop at more station, making it fast for you to go to next HS2 stop and from there to the further distance destination.

HS2 connection to Leeds was designed to help the ECML, the whole HS2 system was designed by experts to help with WCML and ECML.

Of course now that the former car brained fucking moron of a prime minister in his last attempt to safe himself canceled most of HS2 all those benefits are gone. And labor is to cowardly and ignorant to bring it back.

This video is interesting on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtVJ7Zjy-DE

Felixstowe, not Folkestone? The latter is where the channel tunnel is, which does account for a lot of freight but you probably meant the container port at Felixstowe. I used to drive on the A14 daily and you could tell when a ship had recently arrived by the number of containers on the roads. The road also suffered badly from "tram tracks" due to large numbers of heavy good vehicles. Crazy when you realise a lorry can take one container while a single train can take a hundred or more.

Yes, most people cannot think beyond first-order effects, but this can be equally applied to HS2 proponents. There are other solutions to cut the amount of cargo traffic, but most of them involve just consuming less stuff.

Building more and more infrastructure is not sustainable. It's been shown time and time again that more infrastructure only leads to more usage of said infrastructure. The number of lorries on the road will not decrease, we'll just start carting around even more stuff than before.

> because every time they drive somewhere they have to contend with massive potholes and insane amount of heavy cargo traffic anywhere they go

I don't buy that. The potholes are in residential and country roads. No amount of railways is going to do anything about that. The cargo traffic which could go via rail is on the motorways.

I'm all for more rail and less roads. But to stop the road usage we need to tax it more heavily, especially for heavier vehicles, and not just lorries. So far I haven't seen any evidence of replacing roads with rail, it's just more, more, more.

Consuming less is simply not a solution that anybody would ever agree to. Anything that you cut out would just be replaced with other consumption. Maybe consumtion can be slightly more local, but the idea that most consumption can be replaced with something that is local a pipedream. And even if you did that, to produce all that stuff locally the inputs for that production would still need to be transported.

The only way to reduce consumption is people getting poorer or people increasing their savings. And that's just future consumption.

Building more and more infrastructure is actually sustainable. And arguably we are not even building more and more as things like rail infrastructure is less now then it was in many places.

> It's been shown time and time again that more infrastructure only leads to more usage of said infrastructure.

And that is actually good if the infrastructure usage does not have massive negative externalizes, like ... trains. It actually reduces externalizes because it takes away from car and air traffic.

> The number of lorries on the road will not decrease, we'll just start carting around even more stuff than before.

Switzerland is prove that you can reduce the amount of lorries. But even if you don't, it will at least reduce the growth. And it makes it so you don't have to invest in highway expansion.

You might be against that anyway, but most people would demand it if existing highways are always full of lorries.

> But to stop the road usage we need to tax it more heavily, especially for heavier vehicles, and not just lorries. So far I haven't seen any evidence of replacing roads with rail, it's just more, more, more.

If you tax heavy transport without providing an alternative you simply drive up cost of living and make peoples live worse.

But you are right, taxing lorries and putting that into a fund that helps rail expansion is exactly what Switzerland did.

Isn't the problem that the requirements for line were "gold plated"? If they'd put in another standard rail line instead, it would have increased capacity, taken up much less space, would have been much cheaper, would have caused less disruption and would have had a clearer business case.

The high speed lets you build the Y shape to serve London to both north east and north west, as well as cross country journeys from Birmingham to the north east with the minimum amount of new track. With more standard rail lines you'd need to build a lot more. Plus there's many other benefits to high speed.

Japan built the first Shinkansen while British Rail was still running steam services. Can't stay on the Victorian era rail constraints forever.

(it's very British to say "this is too good, can we have something cheap and nasty instead please?")

steam is great technology - it is still used in power plants today. The only reason diesel replaced it was labor cost which made up for the loss in fuel efficiency.

What's the good of a perfect railway line if it never gets built? What happened to the capacity argument? There is likely a good optimum between the cheapest and most expensive possible for capacity and speed. We could all fly around in supersonic aircraft, but there's a reason we don't.

It's getting built! Large sections of it are nearly finished!

Quite a lot of the cost is the NIMBY appeasement mentioned upthread. Something like a quarter of the line will be in tunnels. Making a slower line wouldn't make that any cheaper.

Connections to HS1/Europe, and to Leeds, Golborne, East Midlands, Manchester and finally even Crewe have all been cancelled so now extra expenditures will focus instead on Euston Station. That's not the large section people were interested in riding. Perhaps Old Oak Common should instead have been tunnelled the same distance through to Waterloo International (whose international platforms are now deleted).

The international platforms are not deleted! They were brought back into use from 2018-2019 to serve the Windsor Lines, which includes the service to Reading - platforms 20-24. That somewhat reduces the congestion at Waterloo; the station throat limits adding more services.

The extension to Euston was supposed to have 11 platforms. Even the reduced scope now being implemented is 6 platforms, I believe. All 11 were required to handle the eastern leg of HS2 [providing bypass capacity for the East Coast Main Line out of King's Cross and the Midland Main Line out of St Pancras], and services to Scotland and Manchester [bypassing the West Coast Main Line from Euston's classic platforms].

It would have been cheaper if we hadn't done so much tunnelling.

If you’re building a new rail line you might as well make it high speed. The problem is that a political decision was made to tunnel through the Cotswolds to minimise local impact because a lot of rich and influential people live there.

No this is just a typical media nonsense that is spread by idiots who don't know anything.

> If they'd put in another standard rail line instead

That would be crazy. In order to be a viable line to go from Midlands to London and reduce capacity, it would have to be at the very, very minimum as fast as that line goes today. So you are going to build a high-speed line of some sort anyway.

And that means maybe you can be a bit more adaptive to the terrain, but that also leads to more distance and thus more kilometers of line that has to be build.

A huge amount of the cost is simply buying the land, building the tunnels and bridges, putting up the electricity wires and so on. All that you would have to do anyway.

So basically at the very minimum you would need to build a 200km/h line, and nobody serious would even consider that. A 250km/h is the only reasonable 'lets safe money choice'. Going to a 300-350km/h line is going to be more expensive, but likely only by a few %, maybe 10%. But you would lose a huge amount of the benefit, as tons of study show time is a massive important to use.

So if you actually take into account future income from the line, building it to a lower standard would have been insanely stupid.

> taken up much less space

This is just straight up factually wrong. If you want to save money by changing alignment, you need more space, not less.

> would have been much cheaper

As I pointed out, much is simply wrong here.

> would have caused less disruption

Building would have more disruption and overall there would be more disruption in general.

> would have had a clearer business case

The business case, would be much much worse.

The people making that argument somehow think that you could build some rural 160km/h rail line and still get 90% of the benefit. Yet somehow no country who analysis this beliefs this and pretty much every single rail expert in the world doesn't agree with it either.

So the question you have to ask yourself do you want to believe the designer of HS2, most experts in rail technology or a bunch of anti-infrastructure activists?

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