That's not how rail works - never mind high speed rail.
The rails are the easy part. There's also signalling and monitoring, power gen/distribution, train stabling and maintenance, and all kinds of other infrastructure.
You can't build it piecemeal without incurring huge extra costs.
The insane part with HS2 is the relatively small economic benefit, and the fact that the price is going to spiral out of control even more than it has already.
The UK badly needs an integrated transport policy, making connections between all modes - trains, busses, airports, ferries, roads, and so on. Currently all the modes compete with each other. And that's a huge problem.
Instead we get a project that might have been progressive in the 19th century but makes no economic sense at all in the 21st.
For the same price as HS2 the UK could have hugely improved broadband everywhere, improved rail - especially electrification - and seed funding for new businesses everywhere, especially the North.
'For the same price as HS2 the UK could have hugely improved broadband everywhere, improved rail - especially electrification - and seed funding for new businesses everywhere, especially the North.'
For the same price as invading the gulf we could have had a lot of stuff instead.
I've been around a long time and the infrastructure in the UK has barely improved since I was a kid. The ideal time to be doing this stuff was maybe 30 years ago but since that never happened the second best time is now.
Nobody who says we can get 'improved rail' for the cost of HS2 had ever explained how we get that in the vicinity of London without something which looks extremely similar to HS2. We have solid proposals for 'improving rail' from the rail industry, and HS2 is the bedrock of it all. Where's the silver bullet hiding?
For the same price as HS2 the UK could have hugely improved broadband everywhere, improved rail - especially electrification - and seed funding for new businesses everywhere, especially the North.
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.
Comparing the two is exactly the role of governments (and by extension, us as their supervisors) as there are only finite resources to allocate.
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.
But it would only decrease traffic and pollution for the duration of the spend. Once it's over, those benefits stop and there is nothing left beyond the lingering effects of the intervention.
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.
But it would only decrease traffic and pollution for the duration of the spend. Once it's over, those benefits stop and there is nothing left beyond the lingering effects of the intervention.
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!
You're misunderstanding my point. Transport subsidy funded from current income is a good idea. Spending your entire capital infrastructure budget on making it free for a few years is not. The 'lingering benefits' don't linger long if you then have to hike fares massively because you've got a big loan to repay as a result with no new assets you can exploit to service it.
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.
Making bus travel free is not the issue - it already is for over-65s! Making it exist, on a reasonable schedule, absolutely is. Find out what the Thatcherite bus deregulation was and reverse it.
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.
Did that really happen in Dublin? I've lived in Dublin for years and taken the bus regularly, and every time there's been a strike the bus drivers just don't show up for work or join a picket line, rather than refusing to take fares. And I tell people how they do things differently in Sydney, where they actually have farebox strikes. [0]
Many more people travelling than normal on buses/trams which would be crowded on a regular day.
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.
Your broadband point is a really good one and very interesting. Do you have a rough breakdown of what it would cost, and what could be provided? Is this gigabit fibre to every home type of thing, or a hybrid, and what are the costs for different broadband options?
The rails are the easy part. There's also signalling and monitoring, power gen/distribution, train stabling and maintenance, and all kinds of other infrastructure.
You can't build it piecemeal without incurring huge extra costs.
The insane part with HS2 is the relatively small economic benefit, and the fact that the price is going to spiral out of control even more than it has already.
The UK badly needs an integrated transport policy, making connections between all modes - trains, busses, airports, ferries, roads, and so on. Currently all the modes compete with each other. And that's a huge problem.
Instead we get a project that might have been progressive in the 19th century but makes no economic sense at all in the 21st.
For the same price as HS2 the UK could have hugely improved broadband everywhere, improved rail - especially electrification - and seed funding for new businesses everywhere, especially the North.