71–80 of 161 posts
They work out what a good timetable looks like in that future. Then they build backwards from there.
A workback plan!
For me it's summed up by the £100M tunnel to protect bats. Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue. Scale that kind of thinking up over the whole project including people who don't want HS2 at all using every legal angle imaginable to frustrate it and there's your £66Bn. There are no adults in the room saying you know what, t…
You're right to point out the difficulty in getting projects accomplished in the face of intransigent environmental concerns. But you're also making a strawman argument. This isn't the possibility of "a bat being injured." This is more like the possibility of a subspecies of bat becoming eradicated by destroying their habitat. To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats…
Do you have a sense of how to approach the question of “cost” for this particular bat case?
When destroying an entire habitat (let’s assume we can define the boundaries of that habitat and it is mostly unique), do you have a sense of how to compute the cost given the multitude of species, geographical feedback loops, etc.?
> Well, first up, they'd have spotted that our major cities need more frequent and faster rail connections from suburbs to centres and that these are prevented at the moment by insufficient platform capacity in stations like Leeds, Manchester Piccadilly and Birmingham New Street. So we need more station capacity in our city centres. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Build new cities, don't keep shuffling people into the existing…
The UK does not need more cities. In fact, like most of the industrialized world, their second-tier and third-tier cities are suffering since the entire economy and population are both getting inexorably pulled into London. This includes the planned cities ("new towns") that tried and largely failed to do exactly what you suggest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...
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Be careful when getting irate about aledged "Health & Safety" or "Ecological" oe other money wasting. The facts are often different than they first appear: https://jeffollerton.co.uk/2025/01/31/no-the-hs2-bat-tunnel-...
When this one comes up I always point out it would be better to not bother with HS2 and spend the money on making it easier for people not to have to travel around.
The Swiss method works because their population is 6X smaller and GDP per capita is twice as high. They have a smaller geographic footprint and heavier services economy. The UK still has so much industrial traffic (inclusive of agriculture) and a far less cohesive political environment. This isn’t to say that HS2 isn’t a train wreck (haha - it is) but applying small country policies to big country problems is a a bit…
The approach outlined in the article, is also not applied generally to all infrastructure projects. It's specific to transport. It works because the process is sound and long-term oriented and not because Switzerland is small and rich. Perhaps your comment even inverts the causality.
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When this one comes up I always point out it would be better to not bother with HS2 and spend the money on making it easier for people not to have to travel around.
Great, but it's also a goods corridor; the only way around both of those at the same time (absent massive depopulation) is to move the people, would mean building loads more houses.
Even when it doesn't work, it still often works better than in neighboring countries ;)
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Nimbyism needs to be shut down at the earliest opportunity when a project is mandatory for the economic growth of the country, people moan about their energy prices but also moan when a wind turbine is within viewing distance of their house. I have seen the current Labour government start to override councils putting up fusses, too early to see if it makes any meaningful effect though. I watched this video from TLDR…
Absolutely. Asocial behaviour in the West comes at far too low of a price. For example, here's how NIMBYs are dealt with in places like Serbia: https://n1info.rs/vesti/porodici-iz-kragujevca-investitor-za... If you're gonna be anti-progress, fine, but it should cost you , not others
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> For me it's summed up by the £100M tunnel to protect bats. Someone says […] That someone is Natural England, who is tasked, by law, with enforcing laws that protect wildlife and the environment and needs to sign off on disruptive work: > A spokesperson for HS2 Ltd said "multiple options" had been considered, including green bridges and restoring habitats, to "comply with laws protecting vulnerable species". > It sa…
"But the law says they have to" is just a fancy way of saying you've outsourced your morals to the legislature. The fact that there is a law saying this drag must be applied does not make it right. I'm fully aware we need to protect natural species, not create fire risks, etc, etc, but the idea that every project must incur cost to prove up front that it is complete is an asinine drag on everything, especially seeing…
That's basically the whole point of a representative government, no?