500bn was bank bailouts, debt has increased since by 1.3tn. The majority of the bank bailout has been repaid so you're looking at over a trillion of defect spending on things like the nhs, welfare, pensions and public sector wages. And yes, some portion of those shiny new aircraft carriers, I don't think we've paid much for the shiny new F35's yet though.
HS2/High Speed 2 - Will it happen?
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500bn was bank bailouts, debt has increased since by 1.3tn. The majority of the bank bailout has been repaid so you're looking at over a trillion of defect spending on things like the nhs, welfare, pensions and public sector wages. And yes, some portion of those shiny new aircraft carriers, I don't think we've paid much for the shiny new F35's yet though.
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You want to compare the M6 toll with HS2?
Erm that's one of the sillier comments I've seen recently
I mean I can't imagine why we need physical infrastructure to improve/get repaired, we can all just get everything online and delivered via the broadband connected replicator, and move around using our Transporter Mk 56k's.
Why wouldn't you? It's a large infrastructure project that delivers the same journey you can already take but faster. M6 Toll took 900m to build and only delivers time savings at certain times of the day (why bother on a Sunday afternoon for example). HS2 will cost over 30b but will offer time savings all day every day. They could fund this with less than £10 on a ticket (and much less if only travelling a shorter distance - Birmingham to Manchester for example). Given the price of tickets now, and the advantages in terms of speed and comfort - this is very feasible.
Can I also say, this concept of a private company putting capital funded by debt to build the line, then recouping it through ticket sales - is exactly what we are doing, but nationalized. The government will build it funded by debt, then the franchises who bid for the right to run on it will pay for it. The 'bidding' of franchises means money they pay the Government, in case you didn't know.
Have you tried working remotely purely using teleconferencing apps? It's a chore at best. Partly it's down to lousy broadband across the country but equally you have to bear in mind that teleconferencing apps are mostly terrible - see the constant vitriol that is aimed at tools like Skype, MS Teams, Webex etc which have really bad reputations. Even Almighty Apple themselves only recently felt confident enough in their technology to release Facetime group chats and that's pretty useless in a business context.
Then there's the social aspect. In a lot of cases, you get a lot more out of a meeting if you can look someone in the eye and physically interact with them. I haven't seen a HD video camera yet that is adequate to catch the glint in someone's eye that tells you they like or hate what they are hearing.
Finally I have to mention that some jobs and some employers simply cannot risk having remote workers - internal IT security is a hard enough problem without suddenly having to open your network up to the entire world to facilitate a remote workforce.
As someone who has to suffer the overcrowded ECML most weeks, HS2 can't come fast enough. Always funny to see the rush at King's Cross when a train is called, everyone piles on trying to get one of the unallocated seats and save themselves having to stand up all the way to Yorkshire. By all accounts the WCML is even worse.
Erm that's one of the sillier comments I've seen recently
I mean I can't imagine why we need physical infrastructure to improve/get repaired, we can all just get everything online and delivered via the broadband connected replicator, and move around using our Transporter Mk 56k's.
I thought hs2 was just passengers not freight?
In theory HS2 will reduce passenger numbers/trains on the current train lines. This freed capacity could in there be allocated to freight. There's a link posted earlier in the thread.
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The M6 toll hasn't made a profit in 15 years which isn't surprising considering the debt used for construction, but it's a very long term investment with still unknown returns. I can understand why investors would find it a risky venture.
Sorry to be picky but to be accurate I believe the M6 Toll itself is profitable but that the company that owns it is not in profit. This is due to the interest payments on the debt incurred as you correctly mentioned.
As has been said (both after your post and before), part of the reason for HS2 is to move passengers off the existing line freeing up some slots for freight.
At the moment the existing line has the balancing act between Freight (which is most efficient if it doesn't have to stop or slow down very often), short distance passengers, and long distance passengers.
If you can even just move the long distance passengers off the existing line to HS2 you free up a lot of capacity for more short distance passengers and freight.
Ideally every mainline should be at least two lines in both directions, one for long distance/high speed, and one for shorter distance/slower trains, it could remove a massive amount of heavy traffic from the roads if this was the case (given a single freight train can carry the equivalent of a hundred+ trucks worth of goods).
They manage to give revenue guarantees to build a Nuclear power station privately - why not a train line?
As I said anyway, HS2 will have a much clearer business case than M6 Toll. It's entirely consumer choice to use the Toll road or not, and most of the day it's no quicker (albeit less stressful). The regulator is in charge of what routes are offered so it is perfectly viable to make all express journeys on HS2 and so have a predictable and proven customer base. After that it's just about price per journey.
Some good points, thank you. I hope the apps could be improved, but I can see where you're coming from.
Video conferencing is one of those things that's been on the cusp of becoming 'huge' for about 20 years now but never seems to quite realise the ambition, at least not without a lot of caveats. Chat apps like Teams, Slack etc are more reliable but they necessarily limiting both in terms of the amount of data they carry and their interconnectivity - using these to connect in to a permanent office is fine but they are utterly useless for business-to-business comms. For B2B nothing beats face to face, and that means getting on the train because **** sitting in Chris Grayling's traffic jams on the M1 for hours.
That's assuming that its gonna be built before the need for capacity has risen to where that's no longer possible
The broadband idea isnt that bad, but it depends quite heavily on what percentage of the countries workforce are in roles that could be done from home. If a reasonable percentage of jobs could be done from home (or some kind of remote site) and the idea of increasing the countries broadband network is also accompanied by a push from the government to have people working from home say 2 days a week (obviously only for roles that dont need you on site). A portion of the countries workers would not be commuting for 40% of the week, it would in turn reduce commuter traffic on both rail & roads across a larger area than just between London and Birmingham. People would still be in work for a portion of the week, so you arent taking away all social interaction.
Im sure there are still aspects im not considering though.
Im sure there are still aspects im not considering though.
Soldato
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What average speed and top speed is HS/2 meant to eventually be capable of?
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ignore me
did some reading, seems it is just capable of standard high speed rail travel, with potential for a 20% upgrade in the future if we respend the money twice.
-edit
ignore me
did some reading, seems it is just capable of standard high speed rail travel, with potential for a 20% upgrade in the future if we respend the money twice.
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