Caporegime
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- 22 Oct 2002
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Japans work culture is in a different league to ours however. We are some of the laziest workers only second to the US imo.
why all the hate for hs2?
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Japans work culture is in a different league to ours however. We are some of the laziest workers only second to the US imo.
Exactly. Dump this all at Labour's feet and then ridicule them in the HoC for it.
And most of the posts in here still don't understand the capacity aspect of what HS2 was doing for us
just looking at the "few minutes saved" aspect.Another negative here.
Hs2 has been deemed a England and Wales project. This is ridiculous. Its blatantly an England project.
This means Scotland and NI have received cash in placement for transport that Wales has not.
Man, I hate HS2 and everything about it.
Hs2 has been deemed a England and Wales project. This is ridiculous. Its blatantly an England project.
This means Scotland and NI have received cash in placement for transport that Wales has not.
Man, I hate HS2 and everything about it.
That's a bit generous, it's a London and Midlands project and even that's now a somewhere in London to somewhere in Birmingham project. Maybe.
Yeah kind of sucks. Doesn't really matter for tories I guess. Wales is Labour mainly.
Like you say, it isn't even an England project.
Or dropping the whole mess in Labours lap in a couple of years time...
Deleted member 68110
Deleted member 68110
Exactly. Dump this all at Labour's feet and then ridicule them in the HoC for it.
And most of the posts in here still don't understand the capacity aspect of what HS2 was doing for us
It's important not to overlook/dismiss the fact HS2 was initially promoted largely on speed, and much of the cost is down to implementing a high-speed line.
Putting it simply, if we'd gone purely for capacity at the outset, the line wouldn't have needed to be so straight and over-engineered, and could have been implemented at a much lower cost, and avoiding a lot of the woodlands it's ripped through.
Not sure why UK needs high speed. We have such a dense population its more effective to stop lots of places and improve capacity (is more capacity even needed?) or increase number of lines vs big gaps between big cities with no stops for a few minutes more.
Somewhere like USA is different. Places are so far apart. But in the UK high speed trains aren't really that useful
Vanity project.
Out of all the big projects that have come over the last 10 years this for me is my biggest annoyance. I've not heard any convincing arguments as to how the cost can be justified when there are so so many other broken things in the UK.
I'd argue the UK is actually a great size for high speed rail... Relatively densely populated to provide the demand and utilising fixed infrastructure better, but big enough that with a decent network rail could be the obvious best choice for journeys between major cities, and high speed will give significant time savings. Basically everywhere could be brought under the 4 hour mark making rail now attractive than air travel. Rail could become the obvious best choice for travel between many more city pairs than it currently is.
The USA is far too big for high speed rail to compete well against air travel outside certain corridors.
Making public transport quick, convenient, and reliable (and high speed rail should contribute to all those things) is good.
Because the UK is ideal for high speed, we have densely populated cities but often poor transport links between them. Capacity is needed yes, but as always it is overlooked and freight traffic is suffering as a result. The USA is not ideal, everything is too far apart that even high speed lines are too slow vs air travel.
I haven't really been bothered about HS2 up to now. Afterall, government's gonna government right. But this is getting absolutely ridiculous. This is more akin to some sort of Tony Soprano job "yeah mate I work in waste manage.. I mean HS2". It's got a too-big-to-fail thing going on.. The amount of people employed for it, the amount of ministers supporting it, the amount of damage it's done to the countryside. It's so ridiculous and is making the UK a total laughing stock.
I'd view it's completion as similar to the flippin' Thames Cable Car in docklands. A vanity project that gave some people a job, some money shuffled around, Boris had his day in the papers. But inevitably it's a total waste of time being there. Times that by a thousand (plus) and we've got HS2. Absolute joke.
There is an element of that, but at the same time it would have been fairly nuts in this day and age to have not gone with a line capable of "high speed" (even if it's only middle speed by many standards), rather than something that tops out at the sort of speeds we were doing 50 years ago.
They really should have made far more of an effort to push the capacity increase as one of the selling points, especially as apparently the rail network takes up around a third of the space for the same capacity as say a motorway, so if you wanted to increase capacity for travel along a similar route with roads you'd have been looking at far worse damage to the environment both short and long term.
Having said that, it's weird how people's brains work, as they know it's a new line (hence all the work and the protests about the route), but don't seem to think of the fact that "new line means more trains", unlike whenever a new road is announced and they grasp that it is in fact a new road that can take more cars.
Maybe it's due to my anecdotal evidence. But do we really need fast links between cities?
The only benefit I can remotely see is for a narrow band of people who might commute from Birmingham to London. For anyone else it isn't needed.
Is just such a tiny subset of people.
That will likely be price for a single ticket by the time it's actually finished!