Then why waste hundred+ billion on HS2 and not improve infrastructure for HGV logistics instead which would be a lot cheaper? Services are rammed day in day out, average age of a HGV driver is 50, lorries parking in laybys having their fuel and goods stolen because of a lack of police. Government are having to rely on foreign trucking companies sending trucks for months on end to fill in the gaps because there is simply not enough drivers and it isn't going away. Autonomous is decades away.
The widening and extension of the A14 cost 2 billion, the M62 cost 1 billion adjusted for inflation. All pocket change compared to HS2 yet have been hugely successful.
I understand that HS2 will enable more rail freight but it will be a drop in the ocean compared to what lorries are moving through the country at the moment. The government has no clue and an absolute hatred for logistics because it is a "working" mans industry yet the most important thing in the country.
In the end trucks will keep the country moving. A shiny brand new rail system is pointless when you do not have the logistics to move the product from rail to destination.
Any normal person would build foundations before building a house but government just look at icing on the cake instead because of short termism.
HGV logistics, you mean like more motorways, more bypassess, more rest areas?
We've spent 60 years concentrating on roads at the expense of rail, and whilst I agree we need a lot more "secure" HGV stops, something like HS2 can easily remove thousands of HGV's a day off it's route (a single goods train can carry 50-100 HGV's worth), making the transport per "truck load" cheaper and much cleaner.
What we need is more rail AND more HGV depots etc, ideally you'd be using rail to do bulk long distance transfer between main hubs, then using the trucks to go to the more local hubs and deliveries. One of the problems we've got in this country is that our road and rail are competing, and in the case of rail has been deliberately crippled at various times to push more money to the roads*. Ideally you would have something like say Amazon's incoming shipments going straight from the ports onto rail and delivered via rail to within a few miles (or better yet directly) to it's warehouses and then spread out via trucks, the same sort of way that RM used to do it.
Also re the M62 that was opened what 50+ years ago, and probably had a fraction of the money spent on things like legal appeals, or safety concerns, let alone wildlife surveys that anything built today has to deal with. Also at the time it was built much of that cost would have been things that have gone up far more than general inflation. I've seen/read reports of how they did infrastructure back then and lets just say "life was cheap", the injury/death rate was unacceptably high by modern standards, IIRC HS2 has had a single death and that warranted a full investigation.
It's also worth noting that the M62 has issues due to construction that would not have been tolerated now, for example it's apparently got sections where the underlying structure was not done properly due to insufficient checks on the geology, those checks which HS2 is doing extremely carefully for it's run (and part of the cost overruns is because you don't know what you'll find until you do them**) are the checks themselves are expensive to do, but necessary for long term safety and reliability.
Basically it's nearly impossible to compare construction costs from 50-70 years ago to today because so much has changed, everything from what is an acceptable level of safety for the workers (IIRC at one point around 1900 you were far more likely to die working in construction that as a soldier in the Boar war), to the preparations before you start pouring concrete, to the actual materials used, let alone the "wildlife impact studies" or the archaeological surveys and excavations***. IIRC they've found a few during HS2 that added to delays and massively to costs.
*Possibly most famously were the "Beeching" cuts, where the cuts went far further than his recommendations and IIRC the transport secretary at the time owned shares in/had interests in some of the firms that benefitted greatly from the road building contracts.
**One of my friends is/was a geosurveyor and from what I remember him saying it's not uncommon for the ground to vary massively in a very short stretch, so for something like hs2 or a modern motorway they might be doing sampling every few meters so they don't get a nasty surprise when they go to build on it (or worse, get it built then have a nasty surprise involving deaths of injuries when somethings giveaway under the road or rail).
***Compared to the construction of the London Underground where from memory they just dug up and moved the bodies of several cemeteries, and went through a few other things that these days would have stopped work.
