Everyone after Boris was very anti anything but cars. A functional transport system has multiple options. Not just cars.
why all the hate for hs2?
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Everyone after Boris was very anti anything but cars. A functional transport system has multiple options. Not just cars.
It would massively reduce traffic levels and road surface damage.
I think the path I was leading you down is there are only so many freight trains and building a dedicated line for freight would likely represent poor value, particularly when they can more easily be mixed in with local train services.
Freight trains make most sense where say a hundreds of containers have just been unloaded a Felixstowe port and 50 of them are destined for the west midlands and they can all be stuck on one train and unloaded at the Birmingham freight depo, unloaded onto trucks and sent out to their final destination 5-30 miles away.
The vast majority of road freight isn't the above so can't easily be chucked on a freight train which only works where there is large scale movements all going in the same direction. It also doesn't work for anything time sensitive as it takes far longer than using a truck.
Soldato
Tesco alone move 12,000 containers a month
Caporegime
Its back to capacity issue - sending an express down the lane needs clear tracks and time. Freight runs on a hub and spoke anyway -
Tesco's Rail Network: A Sustainable Solution for Deliveries - New Food Magazine
Tesco has announced the launch of its tenth rail service, which will transport an additional 31 million cases of goods annually across the UK.www.newfoodmagazine.com
They should have made a freight line only in the first place but HS2 was done for all the wrong reasons. Most likely for private firms to milk the tax payer.
If they were thinking with their heads they could have planned distribution hubs away from city centres reducing the cost by magnitudes as they would avoid all the costly bits. Reducing freight cost which means cheaper products for Joe Bloggs (Maybe not so with Private equity leeches
) and a huge boost to the economy because everyone is spending. A passenger rail network is pretty pointless in this country as personal travel is just cheaper and the vast majority of the population has access to it and busses can cover the left overs. We are such a small place by land mass and you can get to pretty much everywhere from central England in 3 hours by car.
Imagine a dedicated freight network being linked with say Liverpool, Southampton, Felixstowe and Hull. It would have been epic.
This thread has taken a odd turn....
There are already freight depots and routes connecting all major ports and cities in the UK already. The reality is 80% of freight traffic goes by road because its its simply a better tool for the job most of the time. Freight trains are great for non-time critical cross country journeys, contrast that with the vast majority of freight journeys by road being under 100 miles.
As for massively reducing traffic levels via taking freight off the roads, that just wouldn't happen. HGV's cover 17bn miles in 2023, cars did 250bn miles. Taking people off trains and putting them in cars would literally have the complete opposite impact. The cars are also significantly higher polluters given how little they are actually doing.
There are already freight depots and routes connecting all major ports and cities in the UK already. The reality is 80% of freight traffic goes by road because its its simply a better tool for the job most of the time. Freight trains are great for non-time critical cross country journeys, contrast that with the vast majority of freight journeys by road being under 100 miles.
As for massively reducing traffic levels via taking freight off the roads, that just wouldn't happen. HGV's cover 17bn miles in 2023, cars did 250bn miles. Taking people off trains and putting them in cars would literally have the complete opposite impact. The cars are also significantly higher polluters given how little they are actually doing.
Why do you keep saying HS2 should have been the freight line? Have you ever been on our “high speed” line between London and other places, and have you been on the “proper” high speed rail in the likes of Germany and Spain?They should have made a freight line only in the first place but HS2 was done for all the wrong reasons. Most likely for private firms to milk the tax payer.
If they were thinking with their heads they could have planned distribution hubs away from city centres reducing the cost by magnitudes as they would avoid all the costly bits. Reducing freight cost which means cheaper products for Joe Bloggs (Maybe not so with Private equity leeches
A passenger rail network is pretty pointless in this country as personal travel is just cheaper and the vast majority of the population has access to it and busses can cover the left overs. We are such a small place by land mass and you can get to pretty much everywhere from central England in 3 hours by car.
Imagine a dedicated freight network being linked with say Liverpool, Southampton, Felixstowe and Hull. It would have been epic.
True high speed rail is absolutely fantastic - hurtling along at 300+km/h on tracks with barely a curve to facilitate the speed, it’s wonderfully smooth. Contrast that with the WCML which is so clattery and twisty our trains have to have tilting mechanisms to reach the maximum 200km/h (125mph), else they are restricted to ~175km/h (110mph) or less. Compare 175km/h to some of Germany’s 320km/h rail… we’re so far behind, it’s depressing.
This is just another reason HS2 in its entirety needs to go ahead.
EDIT: Sorry it wasn't you who said it originally, it was @smilertoo
the rest of the post still stands though
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Soldato
IIRC the statistics have shown that any trip under 6 hours is more efficient by rail than air
Caporegime
Why do you keep saying HS2 should have been the freight line? Have you ever been on our “high speed” line between London and other places, and have you been on the “proper” high speed rail in the likes of Germany and Spain?
True high speed rail is absolutely fantastic - hurtling along at 300+km/h on tracks with barely a curve to facilitate the speed, it’s wonderfully smooth. Contrast that with the WCML which is so clattery and twisty our trains have to have tilting mechanisms to reach the maximum 200km/h (125mph), else they are restricted to ~175km/h (110mph) or less. Compare 175km/h to some of Germany’s 320km/h rail… we’re so far behind, it’s depressing.
This is just another reason HS2 in its entirety needs to go ahead.
EDIT: Sorry it wasn't you who said it originally, it was @smilertoo
I have been on the bullet train in Japan and the Eurotunnel. They are pretty cool but I can think of much better ways to spend tax payers money in this country.
If HS2 was implemented in its entire original plan then I would agree it would be fantastic. Especially with the spur to Nottingham. Now all it will benefit is a certain demographic and the west side of England.
Dedicated freight lines benefit the entire country to put it simply. You could easily have done freight lines at a much cheaper cost because you could bypass towns/cities and with the billions left over you could improve the road network. Taking lorries off the road is taking slower moving traffic off the road which would help with flow and with self driving cars most likely being available in the next 20 years capacity on roads will be a lot more efficient.
Just my opinion but HS2 seems like a solution to something that would have been great 20 years but as we become more WFH and connected it is a lot of money to put into something where the working landscape will most likely be wildly different in the next 20 years.
Freight on the other hand will need to be moved for centuries to come.
Soldato
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I don't see how that can be true, domestic flights you can get to the airport less than an hour before the flight
I used to fly from Southampton to Scotland and in total it was about 3.5 hours from home to being in the rental car. By train it's 6 hours and the train station would be significantly less convenient to where I needed to get to.
Manchester similar, it's 30 minutes less flight time where as the train would be about 4-4.5 hours depending on how risky you want you connections.
I guess it would depend how close you are to the airport at each end but for me, anything over about 3 hours by train and it starts edging towards flight being quicker. And under 3 hours car is massively more convenient.
But we are - almost - making a dedicated freight line by making HS2. Where the track is quadrupled on the WCML now (known as the up/down fast, and up/down slow), the "slows" become the place of freight trains and frequently stopping commuter rail. The fasts also now get to accommodate more intercity/limited stop trains because they don't constantly have to get out of the way of the high speed trains. This means improvements to high-speed, intercity, regional, and freight traffic.
Improving the road network absolutely should not be done. By putting money into car infrastructure, you continually keep people away from trains.
Efficiency in energy usage/CO2 emissions. For example, getting the Eurostar from London to Amsterdam puts out 1/13th the emissions per passenger of the equivalent flight.
Caporegime
Agreed if you are looking at the present but once self driving cars take off in the future you will have road trains that will get people to destinations quicker and from the comfort of their own home instead of having to get to a station, wait for it to arrive. It doesn't matter if it is quicker you lose all the time at either end of the station. Traffic jams will be a thing of the past because road efficiency will be a lot higher because everything will be automated.
Investing is rail network for passenger carrying just seems a 20th century thing to me when you look into the future with autonomous transport and WFH it falls flat on its face imo.
I also hate to break it to you, full time working from home is also being slowly clawed back. There is just too much evidence to show that it’s less efficient and effective for most employers.
The impact on new starts and junior staff can be huge and stunting to their development in role. They benefit from closer collaborative working and you only get that when they are co-located with experienced/senior staff so you can’t just haul the newbies in either, everyone needs to be there.
If you don’t build up your pipeline of new/junior staff and you’ll quickly establish a skills gap and you have to buy experience in which is expensive.
Don’t get me wrong, it works for some employers, but in reality, for most, it doesn’t.
The impact on new starts and junior staff can be huge and stunting to their development in role. They benefit from closer collaborative working and you only get that when they are co-located with experienced/senior staff so you can’t just haul the newbies in either, everyone needs to be there.
If you don’t build up your pipeline of new/junior staff and you’ll quickly establish a skills gap and you have to buy experience in which is expensive.
Don’t get me wrong, it works for some employers, but in reality, for most, it doesn’t.
However HGV like to engage in elephant races which reduces the capacity of our road network. Even worst on smart motorways because you end up with a 3 way race reducing road capacity to a single lane.
A lot of WFH is being clawed back to justify office rental costs under the guise of being "more collaborative". To say most WFH doesn't work is quite a wide brush - getting away from all the office distractions in chatter and noise can be extremely beneficial to actually getting work done, something that certainly rings very true in my role.
Because HS2 runs from london to the Midlands, and the north,
It doesnt benifit me,
that being said, i dont "hate" having better transport links but it would have been better if it benifits a lot of areas, and is cheaper to use
Im glad they electrified the train lines between south wales and london though, makes it better
It doesnt benifit me,
that being said, i dont "hate" having better transport links but it would have been better if it benifits a lot of areas, and is cheaper to use
Im glad they electrified the train lines between south wales and london though, makes it better
At the risk of turning this thread into the self driving cars thread, road trains made up of cars makes little sense. For an equivalent number of passengers, you are wasting more space and more resources (not just fuel but the other consumables in a vehicle) than other forms of bulk passenger transport.
And compared to trains, you won't get the same speeds. Based on Squerbles comment we have trains that can do 110 mph right now. How many cars on the road (ignoring the skills of the driver) could get to and safely maintain 110mph. Let alone the 200mph high speed trains we could have.
what you are suggesting can already be achieved via a comnbination of Taxis and trains.
No, it’s really not. Any sensible employer will have break clauses in their rental agreements, if they have too much they can exercise it. We are at Covid +4 at this point, if they haven’t passed a break clause yet, they’ll be coming up to one shortly.
I also never said most working from home doesn’t work, I said **full time** working from home doesn’t work for most employers. There is a very big difference.
Like I said, there is a mounting evidence base that it stunts the growth of new and inexperienced employees because they simply are not getting the exposure they otherwise would when directly working with experienced and senior employees.
Most employers have gone to hybrid with most (e.g. 3 days) time spent in the office to strike a better balance between flexibility and the needs of the business over the long term.
Roads have higher carrying capacity at lower speeds (to a point) - vehicles are traveling at a more consistent speed so you can have smaller gaps between vehicles and thus fit more vehicles on the road.
The issue isn’t HGVs overtaking, it is the poor standards of U.K. drivers and their entitled behaviour, particularly their general incompetence, impatience, not using all the road space. People would rather close down the space to gain 1 car length at the expense of reducing traffic flow instead of driving in a staggered formation and allowing people to merge in and out of lanes as needed.
I mean, have you ever seen merge in turn successfully happen at a pinch point? No one has.