UK Green Lights HS2 High Speed Rail Line 329
An anonymous reader writes "The United Kingdom has given the green light to the first phase of its proposed High Speed Two train line. In response to environmental concerns, the route for HS2 will now include extra tunneling in the first 90 miles, so not to disrupt the natural beauty of the English countryside. The first phase will connect London to Birmingham and could be functional by 2026."
A good start, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Unlikely, seeing as the three largest parties don't support renationalisation of the trains.
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...except that is exactly what they're not doing when the companies go bust, even when they are much more efficient when (briefly) run by the state.
The last government didn't do this either, despite a motion suggesting exactly this being passed by 2:1 at the 2004 Labour conference.
Re:A good start, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Except Labour did effectively renationalise Network Rail when they forced Railtrack into administration and then created Network Rail to take its place paying £500m in the process. However they couldn't call it nationalisation otherwise they would have had to pay an extra £1.5bn to the shareholders, so instead they created a really convoluted management structure but still get to have their say in how it is run due to the government paying for various projects and by being able to appoint a director that other members cannot remove. Network Rails debts (all £20bn) are also underwritten by the government. Network Rail receives something in the region of £5bn a year in taxpayers money on top of the revenue collected from the tain operators.
So the tracks, signalling and numerous stations are all state owned and state run. And yet the regulator says that Network Rail is significantly less efficient than other track operators across Europe (some 30+% less efficient), and we still have massive infrastructure problems in the UK.
The train operators are pretty dire, thanks to privatisation that didn't include competition at the passenger level which makes it a state sanctioned monopoly, but it is laughable to suggest that things were any better when the entire show was publicly run or that Network Rail are doing any better. The UK government, or more rightly the civil service as this spans multiple governments, doesn't exactly have a stellar record in delivering value for money or even just good services let alone large scale projects. Can you name one major project that has come in under budget or ahead of schedule? The vast majority end in failure, massively late, massively over budget, or some combination of all three.
Re:A good start, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, BR was both more efficient and much better for the UK economy. I just happen to have written a piece on this very subject a couple of days ago: http://www.dominictristram.com/2012/01/05/rail-fare-increase.html [dominictristram.com]
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No matter how deep you dive into the UK's rail industry it just gets worse.
Another example (from my brother in law who works for the railways) is the local operators lease the rolling stock, they are not allowed to own it. For round numbers it's about £1 million a year for a carriage that costs about £10 million new.
However the carriages were already paid for. Some of them are 25+ years old, and the companies that own the stock have little incentive to invest in new stock, because, well why woul
Re:A good start, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Blame that on John Major, breaking up the rail system and selling all the money-making parts off for pennies on the pound to private industry, then rolling up all the complex and expensive stuff into Railtrack.
An ideal way to privatise profit and nationalise risk.
BR needed modernisation badly, but privatisation was not it the answer there - at least not the way it was done.
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Well, the government is really good at poorly thought out privatisation that.
They have done exactly the same to Royal Mail. Forced them to sell off the profitable part (collecting money for letters), and forced them to continue the difficult expensive part (delivering them) for a very low fixed fee. Of course now they want to privatise it because it is loss making.
I suspect exactly the same will happen as happened with Railtrack. They will give good payouts to the directors, fail to meet targets, get fined
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We are unable to depend on Public Transportation in the US, so we have to use our inefficient cars and use 10000*x more gas than we really need to.
*) 99% of all statistics is made up.
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So what you're saying is that, because you need a car one day a week, it's completely unreasonable for you (or anyone else) to use public transportation on the other six?
That's not the stupidest thing I've seen you write, but it's on up there...
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Blame that on John Major, breaking up the rail system and selling all the money-making parts off for pennies on the pound to private industry, then rolling up all the complex and expensive stuff into Railtrack.
Blame that on the EU, who told them they had to do it that way.
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Well done for blaming John Major..... A lot of people wrongly accuse Thatcher for the privatization of the rail, but She always tried to resist that, even stating that privatization of rail would be its Waterloo.
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Actually, Beeching's Axe (while brutal) probably saved the rail system. It was certainly *too* aggressive in its cuts, but the railways were in serious trouble at that point.
Re:A good start, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think so. It was rather like trying to save a troubled supermarket by cutting the loss leaders. Do that, and there will be less customers in the store to buy the profitable products. A profitable supermarket, like Tesco or Asda has lots of loss-leaders.
Branch lines were loss-leaders for the main lines. Close a branch line that runs near to where someone lives, and that person is no longer a customer for the main line.
Beeching was supposed to make the Railways profitable again. It didn't. And that's the reason why.
Now with so much congestion on the roads, we could really do with those branch lines again. Such a shame they were lost.
St Margarets to Buntingford (Score:5, Informative)
British accountants frequently combine arrogance with ignorance; their inability to understand how businesses really work has been one of the reasons for failure of UK PLC.
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Especially since National Rail isn't a for profit company. Anything they make is invested back into infrastructure. It's in a state between government owned and a typical for profit corporation.
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Nope. This is basically just going to make the normal train service worse if anything as train companies stop offering services that compete with it in order to make more money from the more expensive tickets on the new high speed line.
14 years?? (Score:3, Insightful)
14 years to complete just part of it?? It took only six years for the greatest mobilization in world history to defeat the Axis.
Re:14 years?? (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm not sure that's right maybe we should get some Nazis to fact check that.
Re:14 years?? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:14 years?? (Score:5, Funny)
Conveniently ignoring the fact that the US waited until they knew they were on the winning side. Just like a bunch of Manchester United supporters.
So would the USA (Score:3)
If germany hadn't been defeated do you think Hitler would have stopped at the atlantic? The nazis and the japanese would invaded and nicely carved up the USA so you'd probably have bullet trains running across your country by now and be eating at McSushi.
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Actually, the US does have a very efficient freight rail system, which is an essential part of an efficient intermodal system. The passenger rail sucks, though.
Re:14 years?? (Score:5, Informative)
Well yes, of course - once the US stopped handing vast amounts of machinery and oil to Germany, beating them was easy. Glad you guys finally decided to come on side once the difficult bit was done, though.
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And if it hadnt been for the UK the germans would have had the A bomb first and the US would have ALSO had a world class rail system
The T34 tank (Score:3)
Re:14 years?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:14 years?? (Score:4, Informative)
19 years is very long. Is the 19 years for all 7 towers? The Burj Khalifa, Taipei 101 and Petronas Twin Towers all took about 6-7 years, and they cost less than USD2 billion.
Not expecting it to be this fast:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY [youtube.com]
But if it's 19 years for one or two towers, it is crazy.
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That word doesn't mean what you think it does.
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I think he knows exactly what it means unlike you and I agree with him.
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The thing is, allied forces weren't operating on a shoestring budget and this project isn't that important to preserve sovereignty to warrant bankrupting the nation.
Re:14 years?? (Score:5, Informative)
It took only six years for the greatest mobilization in world history to defeat the Axis.
Yes, well this time you don't have Russians doing the bulk of the dirty work for you.
UK digging is mostly by Bulgarians. (Score:3)
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And how long did it take to rebuild Europe after?
And did you just suggest world-war levels of expenditure... so that you can get your shiny new train built faster?
Re:14 years?? (Score:5, Interesting)
A while ago an Italian newspaper compared the time it took to build the Channel Tunnel compared to the Milan Bypass Railway (6 vs 24 years) poking much fun at our (Italian) slowness. Now that Italy has a full high-speed rail link between Turin-Milan-Rome-Naples (which included digging new tunnels in the Appenini mountains) built in less than 20 years (nearly 1000 Km), someone should write a similar article.
Obviously these times and distances are laughable compared to France and Japan anyway.
Make it a one way (Score:2, Funny)
Save 50% of the cost and make it a one way southbound line.
I don't know a single Londoner who voluntarily would want to travel to the grim north [wikia.com].
The problem with our railways is not speed (Score:4, Informative)
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Longer platforms is being done anyway. I suspect the double decker trains would involve so much reworking of tunnels bridges and stations that it would not be cheaper than building a new line.
Re:The problem with our railways is not speed (Score:5, Interesting)
Good point but enhancing an existing line to improve capacity and speed is far more problematic than building a new line on a greenfield site. I think they realised that after comparing the success of HS1 (Channel tunnel to London) when compared with the West Coast main line upgrade that was taking place at the same time.
- There is a finite limit to the number of trains you can run down any stretch of track. Once you reach that limit (which is quite close on existing track) You have limited options to increase capacity:-
> Make the trains/platforms longer. Good in theory, but requires major changes to existing infrastructure. (Demolition of existing buildings in town centres) Changes in track layout, particularly at terminus stations. Changes in signalling (for longer trains).
> Double decker trains. This requires a change in the loading gauge of the lines. A particular problem in the UK that has a smaller existing track gauge than Europe. This is why double decker trains are widespread in Europe and non-existent in the UK: there simply isn't the room for them. Changing the gauge basically means rebuilding the entire railway, with all the disruption that brings. (i.e. rebuild bridges, overhead lines, all track-side structures, track alignment, platforms....)
Building an entirely new line brings you all of the benefits of longer platforms, double decker trains, and a much higher speed. All without causing any significant disruption to existing lines. It's cheaper in the long run. And it provides a much bigger increase in total capacity and resilience for the money.
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Re:The problem with our railways is not speed (Score:5, Informative)
It seems to me that for the same or less than HS2 they could have longer platforms, double decker coaches (like in France) and get the cost down.
Longer platforms are coming, where possible and sensible, but double decker coaches aren't. The problem is that the standard size of space for a train (i.e., the size of tunnels and bridges) is enough smaller in the UK that there's not enough room to put a double decker coach through it. Moreover, the UK uses bridges very heavily by comparison with much of the world.
I would rather have a 2 hour service for about £30 that I could actually use than a 50 minute one for £200.
Yes, but if you go two weeks further out (and are willing to travel outside peak times) there's a fare on the same route for £22.60. (I'm not sure if that's a return or a single; the website's interface isn't quite as clear on that as I would want.) Booking at the last minute is costly, but booking well ahead is pretty cheap.
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I think you're referring to "loading gauge".
I wonder if there will be enough room for DB and Thalys trains to run from Cologne or Paris right through to Manchester. Finally some competition. Looking for to the DB trains coming through the tunnel to London next year (or is it 2014?). Eurostar is pretty out-dated, and the stop in Brussels Midi is really grating after a while.
This HS2 line is embarrassingly late, and it's still years away. The UK was years behind our neighbours when the Eurostar route was
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"I wonder if there will be enough room for DB and Thalys trains to run from Cologne or Paris right through to Manchester."
Yup - HS2 is being built to UIC loading gauge so as long as they have the foresight to link up to HS1 that should be physically possible. Whether the company running HS2 will allow it or try and charge foreign operators silly money for track access is another matter of course.
Re:The problem with our railways is not speed (Score:4, Interesting)
And again the car wins, because you don't have to plan a 200 mile day journey 2 weeks in advance...
The rail network in the UK is really quite poor - let me detail two separate journeys for you which literally made me get a car (and that was no little decision, as it also meant learning to drive ;) )...
The first one involved travel from Leicester to Bath, ticket cost was about £40 return. The journey from Bath to Bristol was fine, but then the Virgin train to Birmingham arrived. Full to the brim. My booked and reserved seat was a waste. The conductor announced that the train would not e leaving until enough people got off, but there was no replacement and the next train was an hour wait ( and no guarantee it wouldn't also be full). Eventually I get to Birmingham, where the train to Leicester has nine platform alterations, with the last alteration coming as the train left the station from a platform we could see but not get to! Another missed train, another wait.
The trip back from Leicester to Bath was all done on rail replacement transport - in other word, busses. Fantastic. National Express do a direct service for a tenner, but I had to pay way more than that for four separate stages.
The second journey on the same route, from Leicester to Bath, got me to Bristol - and there I stayed for eight hours, because of a signalling failure on the South West line, where the train was coming from.
Eventually a train turned up after 4 hours, and everyone piled on. Then the conductor announced that the train that had been delayed was behind this train and would be arriving at the platform directly after the current train had left, and anyone with tickets for that train should get off and take it. As I had an "ultra cheap" ticket which required me to take a specific train, I had the choice of staying on and being stiffed for another ticket, or getting on the next train as promised.
I got off, and the train left. Immediately then "my" train had another hour delay announced. They had lied.
In both circumstances, the train companies never bothered to reply to my complaints.
I now own a car and drive places. Fuck rail travel.
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Well, I live in Surrey, and regularly travel between Woking, Guildford, London, Oxford and Cambridge (I don't have a car). And I literally can't remember the last time a train I wanted to travel on was cancelled, or sufficiently late that I missed a connection or important connection.
Although in fairness I must point out that, despite running on time, First Capital Connect trains from Kings Cross to Cambridge are incredibly shitty and crowded.
Don't forget, folks: the plural of "anecdote" is not "data"!
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The requirement for "data" doesn't apply if the outcome is a person modifying their behaviour based on their own experiences.
If I have several bad experiences, it doesn't matter to me one bit that other people are having good experiences - it doesn't change my experience at all. Statistically my experience might not rise above being an outlier, but it's still my experience and that is what I base further behaviours on.
I'm glad you enjoy good experiences on the railways. It doesn't affect myself at all.
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Note that the biggest problem with that route is the section between Cardiff and Swansea, where the terrain is so hilly that the only way to speed up the existing tortuous train route would be to rebuild it entirely with lots of tunnels. Note that the main reason that the government recently decided not to electrify that section was that the increased speed benefits of lighter, faster electric trains would not be realised on that section of line.
Once the trains get past Bristol, they do get up to full spee
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Prices for tomorrow are always expensive, but if you book in advance it goes down a lot.
Not always. Unlike some people, I don't have many complaints about the UK rail system. But the vagaries of ticket pricing is irritating.
*Sometimes* booking in advance is much cheaper, but not reliably so. *Sometimes* it's cheaper to buy a fare on the day, at the ticket window, than it is to book two weeks in advance.
If you book in advance, you have to book a specific train. *Sometimes* that includes a reserved seat, sometimes it doesn't. If you get a reserved seat, you get the advantage of knowing you'll be
This has nothing to do with rail (Score:2, Insightful)
This is what is called a "Keynesian stimulus program"[2]. It's purpose is to spend 300 billion[1] into the economy in order to inflate the national debt away, save the banks and the contractors. At the taxpayers and citizens expense, the currency will be devalued causing inflation and taxpayers will have to service increased interest payments. The people who will be hit hardest by the additional inflation and taxation are the old, and the poor.
If they had spent the money on something useful, it would have c
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Saving 20 mins between Birmingham and London is not the point of HS2. The reason for HS2 is to get Birmingham London passengers off the West Coast Mainline, to leave more space for local services that use the same line.
To use a car analogy, to drive from London to Birmingham, you can either use the motorways or drive on A roads. The motorways are designed for long distance traffic, and the A roads are for local traffic.
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No, really, it's purpose is to spend 32 billion+.
It is otherwise of no significance.
Re:This has nothing to do with rail (Score:5, Insightful)
No, really, it's purpose is to spend 32 billion+.
The stretch to bitmingham will cost 15bn and save 40 (not 20) minutes, not to mention increasing capacity. The Full cost is for the full plan is for the extension to Manchester and Leeds which will cost 32bn and save considerably more time and also add capacity.
The mainline is running close to capacity, and only the government has the foresight and funds to spend money on large infrastructure projects.
Since you're likely to troll me with the same assertion as before, what do you propose should be done to increase capacity?
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This is what is called a "Keynesian stimulus program"[2]. It's purpose is to spend 300 billion[1] into the economy in order to inflate the national debt away, save the banks and the contractors. At the taxpayers and citizens expense, the currency will be devalued causing inflation and taxpayers will have to service increased interest payments. The people who will be hit hardest by the additional inflation and taxation are the old, and the poor.
Wow, are you a politician, or perhaps a Daily Mail writer? This is the exact same generic argument used against anything that the government ever does in this country and it has never once happened that way on the scale you suggest. If it did it would bankrupt the country, and I have a feeling they might stop a fair way short of that. How many multi-billion pound projects can you name where the cost was ten times what was originally budgeted for, outside of our nuclear weapons?
In particular you don't seem t
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The poor have debts, which
No, the poor don't have access to significant credit, the poor live in a cash society. They can't afford debts, banks don't lend poor people money. They lend rich people money. The wealthier you are the more collateral you have and the better able you are to service debt. Banks will lend wealthy people lots of money and the wealthy do very well from inflation. Assets: Property valuations, stocks, dividends, commodities all increase. Debts, as you mentioned are devalued.
What credit is available to the poor
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No, the poor don't have access to significant credit, the poor live in a cash society. They can't afford debts, banks don't lend poor people money.
You say this, but then you say this:
What credit is available to the poor tends to be of very high interest; tens of percent or more easily outstripping all but hyperinflation.
So yes, the poor do have significant debt (significant compared to their income and significant nationally because there are a lot of them). And it's really crappy debt. They can in fact bar
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No, the poor don't have access to significant credit,
Depends what you mean by "significant". A £300 loan to pay for a washing machine is significant if you're on a low income.
The fact is that the poor in the UK (and I imagine the US) *do* borrow. That they are low-income, and therefore high risk, just means that their loans are expensive. Which means they remain poor.
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[Longer] trains might involve moving all the signals.
Only if the train gets so long that it doesn't fit between two signals! That's pretty rare, and in the places where it does happen they cope just fine with having trains in two signal blocks at once. (In any case, goods trains with a full load of containers get much longer than any passenger train.) The real constraint on signal separation is the ability of trains to come to a stop safely, and the real constraint on train length is platform length and the fact that they'll have to move signals at the end of
Re:The problem with our railways is not speed (Score:4, Insightful)
They should have simply mandated 20 years ago, all future infrastructure should be capable of taking a reasonable height double decker train and at least some of that infrastructure would by now be already in place.
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They are building the line to the European loading gauge. The line is designed to be fully compatible with European very-high-speed lines, as DB and SNCF have expressed an interest in running through trains from European cities to Birmingham through the Channel Tunnel once the Eurotunnel monopoly expires. Additionally, the line is being built to serve very long trains (up to 12 European-length carriages).
All-in-all, the wider/taller loading gauge (which provides the option for double-decker carriages) and
Comment Operation Kickback (Score:2, Troll)
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yachts for the various Ministers
Not yachts. Duck islands.
What a collosal waste of money (Score:2)
which will benefit anyone but the middle class or poor. High Speed rail rarely if ever pays for itself and never benefits those who the politicians claim its aimed at. If anything it has been shown in countries like Spain is that in concentrates wealth in already wealthy cities because it gives greater ease of mobility to those who already have the wealth. Think, businessmen no longer needing to live in the city they work in but instead they can live in a resort style city or coastal city usually connected
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A resort style city? What, like Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham?
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Well, there's the beach under Spaghetti Junction... http://www.bbc.co.uk/birmingham/content/articles/2008/01/31/spaghetti_junction_beach_feature.shtml [bbc.co.uk]
The "Costa Del Gravelly Hill"...
Re:What a collosal waste of money (Score:4)
The less well off can still use the existing routes on the conventional lines, which will take longer and on older trains but will still exist once the high speed project is live. If the high speed train is a great success, then some capacity on existing lines can be made spare or re-allocated for regional and suburban services that currently run on the same lines as the intercity service. What I actually worry about is that the added capacity encourages more people and companies to have more trips into London, where they will use the tube to get to their final destinations and that is really hard to upgrade.
cost and location aside (Score:2)
It's just a shame by 2030 that amount of money only buys a system which is years old by today's standards. Why not aim higher? Or build in space to allow for greater. It will need to be done at some point.
Make work, tax pump up the economy money debt should be used to build some infrastructure. Infrastructure second to none to get something that will benefit generations
Yes lots, also lots of rich city types (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of beautiful English countryside south of Manchester. Also lots of stockbrokers / rich city types who don't want their countryside fantasy shattered by noisy development work. A bit like the rich lords and ladies 150 years ago who complained about their views being ruined the first time they put railway lines across the land.
Though to be fair there are ecological concerns to be taken into account this time round seeing as we've got less countryside left.
Not just railway lines (Score:5, Informative)
Which is why it is funny in a way that Lord Astor has suggested that HS2 is unnecessary and an improved Internet backbone for better video conferencing would be a more sensible use of the money. The fibre link from London to Birmingham could easily be laid along the existing railway or canal network.
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Let's just make it clear how much of a waste of money this actually is.
£33bn ($50bn USD), for a new train line between only two cities, that wont be ready for 12 years, and when it does, shaves only a mere 20minutes or so off the journey.
I assume a company like Capita is getting the contract? The same Capita that runs sizable portions of the rest of our train network along with the companies that run the remaining parts of it for 33% more than our European neighbours who have more reliable, more
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1hr 30min down to 49 minutes.. Seems like they shave 40 mins off, not 20.
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Re:Not just railway lines (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone else has said, it's 40 minutes, not 20. And obviously, that's far from the only benefit of HS2 -- self-evidently, it's a huge increase in capacity. Capacity is much more important than speed.
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As pointed out by the AC, but I'll post while logged in, the £33bn is for the full network. It's approximately £15bn for the London-Birmingham route.
As is typical for private industry, they won't undertake such a project because they can't see past next quarter's balance statement, but something needed to be done - the increase in rail traffic is going to overtake the capacity of the current lines in the coming future (over 10 to 15 years) and alternative options such as lengthening platforms an
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A good way to increase local capacity is to move the high speed trains off the current tracks onto a new, high speed track...
The current network is already quite crowded (in terms of trains, not people on trains), although some services are obviously more heavily used than others.
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Interesting. I live in Bath. Presumably you are referring to the A46? Do you have any links about these BBC journalists?
Re:Yes lots, also lots of rich city types (Score:4, Insightful)
Though to be fair there are ecological concerns to be taken into account this time round seeing as we've got less countryside left.
The easiest way to fix that is to get some farmers in the area to take some land out of production and just leave it alone. Within a few decades, you'll have woodland there as that's the natural state for most of the UK anyway (that which isn't bare rock or open water). Sure it won't be undisturbed natural woodland but there's almost none of that anyway; too many hundreds of years of human interference have already been and gone.
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Sure it won't be undisturbed natural woodland but there's almost none of that anyway; too many hundreds of years of human interference have already been and gone.
Indeed. Most people will look at a British countryside scene and mutter words like "unspoilt" or "natural when it's really nothing of the sort.
- almost all grazing land would naturally be forest
- most of our forests are managed conifers being grown for timber. Indigenous forestry is deciduous.
- hedges, dry stone walls are pretty, but they ain't natural.
- a typical chocolate box scene will include roads (OK, not motorways...), trains etc.
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Confirming that the "environmental concerns" are really concerns over property prices on the part of people rich enough to own country homes in the Chiltern Hills...
Re:Yes lots, also lots of rich city types (Score:5, Insightful)
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You bought the house and land. You didn't buy the view. You might think you did - you may have paid more because the view was there. And yet the view didn't belong to the person that sold you the property, so you did not buy it.
Your "view" belongs to other people. All those people who's property it is that you are looking at when you say "view".
If you get a perceptible reduction in daylight because of this wall, or significant noise from the trains, then for sure that deserves compensation. But loss (or deg
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Well I'll be blunt. The appearance of the countryside has exactly Jack Shit to do with environmental concerns.
The problem is that "environment" is an extremely overloaded term; broadly it just means "the stuff around you".
Appearance is one property of one's immediate environment, and it's important to some people.
Re:Pffft, natural beauty. (Score:4, Informative)
Have you ever been to these places at weekend? (Score:2)
It's like the entire city decides to go for a walk in the country at the same time.
Crowds of inappropriately dressed people squashed into every little patch of green they can find.
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It's like the entire city decides to go for a walk in the country at the same time.
Crowds of inappropriately dressed people squashed into every little patch of green they can find.
In the peak district this is confined to the famous mountains and routes. There are many smaller mountains where you can walk and be virtually alone
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C
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England south and east of Manchester is so overcrowded that there is not one square foot of wilderness left.
Wilderness? You must be American. Southern England hasn't had any wilderness for hundreds of years, and it's to do with farming not houses. You may find the English countryside rather tame compared with the Rocky Mountains or whatever, but we like it.
The wild bits of Britain are basically where farming is impractical.
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Southern England hasn't had any wilderness for hundreds of years, and it's to do with farming not houses.
It's got a moral and spiritual wilderness. Will that do?
Re:Natural beauty of the English countryside? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, transport in general in the UK is a mess...
As was reported recently, trains cost massively more in the UK than in other european countries, and if you live outside of a large city public transport is even worse or may be entirely lacking.
Concorde cut the journey time to new york in half, and yet it's no longer flying... Faster transport isn't whats needed, we need to decrease distances, decrease congestion and most importantly decrease the need to travel.
Encourage home working... Most office jobs can be done from anywhere with an internet connection and phoneline...
Stagger working hours - don't have everyone travel in for 9am, that just causes mass congestion at specific times and creates a horrendously inefficient transport system where the extra capacity to handle peak traffic is simply wasted at other times. Many staff never need to interact directly with third parties and so have no reason to be at work 9-5.
Convince businesses to get over this stupid obsession of having offices in central london (or other large cities), it doesn't make your company look prestigious it just increases costs and hinders your recruitment process because people are put off by the horrendous commute and will usually demand more money for working there. Instead, build your offices in small business parks located outside the centre of cities, not only are these considerably cheaper but there is generally affordable housing within a short distance. I personally have turned down several job offers that required commuting to central london.
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As somebody who did this for 10 years, let me tell you it's not a good idea as a permanent solution for most people. I only do it now if my early morning meetings leave me in my PJs at lunchtime. Some flexibility is good, but it does disrupt communications.
As somebody who works with colleagues
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"his is why I live in cycling distance and 25km/day is good for my health"
Good for your heart maybe, not so much for your lungs deep breathing in all those PM10s from diesel vehicles. Drivers will be breathing the same air but they're not breathing heavily so the particles don't go down so far and get lodged.
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If we could go further in this out of the box thinking, changing the work hours to 7 a day and then 6 a day, with different people starting and ending work at different times would surely improve the overcrowding in all sorts of transport. If having a 4 day work week is too radical to consider, just changing the routine to having a day week with 6 hours work day with a minor or no stop for lunch would have a major impact in the quality of life.
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"Essentially, the estimate for 100% FTTH coverage of the UK was about £29billion - a lot of money for sure."
Keep in mind that was BT's "Hey look, FTTH is far too expensive to roll out, well, unless you give us lots of cash Mr Prime Minister" estimate too.
In reality it will cost far, far less than that, the real figure is likely well under £20bn. That was a grossly inflated figure to try and push the government into giving BT as much money as possible to go ahead with the rollout. Som
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Something tells me that neither project, regardless of funding, would be "done right". That's just not how the rail operators or BT work.
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It appears you are right and I stand very much corrected. I had to do some digging, but this report from nearly 2 years ago breaks it down properly:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8561286.stm [bbc.co.uk]
It appears that the estimation has risen slightly in the last coupl
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Certainly more should be invested in broadband but not instead of HS2. The pros/cons of additional transport capacity are fairly clear and it is easy to see that this is required given current usage trends. Understanding the pros/cons of fast internet requires some insight into future changes to the way society operates so is harder to justify to the public. Still, it should be persued because of the potential that it offers.
Clearly, the advent of the internet has not done anything to reduce rail usage i
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The route passes through the Chilterns, an officially designated area of outstanding natural beauty. I'm in favour of the link but some pretty stuff will get trashed.
http://blog.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/2011/04/cycling-in-the-chilterns [ordnancesurvey.co.uk]
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