The 20mph has had a measurable impact in Wales, and it does lower average speeds even if more people are now driving over the limit. It really should come along with infrastructure changes to reflect the lower limits, but that would take decades and this is something that can be done quickly.

Never vote blue

Who are you referencing in this comment? Because the people that come to mind for me are Faiza Shaheen, who was deselected for, from what I can tell, liking some tweets that were critical of Israel, and Luke Akehurst, who has been selected while actually being antisemetic (but pro Israel so it’s fine I guess)

Crank? Isn’t this pretty standard for the tories at this point? They’ve pedalled conspiracy theories before.

It’s basically import antigravity

It’s nice that they included woke in their subheading so I already knew it wasn’t worth reading any further.

HS2 never had to be some kind of souped up bullet train service. All HS2 had to be was an increase in capacity, with any added speed as a bonus. Four track instead of two track - so that fast trains didn’t get stuck behind stopping services. That’s all that was needed.

The speed isn’t what makes it expensive, and it actually does make sense. If you look at the original Y layout vs the existing mainlines, the East Coast Mainline is more direct to Leeds than HS2, so it needs to be faster to match that travel time. Faster travel times also induces travel which has various economical and societal benefits. It will also help to shift more travel from other modes.

Why are they called women and not wowomen?

Personally, I think instead of “densifying” cities we should be doing the opposite - incentivize building new homes and business investment in lower-populated areas of the country.

Why? More low density development means more car dependency and less green space.

So actually investing in the economy, instead of imposing more austerity? Or is it just too unrealistic to hope for that?

And you basically can’t do that unless those trains are going to London

But to get that capacity, you’re moving the intercity trains off of the existing lines.

Except most people on those intercity trains are trying to get to or from London, so it doesn’t make sense to just run Birmingham to Manchester. You have to run to London to get that capacity benefit.

Sure, but it also would’ve meant you couldn’t properly take the intercity trains off the existing lines, since they’d just go back onto the capacity constrained WCML south of Birmingham, and thus you couldn’t really do a whole lot about the capacity until that section was built.

I disagree with you wrt starting in the north. The WCML south of Birmingham is also desperate for relief and if you tried running HS2 trains down to Brum and then onto the WCML it would just make things worse.

How is this a win?

Just to note, the 130 billion figure for HS2 isn’t just for the London to Birmingham leg.

Also there’s a lot of things that went into making it expensive: a lack of high speed expertise, extra tunnels to satisfy nimbys, the government insisting on low risk contracts and changing plans constantly, etc

The “reallocation” is bullshit. If they’re spending money in Manchester in the next few years it isn’t the same money that would’ve been used for HS2 because that wasn’t due to be delivered until later. And the majority of the projects are just things they’ve already promised to do before and have already been neglecting. The tory manifesto of 2015 promised electrification of the midland main line to Sheffield, and notably the new list of promises won’t bring the massive increase in capacity that HS2 would have, and that we need. On top of that a quarter of this money is going to fixing potholes…

There’s many reasons why HS2’s costs have risen, but notably it was the tories who’ve been in power the whole time and have had the opportunity to look into it, but have decided it isn’t worth the effort apparently.

What are your thoughts?

The biggest benefit is capacity, with the fast intercity trains running on a new line you have much more space to run more local and freight services on existing lines. Due to the current difference in speeds on the same lines, the capacity is limited even more because trains have to be spaced out more to stop them catching up with each other, so you get more than one extra trains capacity on the existing lines for each intercity train moved off.

With regards to WFH, it’s not as big of an impact as you might think, and even those working from home still travel. Rail usage is mostly back to how it was pre pandemic, but with some changes. There’s now more leisure traffic than there was before, and fewer commuters.

It’s really not a good idea to stop at this point. We’ve committed to the most expensive part which will be under-used without the rest. The tories have had more than a decade being in charge and they’ve done nothing to try to control the costs, while also trying to reduce risk which then increases costs. There’s also the myth that has become pervasive recently that government debt works like household debt, which isn’t true. Most government debt is owned by the Bank of England, which is controlled by the government. In harder economic times the government should be spending more to stimulate the economy, not continually imposing austerity.

👍 If everyone has to keep their cars going above 20mph we wouldn’t need so much parking everywhere.