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Britain is building one of the world’s most expensive railways

61 points by peutetre 2y ago

looofooo0 2y ago
It is really a shame, that the west cannot build cheap infrastructure anymore.
- belorn 2y ago
  Given the high amount of human trafficking that is involved in practically all construction of infrastructure, it is kind of strange how expensive it really is. It seems less and less of the budget is spent on actually construction.
  - Retric 2y ago
    It’s more that construction is one of the few things that hasn’t benefited significantly from information technology so it looks relatively more expensive. Farming, retail, energy, manufacturing, etc all got vastly more efficient but land, education, and construction didn’t so what looks like huge price increases is largely inflation. It’s the same reason artisanal goods seem so expensive when that’s how everything used to be made.
    - lo_zamoyski 2y ago
      Look at earnings vs. housing costs, controlling for location and size. That ratio has not remained fixed.
      - Retric 2y ago
        There’s a lot of ways to slice these numbers. A 1,500 square foot house in rural Tennessee has seen a very different shift in prices over the last 50 or 100 years vs a 1,500 square foot apartment in Manhattan over that same time periods. Similarly, apples to apples job comparisons are difficult. Many modern jobs are quite different. An Amazon warehouse worker works a lot harder than would be typical for a random warehouse worker in 2000.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Or houses, or cars, or just about anything really.
- sofixa 2y ago
  By the west I presume you mean US+Canada+UK. Maybe you're including Australia and New Zealand? France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, etc. do it just fine. They have good various combinations of urban and interurban public transit which was expanded in the past 10-20 years. (be it high speed rail or new subway lines or big bridges).
- TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
  The UK did just fine with HS1 - built under budget - and the Elizabeth Line, which was over and late but has been a huge commercial and popular success. HS2 is just a bad answer to the problems its trying to address.
  - growse 2y ago
    What's a better answer to freeing up WCML capacity?
    - DrBazza 2y ago
      Not telling potential contract bidders what the value of each contract is and then being surprised when they bid at that value. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/hs2-rishi-sunak-tory-conference-b2422922.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/hs2-rishi-sun... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/07/hs2-the-zombie-train-that-refuses-to-die https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/07/hs2-the-zomb... > Mr Holden also said HS1 was successful because the true budget was known to just “a handful of people”, while HS2 contractors inflated their prices once they saw the latter project’s true budget.
      - growse 2y ago
        You seem to be answering a different question.
lmm 2y ago
Most of the money isn't being spent on building a railway, it's being spent on not building it, such as by redesigning Euston station to be smaller and more expensive, repeatedly, and making sure to spend a large amount of money demolishing buildings and digging a big hole in the ground before cancelling it. Make no mistake, this was deliberate Conservative policy. They knew (as everyone else did) that they were going to lose the last election, years before the fact, and chose to set money on fire and sabotage the country's infrastructure in order to make life harder for the Labour government that was coming and ensure they couldn't get a win.
- krona 2y ago
  Sorry but for some ballance, the current prime minister stood in parliament and opposed the entire HS2 project "on cost and merit" and voted against the project in 2016. He said "the only sensible plan is to abandon the project altogether". > They knew (as everyone else did) that they were going to lose the last election, years before the fact, and chose to set money on fire and sabotage the country's infrastructure in order to make life harder for the Labour government that was coming and ensure they couldn't get a win. Actually HS2 was never popular in Conservative constituencies and if they had a manifesto pledge to scrap the project entirely, they might've stood a chance.
  - lmm 2y ago
    > Sorry but for some ballance, the current prime minister stood in parliament and opposed the entire HS2 project "on cost and merit" and voted against the project in 2016. He said "the only sensible plan is to abandon the project altogether". That 2016 vote was the decision. Yes and no were both valid answers at that point ("no" was a bad one, but a defensible one). The subsequent dicking about is a whole lot worse than either.
- michaelt 2y ago
  There's a UK politics tradition called "kicking it into the long grass" You've got a group of stakeholders who passionately believe X should be done. They've got some strong arguments, and some political backing. You've got another group of stakeholders who strongly think X should not be done. They've got some good arguments, and some powerful supporters. So how do you resolve the debate? Which of the two groups are you going to upset? It's simple! You just delay the decision. Order a study, set up a committee, change the requirements, whatever. Just hold up any major works for 5 years or so without cancelling the project, and you can leave office making it some other chump's problem. Nuclear power plant we might need, but it's expensive and nuclear? Long grass. Extra runway at a busy airport, but locals don't like it? Long grass. Decarbonising transport, but it'll raise prices? Long grass. Nuclear weapons renewal? Long grass. Incredibly busy road through a world heritage site? Long grass.
whalesalad 2y ago
https://archive.is/HGXJN https://archive.is/HGXJN
haspok 2y ago
I understand all those against HS2 due to various reasons (costs, environment etc), but what is the alternative? If the current tracks are at capacity there is no easy solution. If they stop the project now, surely, that's all the money spent so far down the drain?
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Encourage WFH, discourage business travel. Why are all these people travelling anyway?
  - IneffablePigeon 2y ago
    Leisure is already more than half of the trips on UK rail. It’s mostly people living their lives. Reducing demand seems mostly a dead end to me except perhaps along very busy commuting corridors, of which there aren’t that many and of which demand is still high at weekends because work hubs also tend to be leisure hubs.
    - HPsquared 2y ago
      Very surprised by that statistic. For me it's something like a 99-1 split for business travel.
      - physicsguy 2y ago
        by far the most common method of public transport for commuting is by bus, which is why the Gov spent all that money subsidising bus fares in the last couple of years.
        HPsquared 2y ago
        Thought I'd look up some hard data and wow, surprising. In 2022 at least, a whopping 6% of commuting trips were by bus and 9% were by rail. Even less for leisure: 3% of leisure trips are by bus, 3% by rail. Hardly seems worth all the hassle. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-statistics-great-britain-2022/transport-statistics-great-britain-2022-domestic-travel https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-statistic... Chart 4 is a summary of (domestic) travel modes and purposes.
Dennip 2y ago
Mismanagement aside, HS2 required 8000+ different permits along its route [1], as well as years of opposition and legal battles from environmental groups and NIMBYs. This is a significant portion of the cost, huge amounts of 'green tunnels' and cuttings are being created where they are not needed. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/07/cost-of-shed-to-protect-bat-colony-near-hs2-has-topped-100m-chair-says https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/07/cost-of-shed...
- tharmas 2y ago
  Im sure Regular rail like WCML would've been much cheaper and less disruptive.
  - growse 2y ago
    Not sure if this is sarcasm. Assuming not.... No. The premium cost on the project related to its running speed is not significant. Planning and engineering a brand new 125mph railway doesn't cost much less than planning and engineering a brand new 250mph railway.
    - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
      If the ultimate goal was to bypass freight - none of which travels at 125mph - wouldn't it have been cheaper to build a new freight line and upgrade the speed and capacity of the WCML? Or does a 75mph freight railway cost as much as a 250mph passenger railway? A reminder that the cost of the project, even unfinished, with none of the benefits of the lines to Manchester and Leeds, is of the same order as NASA's current moonshot budget.
      - growse 2y ago
        Performing major works on an existing line to upgrade its speed (which, given alignments might not even be possible) is probably the worst-case scenario in terms of cost and disruption. For the WCML specifically, _we already did that_ in the form of the modernization program (early-2000s) which was over 10 years of disruption, and massively expensive. And HS2 isn't just for freight, it's also for providing higher capacity and frequency of local stopping passenger trains. The WCML already connects the population centres, so the local stopping trains have to stay there. The thing that really kills capacity is the co-mingling of 125mph and lower speed (90/75) traffic. Remove the 125mph traffic (onto, say, a dedicated high-speed single-mode line) and you _massively_ increase capacity on the existing line. > A reminder that the cost of the project, even unfinished, with none of the benefits of the lines to Manchester and Leeds, is of the same order as NASA's current moonshot budget. This is not a railway problem. This is a government problem.
Oarch 2y ago
The £100m bat tunnel is "the tip of the iceberg" apparently. They're not even sure it'll help the bats...
petesergeant 2y ago
And of course, just to top off the fucking insanity here, the UK has a system of governance where a simple HoC majority can say "yeah, we're building it, lolsoz we'll pay for your house and sorry about the bats" and all the red tape would literally disappear. This isn't America where people can bang on about the constitution or some shit. The Tories didn't want to piss off the voters, but Labour are simply lacking the cojones here.
- seabass-labrax 2y ago
  Parliament does indeed have absolute superiority and the Government does indeed have an absolute majority. However, it is not in any way possible for the Government to say 'lolsoz' and bypass all restrictions as you put it. This is for several reasons: - 'Judicial review' has become increasingly common as a check on the power of Parliament and the Government, fulfilling the need for enforcement of individual rights in a country without a singular, written constitution. [1] for a discussion on this topic by a senior British judge. Parliament would need to repeal the Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022 in order to avoid it. The oft-derided Human Rights Act may also prevent due process from being circumvented. - Local authorities have the primary say in planning consent, although they can be overridden on appeal. The Government and public sector contractors must therefore apply for permission just as any other legal entity; building HS2 does not in theory given them any special treatment. - The 'red tape' isn't there without reason. Although it does indeed prevent some kinds of construction, that is precisely the reason why some of it was introduced. There are powerful lobbying groups for property rights, the environment and conservation just to name a few - these are powerful because many people value these things dearly. The public does not have a infinite tolerance for rash government decision-making either, so any proposed construction must be carefully weighed against its ramifications on government popularity and thus chances of re-election. I hope I have been able to give a bit of balance to the idea that laziness is any part of government thinking at this point in time. [1]: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/is-judicial-review-a-threat-to-democracy-mr.pdf https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/is-judic...
  - blibble 2y ago
    judicial review is a check on the legality of use of executive power as granted by parliament, not on parliament's ability to legislate if parliament legislated to grant the government the ability to do whatever it wanted in regards to HS2 then there would be nothing for judicial review to... review the government can also override local authorities for planning decisions for e.g. projects of national significance
tharmas 2y ago
What they needed was another line to relieve congestion on the WCML. But it needn't have been High Speed Rail. HSR is too expensive and impractical. Regular Rail was sufficient. The French call their HSR "debt on wheels".
- MLR 2y ago
  Regular rail is ruinously expensive in this country too, East West Rail, which is an unelectrified <100mph railway, is probably going to end up costing in the region of £10bn and take twenty years to build. Even local tram projects with distances in the single digits can cost hundreds of millions of pounds now, it's ludicrous.
  - growse 2y ago
    It's almost like the target speed of the line isn't the problem.
rado 2y ago
Perspective: China has 45 000 km of high speed rail, while the UK is struggling to build 500.
- m0llusk 2y ago
  Perspective: China is suffering terribly from the out of control debt used to build their high speed rail system and incidents are being systematically covered up rather than used to improve reliability of service. It's a trillion dollar blow out, not the great success that so many claim it to be.
  - rangestransform 2y ago
    There are some lines that were built for ideological/vanity project reasons, I dunno who tf thought it would be a good idea to build HSR to xinjiang, but the coastal lines are actually profitable [1] (take the government numbers with a huge grain of salt though) [1] https://defencepk.com/forums/threads/china-state-railway-ends-losses-in-2023-net-profit-exceeds-3-3-billion-but-only-6-high-speed-rail-lines-are-profitable.7754/ https://defencepk.com/forums/threads/china-state-railway-end...
    - vouwfietsman 2y ago
      > take the government numbers with a huge grain of salt though Large enough to make them unprofitable?
  - rado 2y ago
    How is it suffering terribly?
  - ossobuco 2y ago
    China has built the best and largest high-speed rail system in the world, at a fraction of the time and cost it's taken other developed countries to build tiny (in comparison) systems....BUT AT WHAT COST???? > It's a trillion dollar blow out, not the great success that so many claim it to be. Source?
gadders 2y ago
You wait until you hear about the Lower Thames Crossing. £300m so far, and they've not event started digging. https://www.kentonline.co.uk/gravesend/news/lower-thames-crossing-planning-costs-reach-300m-301419/ https://www.kentonline.co.uk/gravesend/news/lower-thames-cro...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
prennert 2y ago
The original plan was to have 18 trains running every hour in each direction between London and Birmingham [0]. This is tube frequency, and very difficult to do. Therefore the specs and designs were quite expensive. But however sophisticated (or not) the trains where, a _lot_ of money is needed to buy out property holders and construction. However, this is a complete paradigm shift in the way of travel. This would have made Birmingham a suburb of London, as you can just go to the train station and hop on the next train as you do if you were to travel from anywhere within London. The newspapers kept reporting the "faster" travel times which only shaves off "a few minutes" for a huge amount of money. But that was not the point. The point was capacity through frequency. Over the years, this has been watered down. Now still a huge amount of money is spent on property buyouts and nature preservation / protection (the same higher frequency trains would have needed as well), on a marginally better service. It seems to me (maybe thats wrong) that a lot of the fancy tech that is needed for increasing frequency could be had at relatively low extra cost, because there is this high base budget that needs to be spent whatever the performance of this new rail-line. So now HS2 is the worst of both worlds: expensive works delivering only a small improvement. [0]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82b56740f0b6230269c497/journey_times.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82b56740f0b...
- t43562 2y ago
  Capacity is about taking passenger services off other lines which greatly increases their freight capacity. The HS2 line itself is a kind of side benefit in a sense.
  - stuaxo 2y ago
    Also their passenger capacity because there isn't such a mix of faster and stopping trains.
- growse 2y ago
  > The point was capacity through frequency. Mm, the point was increasing capacity on the WCML, for which there is large demand right now What's murkier is what capacity is needed 50+ years from now on the new line. It was never going to be full day 1, but you don't build new expensive things hoping to run them at 100% capacity from the very start. Passenger growth was (pre-covid) only going up, so a design that could cope with passenger flows for the next 50 years was inevitable.
simplecto 2y ago
California -- here, hold my Chardonnay
- swarnie 2y ago
  How's your HyperLoop coming along?
t43562 2y ago
I think this article recycles a lot of the arguments that have happened over this and as usual doesn't make the correct case for why it's being done. [NB to get passenger services off other lines because they dramatically reduce freight capacity] As for the costs...well, some people in the UK don't want power lines, don't want wind turbines, don't want nuclear power plants, don't want anything in fact except the freedom to continue living their comfortable ruralish lives while the rest of us starve and die out and preferably just go away. They do, however, want Waitrose and possibly Sainsburys to keep on functioning and possibly their electric lights. If there's a price to be paid - they're not going to pay any of it. So everything is a battle, and it's not an autocracy so a government that wants to be elected again has to think twice before taking on enemies.
- sgt101 2y ago
  On the other hand there's a big part of the UK that doesn't want to work or support itself and does want to confiscate other peoples money in order to continue to sit in social housing with social wellfare and a plethora of other social services. We can have a libertarian country. Or we can have a social democratic one. We can't have both.
  - t43562 2y ago
    If we're a country at all we have to make joint efforts. That requires tax. We'll never agree about how much. Lucky we don't currently have to fight a world war or endure any other serious kind of suffering.
    - sgt101 2y ago
      I say again, we can either have a social democracy where we decide what the rule of law is with a plebiscite or we can have a libertarian rights based society where whoever has capital can decide what happens and no one can stop them. If we run things based on voting then part of that is accepting that other people don't agree with you about what is and isn't a priority. They like their quiet lives and there are enough of them to influence elections.
masfuerte 2y ago
Nitpick: the Colne Valley viaduct is not the longest British viaduct, that's the Bromford viaduct. It is the longest railway viaduct.
vondur 2y ago
If you are building a railway through very expensive real estate, it's going to be expensive. The California High Speed Rail project is having the same issues. Buying up property in Los Angeles and San Francisco is super expensive.
- physicsguy 2y ago
  The bits that have really cost have been going through the Cotswolds where local opposition has meant insane planning applications and eventually a decision to bury the lines in tunnels. It was totally unnecessary and could have gone above ground if we had a more sane planning system, something the new government has promised to at least try and change (I suspect they will fail…)
  - makomk 2y ago
    The Chilterns, I think, and burying the line in tunnels was more or less necessary anyway. Some of the tunnels could technically probably have been replaced with cuttings, but apparently it would've cost more. The existing line used them mostly because tunneling was a lot harder back then. Mostly, the NIMBYs seem to have forced the existing tunnels to be longer than they need to be, which is expensive but not making building infrastructure in the country entirely non-viable levels of expensive.
paganel 2y ago
At this point wouldn't it be cheaper to just move the capital to somewhere in the Midlands, and in so doing hitting two birds with one stone? I.e. decongesting London and giving (back) lots of economic opportunities to Midlands itself (which seems like it got the shortest of sticks as a result of Britain's des-industrialisation) and even to Northern England. And I'm not just talking about moving some BBC offices and stuff like that, I'm talking about moving the whole damn thing, i.e. the Government and even the Parliament. Otherwise the entire island of Britain (or the English part of it, at least) would be geared towards its South-Eastern corner only, and there's only so much that you can alleviate that by infrastructure works.
- roywiggins 2y ago
  The Parliament building is literally falling down, so at least temporarily moving out to somewhere while they rebuild it has been proposed a few times. Probably it would take it actually burning down for MPs to leave. https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/195220/real-and-rising-risk-that-palace-of-westminster-will-be-destroyed-by-catastrophic-event-before-it-is-restored-says-pac/ https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accoun...
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    Westminster burning down again would be high irony. (The current building was erected after a devastating fire in 1834, caused by improper disposal of ancient tally sticks no less.)
sgt101 2y ago
There's no mystery, it's just very orderly corruption.
surfingdino 2y ago
Britain already has one of the most expensive railways in the world.
ajeet_dhaliwal 2y ago
Imo, as someone who lived in central London for 9 years with no car, the Uk puts ideology first oft n. Obsessed with trains. They are unreliable and expensive. Even the London Underground doesn’t pay for itself with tickets, needing subsidies from tax payers. It may be best to build wider roads and highways and everyone buy a car.
- lxgr 2y ago
  > Obsessed with trains. They are unreliable and expensive. As a visitor, I've always experienced them as very reliable, extremely frequent, and very affordable compared to all alternatives. > Even the London Underground doesn’t pay for itself with tickets, needing subsidies from tax payers. Compared to roads, which are somehow self-funding? And that's not even considering all the other negative externalities of dense but car-centric cities.
  - ajeet_dhaliwal 2y ago
    Drivers and residents pay additional taxes to maintain roads and pay for their own cars. You can’t get tax payers to maintain your own car.
    - lxgr 2y ago
      Why should I pay taxes (as a resident non-driver) for somebody else's car if they don't pay taxes for the train I much prefer to use?
      - ajeet_dhaliwal 2y ago
        They do. That’s my point. Train riders are subsidized. Car drivers are not
        lxgr 2y ago
        Do you really believe that all car-related costs to society are completely paid for by car-related taxes and fees?
muteor 2y ago
I live close to the line so drive past most days. They have been building a bridge over where the track will run (no track at all yet) for 5 years. Oh and the bridge a little further up they built in wrong place so had to remove it and start again. So yeah this is the level of speed and quality we will see.

61 points by peutetre 2y ago

looofooo0 2y ago

It is really a shame, that the west cannot build cheap infrastructure anymore.

belorn 2y ago
Given the high amount of human trafficking that is involved in practically all construction of infrastructure, it is kind of strange how expensive it really is. It seems less and less of the budget is spent on actually construction.
- Retric 2y ago
  It’s more that construction is one of the few things that hasn’t benefited significantly from information technology so it looks relatively more expensive. Farming, retail, energy, manufacturing, etc all got vastly more efficient but land, education, and construction didn’t so what looks like huge price increases is largely inflation. It’s the same reason artisanal goods seem so expensive when that’s how everything used to be made.
  - lo_zamoyski 2y ago
    Look at earnings vs. housing costs, controlling for location and size. That ratio has not remained fixed.
    - Retric 2y ago
      There’s a lot of ways to slice these numbers. A 1,500 square foot house in rural Tennessee has seen a very different shift in prices over the last 50 or 100 years vs a 1,500 square foot apartment in Manhattan over that same time periods. Similarly, apples to apples job comparisons are difficult. Many modern jobs are quite different. An Amazon warehouse worker works a lot harder than would be typical for a random warehouse worker in 2000.
HPsquared 2y ago
Or houses, or cars, or just about anything really.
sofixa 2y ago
By the west I presume you mean US+Canada+UK. Maybe you're including Australia and New Zealand? France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, etc. do it just fine. They have good various combinations of urban and interurban public transit which was expanded in the past 10-20 years. (be it high speed rail or new subway lines or big bridges).
TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
The UK did just fine with HS1 - built under budget - and the Elizabeth Line, which was over and late but has been a huge commercial and popular success. HS2 is just a bad answer to the problems its trying to address.
- growse 2y ago
  What's a better answer to freeing up WCML capacity?
  - DrBazza 2y ago
    Not telling potential contract bidders what the value of each contract is and then being surprised when they bid at that value. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/hs2-rishi-sunak-tory-conference-b2422922.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/hs2-rishi-sun... https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/07/hs2-the-zombie-train-that-refuses-to-die https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/07/hs2-the-zomb... > Mr Holden also said HS1 was successful because the true budget was known to just “a handful of people”, while HS2 contractors inflated their prices once they saw the latter project’s true budget.
    - growse 2y ago
      You seem to be answering a different question.

lmm 2y ago

Most of the money isn't being spent on building a railway, it's being spent on not building it, such as by redesigning Euston station to be smaller and more expensive, repeatedly, and making sure to spend a large amount of money demolishing buildings and digging a big hole in the ground before cancelling it. Make no mistake, this was deliberate Conservative policy. They knew (as everyone else did) that they were going to lose the last election, years before the fact, and chose to set money on fire and sabotage the country's infrastructure in order to make life harder for the Labour government that was coming and ensure they couldn't get a win.

krona 2y ago
Sorry but for some ballance, the current prime minister stood in parliament and opposed the entire HS2 project "on cost and merit" and voted against the project in 2016. He said "the only sensible plan is to abandon the project altogether". > They knew (as everyone else did) that they were going to lose the last election, years before the fact, and chose to set money on fire and sabotage the country's infrastructure in order to make life harder for the Labour government that was coming and ensure they couldn't get a win. Actually HS2 was never popular in Conservative constituencies and if they had a manifesto pledge to scrap the project entirely, they might've stood a chance.
- lmm 2y ago
  > Sorry but for some ballance, the current prime minister stood in parliament and opposed the entire HS2 project "on cost and merit" and voted against the project in 2016. He said "the only sensible plan is to abandon the project altogether". That 2016 vote was the decision. Yes and no were both valid answers at that point ("no" was a bad one, but a defensible one). The subsequent dicking about is a whole lot worse than either.
michaelt 2y ago
There's a UK politics tradition called "kicking it into the long grass" You've got a group of stakeholders who passionately believe X should be done. They've got some strong arguments, and some political backing. You've got another group of stakeholders who strongly think X should not be done. They've got some good arguments, and some powerful supporters. So how do you resolve the debate? Which of the two groups are you going to upset? It's simple! You just delay the decision. Order a study, set up a committee, change the requirements, whatever. Just hold up any major works for 5 years or so without cancelling the project, and you can leave office making it some other chump's problem. Nuclear power plant we might need, but it's expensive and nuclear? Long grass. Extra runway at a busy airport, but locals don't like it? Long grass. Decarbonising transport, but it'll raise prices? Long grass. Nuclear weapons renewal? Long grass. Incredibly busy road through a world heritage site? Long grass.

whalesalad 2y ago

https://archive.is/HGXJN https://archive.is/HGXJN

haspok 2y ago

I understand all those against HS2 due to various reasons (costs, environment etc), but what is the alternative? If the current tracks are at capacity there is no easy solution. If they stop the project now, surely, that's all the money spent so far down the drain?

HPsquared 2y ago
Encourage WFH, discourage business travel. Why are all these people travelling anyway?
- IneffablePigeon 2y ago
  Leisure is already more than half of the trips on UK rail. It’s mostly people living their lives. Reducing demand seems mostly a dead end to me except perhaps along very busy commuting corridors, of which there aren’t that many and of which demand is still high at weekends because work hubs also tend to be leisure hubs.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    Very surprised by that statistic. For me it's something like a 99-1 split for business travel.
    - physicsguy 2y ago
      by far the most common method of public transport for commuting is by bus, which is why the Gov spent all that money subsidising bus fares in the last couple of years.
      - HPsquared 2y ago
        Thought I'd look up some hard data and wow, surprising. In 2022 at least, a whopping 6% of commuting trips were by bus and 9% were by rail. Even less for leisure: 3% of leisure trips are by bus, 3% by rail. Hardly seems worth all the hassle. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-statistics-great-britain-2022/transport-statistics-great-britain-2022-domestic-travel https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-statistic... Chart 4 is a summary of (domestic) travel modes and purposes.

Dennip 2y ago

Mismanagement aside, HS2 required 8000+ different permits along its route [1], as well as years of opposition and legal battles from environmental groups and NIMBYs. This is a significant portion of the cost, huge amounts of 'green tunnels' and cuttings are being created where they are not needed. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/07/cost-of-shed-to-protect-bat-colony-near-hs2-has-topped-100m-chair-says https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/07/cost-of-shed...

tharmas 2y ago
Im sure Regular rail like WCML would've been much cheaper and less disruptive.
- growse 2y ago
  Not sure if this is sarcasm. Assuming not.... No. The premium cost on the project related to its running speed is not significant. Planning and engineering a brand new 125mph railway doesn't cost much less than planning and engineering a brand new 250mph railway.
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    If the ultimate goal was to bypass freight - none of which travels at 125mph - wouldn't it have been cheaper to build a new freight line and upgrade the speed and capacity of the WCML? Or does a 75mph freight railway cost as much as a 250mph passenger railway? A reminder that the cost of the project, even unfinished, with none of the benefits of the lines to Manchester and Leeds, is of the same order as NASA's current moonshot budget.
    - growse 2y ago
      Performing major works on an existing line to upgrade its speed (which, given alignments might not even be possible) is probably the worst-case scenario in terms of cost and disruption. For the WCML specifically, _we already did that_ in the form of the modernization program (early-2000s) which was over 10 years of disruption, and massively expensive. And HS2 isn't just for freight, it's also for providing higher capacity and frequency of local stopping passenger trains. The WCML already connects the population centres, so the local stopping trains have to stay there. The thing that really kills capacity is the co-mingling of 125mph and lower speed (90/75) traffic. Remove the 125mph traffic (onto, say, a dedicated high-speed single-mode line) and you _massively_ increase capacity on the existing line. > A reminder that the cost of the project, even unfinished, with none of the benefits of the lines to Manchester and Leeds, is of the same order as NASA's current moonshot budget. This is not a railway problem. This is a government problem.

Oarch 2y ago

The £100m bat tunnel is "the tip of the iceberg" apparently. They're not even sure it'll help the bats...

petesergeant 2y ago

And of course, just to top off the fucking insanity here, the UK has a system of governance where a simple HoC majority can say "yeah, we're building it, lolsoz we'll pay for your house and sorry about the bats" and all the red tape would literally disappear. This isn't America where people can bang on about the constitution or some shit. The Tories didn't want to piss off the voters, but Labour are simply lacking the cojones here.

seabass-labrax 2y ago
Parliament does indeed have absolute superiority and the Government does indeed have an absolute majority. However, it is not in any way possible for the Government to say 'lolsoz' and bypass all restrictions as you put it. This is for several reasons: - 'Judicial review' has become increasingly common as a check on the power of Parliament and the Government, fulfilling the need for enforcement of individual rights in a country without a singular, written constitution. [1] for a discussion on this topic by a senior British judge. Parliament would need to repeal the Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022 in order to avoid it. The oft-derided Human Rights Act may also prevent due process from being circumvented. - Local authorities have the primary say in planning consent, although they can be overridden on appeal. The Government and public sector contractors must therefore apply for permission just as any other legal entity; building HS2 does not in theory given them any special treatment. - The 'red tape' isn't there without reason. Although it does indeed prevent some kinds of construction, that is precisely the reason why some of it was introduced. There are powerful lobbying groups for property rights, the environment and conservation just to name a few - these are powerful because many people value these things dearly. The public does not have a infinite tolerance for rash government decision-making either, so any proposed construction must be carefully weighed against its ramifications on government popularity and thus chances of re-election. I hope I have been able to give a bit of balance to the idea that laziness is any part of government thinking at this point in time. [1]: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/is-judicial-review-a-threat-to-democracy-mr.pdf https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/is-judic...
- blibble 2y ago
  judicial review is a check on the legality of use of executive power as granted by parliament, not on parliament's ability to legislate if parliament legislated to grant the government the ability to do whatever it wanted in regards to HS2 then there would be nothing for judicial review to... review the government can also override local authorities for planning decisions for e.g. projects of national significance

tharmas 2y ago

What they needed was another line to relieve congestion on the WCML. But it needn't have been High Speed Rail. HSR is too expensive and impractical. Regular Rail was sufficient. The French call their HSR "debt on wheels".

MLR 2y ago
Regular rail is ruinously expensive in this country too, East West Rail, which is an unelectrified <100mph railway, is probably going to end up costing in the region of £10bn and take twenty years to build. Even local tram projects with distances in the single digits can cost hundreds of millions of pounds now, it's ludicrous.
- growse 2y ago
  It's almost like the target speed of the line isn't the problem.

rado 2y ago

Perspective: China has 45 000 km of high speed rail, while the UK is struggling to build 500.

m0llusk 2y ago
Perspective: China is suffering terribly from the out of control debt used to build their high speed rail system and incidents are being systematically covered up rather than used to improve reliability of service. It's a trillion dollar blow out, not the great success that so many claim it to be.
- rangestransform 2y ago
  There are some lines that were built for ideological/vanity project reasons, I dunno who tf thought it would be a good idea to build HSR to xinjiang, but the coastal lines are actually profitable [1] (take the government numbers with a huge grain of salt though) [1] https://defencepk.com/forums/threads/china-state-railway-ends-losses-in-2023-net-profit-exceeds-3-3-billion-but-only-6-high-speed-rail-lines-are-profitable.7754/ https://defencepk.com/forums/threads/china-state-railway-end...
  - vouwfietsman 2y ago
    > take the government numbers with a huge grain of salt though Large enough to make them unprofitable?
- rado 2y ago
  How is it suffering terribly?
- ossobuco 2y ago
  China has built the best and largest high-speed rail system in the world, at a fraction of the time and cost it's taken other developed countries to build tiny (in comparison) systems....BUT AT WHAT COST???? > It's a trillion dollar blow out, not the great success that so many claim it to be. Source?

gadders 2y ago

You wait until you hear about the Lower Thames Crossing. £300m so far, and they've not event started digging. https://www.kentonline.co.uk/gravesend/news/lower-thames-crossing-planning-costs-reach-300m-301419/ https://www.kentonline.co.uk/gravesend/news/lower-thames-cro...

deleted 2y ago

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prennert 2y ago

The original plan was to have 18 trains running every hour in each direction between London and Birmingham [0]. This is tube frequency, and very difficult to do. Therefore the specs and designs were quite expensive. But however sophisticated (or not) the trains where, a _lot_ of money is needed to buy out property holders and construction. However, this is a complete paradigm shift in the way of travel. This would have made Birmingham a suburb of London, as you can just go to the train station and hop on the next train as you do if you were to travel from anywhere within London. The newspapers kept reporting the "faster" travel times which only shaves off "a few minutes" for a huge amount of money. But that was not the point. The point was capacity through frequency. Over the years, this has been watered down. Now still a huge amount of money is spent on property buyouts and nature preservation / protection (the same higher frequency trains would have needed as well), on a marginally better service. It seems to me (maybe thats wrong) that a lot of the fancy tech that is needed for increasing frequency could be had at relatively low extra cost, because there is this high base budget that needs to be spent whatever the performance of this new rail-line. So now HS2 is the worst of both worlds: expensive works delivering only a small improvement. [0]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82b56740f0b6230269c497/journey_times.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82b56740f0b...

t43562 2y ago
Capacity is about taking passenger services off other lines which greatly increases their freight capacity. The HS2 line itself is a kind of side benefit in a sense.
- stuaxo 2y ago
  Also their passenger capacity because there isn't such a mix of faster and stopping trains.
growse 2y ago
> The point was capacity through frequency. Mm, the point was increasing capacity on the WCML, for which there is large demand right now What's murkier is what capacity is needed 50+ years from now on the new line. It was never going to be full day 1, but you don't build new expensive things hoping to run them at 100% capacity from the very start. Passenger growth was (pre-covid) only going up, so a design that could cope with passenger flows for the next 50 years was inevitable.

simplecto 2y ago

California -- here, hold my Chardonnay

swarnie 2y ago
How's your HyperLoop coming along?

t43562 2y ago

I think this article recycles a lot of the arguments that have happened over this and as usual doesn't make the correct case for why it's being done. [NB to get passenger services off other lines because they dramatically reduce freight capacity] As for the costs...well, some people in the UK don't want power lines, don't want wind turbines, don't want nuclear power plants, don't want anything in fact except the freedom to continue living their comfortable ruralish lives while the rest of us starve and die out and preferably just go away. They do, however, want Waitrose and possibly Sainsburys to keep on functioning and possibly their electric lights. If there's a price to be paid - they're not going to pay any of it. So everything is a battle, and it's not an autocracy so a government that wants to be elected again has to think twice before taking on enemies.

sgt101 2y ago
On the other hand there's a big part of the UK that doesn't want to work or support itself and does want to confiscate other peoples money in order to continue to sit in social housing with social wellfare and a plethora of other social services. We can have a libertarian country. Or we can have a social democratic one. We can't have both.
- t43562 2y ago
  If we're a country at all we have to make joint efforts. That requires tax. We'll never agree about how much. Lucky we don't currently have to fight a world war or endure any other serious kind of suffering.
  - sgt101 2y ago
    I say again, we can either have a social democracy where we decide what the rule of law is with a plebiscite or we can have a libertarian rights based society where whoever has capital can decide what happens and no one can stop them. If we run things based on voting then part of that is accepting that other people don't agree with you about what is and isn't a priority. They like their quiet lives and there are enough of them to influence elections.

masfuerte 2y ago

Nitpick: the Colne Valley viaduct is not the longest British viaduct, that's the Bromford viaduct. It is the longest railway viaduct.

vondur 2y ago

If you are building a railway through very expensive real estate, it's going to be expensive. The California High Speed Rail project is having the same issues. Buying up property in Los Angeles and San Francisco is super expensive.

physicsguy 2y ago
The bits that have really cost have been going through the Cotswolds where local opposition has meant insane planning applications and eventually a decision to bury the lines in tunnels. It was totally unnecessary and could have gone above ground if we had a more sane planning system, something the new government has promised to at least try and change (I suspect they will fail…)
- makomk 2y ago
  The Chilterns, I think, and burying the line in tunnels was more or less necessary anyway. Some of the tunnels could technically probably have been replaced with cuttings, but apparently it would've cost more. The existing line used them mostly because tunneling was a lot harder back then. Mostly, the NIMBYs seem to have forced the existing tunnels to be longer than they need to be, which is expensive but not making building infrastructure in the country entirely non-viable levels of expensive.

paganel 2y ago

At this point wouldn't it be cheaper to just move the capital to somewhere in the Midlands, and in so doing hitting two birds with one stone? I.e. decongesting London and giving (back) lots of economic opportunities to Midlands itself (which seems like it got the shortest of sticks as a result of Britain's des-industrialisation) and even to Northern England. And I'm not just talking about moving some BBC offices and stuff like that, I'm talking about moving the whole damn thing, i.e. the Government and even the Parliament. Otherwise the entire island of Britain (or the English part of it, at least) would be geared towards its South-Eastern corner only, and there's only so much that you can alleviate that by infrastructure works.

roywiggins 2y ago
The Parliament building is literally falling down, so at least temporarily moving out to somewhere while they rebuild it has been proposed a few times. Probably it would take it actually burning down for MPs to leave. https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/195220/real-and-rising-risk-that-palace-of-westminster-will-be-destroyed-by-catastrophic-event-before-it-is-restored-says-pac/ https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accoun...
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  Westminster burning down again would be high irony. (The current building was erected after a devastating fire in 1834, caused by improper disposal of ancient tally sticks no less.)

sgt101 2y ago

There's no mystery, it's just very orderly corruption.

surfingdino 2y ago

Britain already has one of the most expensive railways in the world.

ajeet_dhaliwal 2y ago

Imo, as someone who lived in central London for 9 years with no car, the Uk puts ideology first oft n. Obsessed with trains. They are unreliable and expensive. Even the London Underground doesn’t pay for itself with tickets, needing subsidies from tax payers. It may be best to build wider roads and highways and everyone buy a car.

lxgr 2y ago
> Obsessed with trains. They are unreliable and expensive. As a visitor, I've always experienced them as very reliable, extremely frequent, and very affordable compared to all alternatives. > Even the London Underground doesn’t pay for itself with tickets, needing subsidies from tax payers. Compared to roads, which are somehow self-funding? And that's not even considering all the other negative externalities of dense but car-centric cities.
- ajeet_dhaliwal 2y ago
  Drivers and residents pay additional taxes to maintain roads and pay for their own cars. You can’t get tax payers to maintain your own car.
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Why should I pay taxes (as a resident non-driver) for somebody else's car if they don't pay taxes for the train I much prefer to use?
    - ajeet_dhaliwal 2y ago
      They do. That’s my point. Train riders are subsidized. Car drivers are not
      - lxgr 2y ago
        Do you really believe that all car-related costs to society are completely paid for by car-related taxes and fees?

muteor 2y ago

I live close to the line so drive past most days. They have been building a bridge over where the track will run (no track at all yet) for 5 years. Oh and the bridge a little further up they built in wrong place so had to remove it and start again. So yeah this is the level of speed and quality we will see.