8 ms·

For me it's summed up by the £100M tunnel to protect bats. Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M

by Neil44 1y ago

For me it's summed up by the £100M tunnel to protect bats. Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue. Scale that kind of thinking up over the whole project including people who don't want HS2 at all using every legal angle imaginable to frustrate it and there's your £66Bn. There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured. One of the good things and assets of this country is our strong legal system and the comparative accessibility of justice, compared to many other places in the world. But this also gets used by people with an axe to grind to frustrate big public projects.

7952 1y ago
I think bats can be particularly vulnerable to new development due to their commuting habits and slow rate of reproduction. Although, the engineering solution here does seem crazy. I am far more angry about the unnecessary tunnelling for dubious landscape reasons. The Chilterns is nice, but spending such vast amounts is unjustified. Better to spend a smaller amount of money improving the actual environment rather than peoples perception of it.
consp 1y ago
From my abroad ivory tower it just looked like the torries were trying to extract as much money for their friends as possible and got away with it too. But that's just my personal, likely biased, observation.
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  If you have little information, it's a decent rule of thumb.
throw0101a 1y ago
> For me it's summed up by the £100M tunnel to protect bats. Someone says […] That someone is Natural England, who is tasked, by law, with enforcing laws that protect wildlife and the environment and needs to sign off on disruptive work: > A spokesperson for HS2 Ltd said "multiple options" had been considered, including green bridges and restoring habitats, to "comply with laws protecting vulnerable species". > It said through "extensive engagement" with Natural England, "a covered structure was designed". * https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo If you don't like it change the law so that the environment/wildlife isn't protected, or these kinds of sign offs are not requirement, or can be overrided in the enacting legislation of infrastructure projects.
- markus_zhang 1y ago
  There is definitely a long gap between "Don't care about env at all" and "Preventing everything being built because it hassles some small animal". I'm afraid and you and many people are biasing towards the other end even if you believe you are a white knight. Anyway, I'm not in UK so I don't care. Good luck.
  - jamespo 1y ago
    Thank you for that non-caring contribution
    - markus_zhang 1y ago
      It's more like caring for prosperity and long-term growth instead of getting scared and inventing a huge amount of red tape. We probably won't agree with each other, though. We definitely have different definition of "care".
  - milesjag 1y ago
    The legal basis is there to protect wildlife from man-made disruption and provides a kind of ecological basis to limit the kind of boundless growth that politicians appeal to. Unfortunately, for those laws to be effective, they have to be strong enough to beat the various legal shenanigans / loopholes which can be used by developers to effortlessly leapfrog them. Finally, if the laws are strong enough, they might be effortlessly wielded to prevent even reasonable developments from occurring. The law lands somewhere in the middle and I think there are always people at either extreme trying to take advantage.
    - reedf1 1y ago
      Blocking high-speed rail in the name of conservation makes me want to bash my head against a wall. Guess we'll buy 10000 diesel trucks to move goods north-south instead. Car-world isn't good for conservation, rail is. It's missing the forest for the trees. These laws are selectively invoked by interest groups, they don't event serve the legitimate cause of conservationists - there is enough ammo in UK law to block any development.
MichaelZuo 1y ago
If you can’t even stop expenditures that lack credible explanations, of why it’s worth it, then how do you know it is a “strong legal system”?
loudmax 1y ago
You're right to point out the difficulty in getting projects accomplished in the face of intransigent environmental concerns. But you're also making a strawman argument. This isn't the possibility of "a bat being injured." This is more like the possibility of a subspecies of bat becoming eradicated by destroying their habitat. To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.
- glenstein 1y ago
  Much more measured and thoughtful than I would have been, but I think you're exactly right. I don't know the first thing about bats but even I know their populations have been devastated by some kind of white fungus virus, or the "clean windshield" phenomenon associated with the devastating collapsing insect populations they probably depend on, and so it's not a big leap to think $100MM project is being mobilized in the face of a serious existential threat to their survival. If the best you could think of is that "a" bat might "possibly" get injured it's a dramatic understatement of the kind of environmental threats they face. And you don't have to be anything more than a bit of a news junkie to know that.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  > To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is. Do you have a sense of how to approach the question of “cost” for this particular bat case? When destroying an entire habitat (let’s assume we can define the boundaries of that habitat and it is mostly unique), do you have a sense of how to compute the cost given the multitude of species, geographical feedback loops, etc.?
- appreciatorBus 1y ago
  For me the contradiction is simply how much of the status quo doesn't have to justify itself with those rules. It may seem like an improvement to say that a rail project has to be careful about bats. But left unsaid is that the highway that already exists and competes with rail was never asked to perform such an analysis, and it's likely someone could adding lanes to that highway with much less stringent requirements. So what is ostensibly environmental law, really ends up being a status quo law - if the status quo is bad for the environment, the law perpetuates it. The headline is about bats and trains, but everything from insects, to animals to people are killed right now - every day - on highways and no one bats an eye.
ta1243 1y ago
That's all noise that the press likes to trump up. Sure 5% of the cost might be on "silly things" like bat tunnels or hedghog bridges, but that doesn't make or break a project. Actually delivering smaller projects at a rapid pace on an understood roadmap as advocated by the article is very different to delivering a big flashy project which delivers nothing until it's all delivered. Its more like how the UKs motorway network was built. In 1963 the M6 J13-15 opened. At that time there was nothing north or south of it, but it started delivering benefits immediately. The following year J15 to Preston opened, anyone heading south was still dumped onto traditional roads though, but again massive benefits. The cross country link from Birmingham to the M1 didn't open until 1971, but by then people had had a decade of benefiting from both motorways. It also followed a different route, the M45 for example fell by the roadside as requirements changed, that's fine - requirements will change. Build towards a vision, but make it usable faster and quicker. Of course software people no longer like "Agile"
JohnCClarke 1y ago
Be careful when getting irate about aledged "Health & Safety" or "Ecological" oe other money wasting. The facts are often different than they first appear: https://jeffollerton.co.uk/2025/01/31/no-the-hs2-bat-tunnel-has-not-cost-300000-per-bat/ https://jeffollerton.co.uk/2025/01/31/no-the-hs2-bat-tunnel-...
- calpaterson 1y ago
  I read your link and it does not support your view that the facts are different than they appear. He calculates a bit differently (including not just currently living bats but those bats yet unborn) but still I feel the tunnel was not necessary
  - ta1243 1y ago
    You're looking at someone saying "look at this tiny pothole and how awful it is on a road" when 50 yards further down there's a massive chasm. It's a distraction technique as old as the hills, and implies the blame for the missing 100b is because of bat boxes, while others run off with the remaining 99b.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      No it's not. The bad boxes are both literal and metaphorical. There are many stupid straws on this stupid camel and every stupid straw is there because a stupid person said "but what about my bats, or whatever" without consideration and/or caring for the big picture.
- crinkly 1y ago
  When this one comes up I always point out it would be better to not bother with HS2 and spend the money on making it easier for people not to have to travel around.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    Great, but it's also a goods corridor; the only way around both of those at the same time (absent massive depopulation) is to move the people, would mean building loads more houses.
JackFr 1y ago
> Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue. That is an issue with many projects in the US. Reasonable and well-intentioned environmental regulations are created, but then used as political cudgels in bad faith to derail projects for NIMBY or other reasons of self interest. It’s not an easy problem to solve.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  Were they really reasonable and well intentioned if they were written with these faults and people supported them as such?
  - BobaFloutist 1y ago
    California's notorious CEQA was originally intended only to apply to public projects, but the State Supreme Court bizarrely decided to interpret it to as written cover pretty much any construction, public or private, presumably plugging their ears and singing when the legislature attempted to clarify that that was never the intent of the law. Course have subsequently expanded it's purview beyond parody, such that a law that was written with the goal of preventing contaminated rivers from catching fire now requires a housing developer to study the potential "environmental impact" college students getting a bit too noisy would have on the surrounding neighborhood.
  - amanaplanacanal 1y ago
    Likely they were side effects that nobody thought of until people started using them after the regulations were created.
potato3732842 1y ago
>There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured. Everyone knows it's stupid but they're doing it anyway. The problem is that legislation and rules and official policy and precedents have added up and added up over the years to the point where nobody can say "screw this, we're not studying your stupid bats, we're building the tunnel, come back if you think the bats have been negatively affected". And the whole thing top to bottom in every area is like this and it forces out or kills the ambition of and subjugates anyone who tries to to better. And even if those people did magically appear they would be facing a system that has spent generations getting stacked with people who are opposed to doing things and taking responsibility (because everyone else washes out or converts). It's a bad system and it naturally fills itself with bad people. And this isn't news to anyone who's had to interface with government in a capacity other than the low common denominator consumer stuff (permits for basic stuff, licenses of various types) that is generally polished less those people start questioning the utility of these organizations knows this.
Symbiote 1y ago
Your comment has nothing to do with the article, or the differing approach of the Swiss (who I'm sure also have legal protection for endangered species). > There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured. Remember if these adults were in the room, the political cohort angry about the bat tunnel wouldn't have been able to stop low-traffic neighbourhood schemes, cycle paths, air-quality regulations, Manchester's congestion charge, etc.
Kognito 1y ago
> £100M gets spent to resolve the issue It's even worse than it first appears. There's no evidence that the trains will have any impact on the bats AND there's equally scant evidence that a tunnel will protect the bats from this entirely theoretical harm.
- jessekv 1y ago
  My guess is the tunnel will become the preferred roosting spot for the bats.
rayiner 1y ago
Legalistic culture made the UK into the world’s largest empire by allowing it to effectively organize huge numbers of people. But it seems to be a liability in the diminished nation that remains, with those powerful energies focused inward instead of outward.
tim333 1y ago
£216 million bat protection tunnel I'll have you know https://ccemagazine.com/news/hs2s-hidden-wildlife-costs-climb-to-216-with-new-bat-protection-tunnel/ https://ccemagazine.com/news/hs2s-hidden-wildlife-costs-clim... As someone who lives near a train line with people, pets and wildlife all seeming unbothered by the train line, I'm not sure it's really necessary. >The project required more than 8,000 permits, each needing surveys, consultation and legal sign-off.

by Neil44 1y ago

7952 1y ago

I think bats can be particularly vulnerable to new development due to their commuting habits and slow rate of reproduction. Although, the engineering solution here does seem crazy. I am far more angry about the unnecessary tunnelling for dubious landscape reasons. The Chilterns is nice, but spending such vast amounts is unjustified. Better to spend a smaller amount of money improving the actual environment rather than peoples perception of it.

consp 1y ago

From my abroad ivory tower it just looked like the torries were trying to extract as much money for their friends as possible and got away with it too. But that's just my personal, likely biased, observation.

actionfromafar 1y ago
If you have little information, it's a decent rule of thumb.

throw0101a 1y ago

> For me it's summed up by the £100M tunnel to protect bats. Someone says […] That someone is Natural England, who is tasked, by law, with enforcing laws that protect wildlife and the environment and needs to sign off on disruptive work: > A spokesperson for HS2 Ltd said "multiple options" had been considered, including green bridges and restoring habitats, to "comply with laws protecting vulnerable species". > It said through "extensive engagement" with Natural England, "a covered structure was designed". * https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9wryxyljglo If you don't like it change the law so that the environment/wildlife isn't protected, or these kinds of sign offs are not requirement, or can be overrided in the enacting legislation of infrastructure projects.

markus_zhang 1y ago
There is definitely a long gap between "Don't care about env at all" and "Preventing everything being built because it hassles some small animal". I'm afraid and you and many people are biasing towards the other end even if you believe you are a white knight. Anyway, I'm not in UK so I don't care. Good luck.
- jamespo 1y ago
  Thank you for that non-caring contribution
  - markus_zhang 1y ago
    It's more like caring for prosperity and long-term growth instead of getting scared and inventing a huge amount of red tape. We probably won't agree with each other, though. We definitely have different definition of "care".
- milesjag 1y ago
  The legal basis is there to protect wildlife from man-made disruption and provides a kind of ecological basis to limit the kind of boundless growth that politicians appeal to. Unfortunately, for those laws to be effective, they have to be strong enough to beat the various legal shenanigans / loopholes which can be used by developers to effortlessly leapfrog them. Finally, if the laws are strong enough, they might be effortlessly wielded to prevent even reasonable developments from occurring. The law lands somewhere in the middle and I think there are always people at either extreme trying to take advantage.
  - reedf1 1y ago
    Blocking high-speed rail in the name of conservation makes me want to bash my head against a wall. Guess we'll buy 10000 diesel trucks to move goods north-south instead. Car-world isn't good for conservation, rail is. It's missing the forest for the trees. These laws are selectively invoked by interest groups, they don't event serve the legitimate cause of conservationists - there is enough ammo in UK law to block any development.

MichaelZuo 1y ago

If you can’t even stop expenditures that lack credible explanations, of why it’s worth it, then how do you know it is a “strong legal system”?

loudmax 1y ago

You're right to point out the difficulty in getting projects accomplished in the face of intransigent environmental concerns. But you're also making a strawman argument. This isn't the possibility of "a bat being injured." This is more like the possibility of a subspecies of bat becoming eradicated by destroying their habitat. To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.

glenstein 1y ago
Much more measured and thoughtful than I would have been, but I think you're exactly right. I don't know the first thing about bats but even I know their populations have been devastated by some kind of white fungus virus, or the "clean windshield" phenomenon associated with the devastating collapsing insect populations they probably depend on, and so it's not a big leap to think $100MM project is being mobilized in the face of a serious existential threat to their survival. If the best you could think of is that "a" bat might "possibly" get injured it's a dramatic understatement of the kind of environmental threats they face. And you don't have to be anything more than a bit of a news junkie to know that.
andsoitis 1y ago
> To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is. Do you have a sense of how to approach the question of “cost” for this particular bat case? When destroying an entire habitat (let’s assume we can define the boundaries of that habitat and it is mostly unique), do you have a sense of how to compute the cost given the multitude of species, geographical feedback loops, etc.?
appreciatorBus 1y ago
For me the contradiction is simply how much of the status quo doesn't have to justify itself with those rules. It may seem like an improvement to say that a rail project has to be careful about bats. But left unsaid is that the highway that already exists and competes with rail was never asked to perform such an analysis, and it's likely someone could adding lanes to that highway with much less stringent requirements. So what is ostensibly environmental law, really ends up being a status quo law - if the status quo is bad for the environment, the law perpetuates it. The headline is about bats and trains, but everything from insects, to animals to people are killed right now - every day - on highways and no one bats an eye.

ta1243 1y ago

That's all noise that the press likes to trump up. Sure 5% of the cost might be on "silly things" like bat tunnels or hedghog bridges, but that doesn't make or break a project. Actually delivering smaller projects at a rapid pace on an understood roadmap as advocated by the article is very different to delivering a big flashy project which delivers nothing until it's all delivered. Its more like how the UKs motorway network was built. In 1963 the M6 J13-15 opened. At that time there was nothing north or south of it, but it started delivering benefits immediately. The following year J15 to Preston opened, anyone heading south was still dumped onto traditional roads though, but again massive benefits. The cross country link from Birmingham to the M1 didn't open until 1971, but by then people had had a decade of benefiting from both motorways. It also followed a different route, the M45 for example fell by the roadside as requirements changed, that's fine - requirements will change. Build towards a vision, but make it usable faster and quicker. Of course software people no longer like "Agile"

JohnCClarke 1y ago

Be careful when getting irate about aledged "Health & Safety" or "Ecological" oe other money wasting. The facts are often different than they first appear: https://jeffollerton.co.uk/2025/01/31/no-the-hs2-bat-tunnel-has-not-cost-300000-per-bat/ https://jeffollerton.co.uk/2025/01/31/no-the-hs2-bat-tunnel-...

calpaterson 1y ago
I read your link and it does not support your view that the facts are different than they appear. He calculates a bit differently (including not just currently living bats but those bats yet unborn) but still I feel the tunnel was not necessary
- ta1243 1y ago
  You're looking at someone saying "look at this tiny pothole and how awful it is on a road" when 50 yards further down there's a massive chasm. It's a distraction technique as old as the hills, and implies the blame for the missing 100b is because of bat boxes, while others run off with the remaining 99b.
  - potato3732842 1y ago
    No it's not. The bad boxes are both literal and metaphorical. There are many stupid straws on this stupid camel and every stupid straw is there because a stupid person said "but what about my bats, or whatever" without consideration and/or caring for the big picture.
crinkly 1y ago
When this one comes up I always point out it would be better to not bother with HS2 and spend the money on making it easier for people not to have to travel around.
- ben_w 1y ago
  Great, but it's also a goods corridor; the only way around both of those at the same time (absent massive depopulation) is to move the people, would mean building loads more houses.

JackFr 1y ago

> Someone says the nice bats in those nearby woods might not get on with the big scary trains so £100M gets spent to resolve the issue. That is an issue with many projects in the US. Reasonable and well-intentioned environmental regulations are created, but then used as political cudgels in bad faith to derail projects for NIMBY or other reasons of self interest. It’s not an easy problem to solve.

potato3732842 1y ago
Were they really reasonable and well intentioned if they were written with these faults and people supported them as such?
- BobaFloutist 1y ago
  California's notorious CEQA was originally intended only to apply to public projects, but the State Supreme Court bizarrely decided to interpret it to as written cover pretty much any construction, public or private, presumably plugging their ears and singing when the legislature attempted to clarify that that was never the intent of the law. Course have subsequently expanded it's purview beyond parody, such that a law that was written with the goal of preventing contaminated rivers from catching fire now requires a housing developer to study the potential "environmental impact" college students getting a bit too noisy would have on the surrounding neighborhood.
- amanaplanacanal 1y ago
  Likely they were side effects that nobody thought of until people started using them after the regulations were created.

potato3732842 1y ago

>There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured. Everyone knows it's stupid but they're doing it anyway. The problem is that legislation and rules and official policy and precedents have added up and added up over the years to the point where nobody can say "screw this, we're not studying your stupid bats, we're building the tunnel, come back if you think the bats have been negatively affected". And the whole thing top to bottom in every area is like this and it forces out or kills the ambition of and subjugates anyone who tries to to better. And even if those people did magically appear they would be facing a system that has spent generations getting stacked with people who are opposed to doing things and taking responsibility (because everyone else washes out or converts). It's a bad system and it naturally fills itself with bad people. And this isn't news to anyone who's had to interface with government in a capacity other than the low common denominator consumer stuff (permits for basic stuff, licenses of various types) that is generally polished less those people start questioning the utility of these organizations knows this.

Symbiote 1y ago

Your comment has nothing to do with the article, or the differing approach of the Swiss (who I'm sure also have legal protection for endangered species). > There are no adults in the room saying you know what, the value to life and society and the good that could be done with £100M of public money is worth more than the unproven possibility of a bat being injured. Remember if these adults were in the room, the political cohort angry about the bat tunnel wouldn't have been able to stop low-traffic neighbourhood schemes, cycle paths, air-quality regulations, Manchester's congestion charge, etc.

Kognito 1y ago

> £100M gets spent to resolve the issue It's even worse than it first appears. There's no evidence that the trains will have any impact on the bats AND there's equally scant evidence that a tunnel will protect the bats from this entirely theoretical harm.

jessekv 1y ago
My guess is the tunnel will become the preferred roosting spot for the bats.

rayiner 1y ago

Legalistic culture made the UK into the world’s largest empire by allowing it to effectively organize huge numbers of people. But it seems to be a liability in the diminished nation that remains, with those powerful energies focused inward instead of outward.

tim333 1y ago

£216 million bat protection tunnel I'll have you know https://ccemagazine.com/news/hs2s-hidden-wildlife-costs-climb-to-216-with-new-bat-protection-tunnel/ https://ccemagazine.com/news/hs2s-hidden-wildlife-costs-clim... As someone who lives near a train line with people, pets and wildlife all seeming unbothered by the train line, I'm not sure it's really necessary. >The project required more than 8,000 permits, each needing surveys, consultation and legal sign-off.