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

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

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.

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.

Or houses, or cars, or just about anything really.

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).

Look at earnings vs. housing costs, controlling for location and size. That ratio has not remained fixed.

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.

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.

What's a better answer to freeing up WCML capacity?

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-sun...

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.

You seem to be answering a different question.