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

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?

Encourage WFH, discourage business travel. Why are all these people travelling anyway?

Regular Rail.

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.

I heard someone say that they wished it had been called High Capacity 2, rather than High Speed 2.

What we need is more rail capacity, while people opposed to this project latched onto the idea that no one really wanted to get from London to Birmingham (a somewhat unlovely city that is the first major stop on the line) faster.

Roughly translating the Japanese "Shinkansen" as "New trunk line" or "New main line" would have worked fine. Or "West coast relief line".

Birmingham is the second largest city in the UK. I think people know that, even if they make fun of it.

Paying less for the same thing?

Isn't the problem the price-tag?

It's a surprising black hole on the map, seen from London. In 20 years in the country, it has never come into any conversation I've had except for "have you ever been to Birmingham? No, me neither." For a major city so accessible from London, it's very odd.

Very surprised by that statistic. For me it's something like a 99-1 split for business travel.

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.

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-statistic...

Chart 4 is a summary of (domestic) travel modes and purposes.

You’re making a somewhat classic correlation = causation mistake here. I.e. because most people use cars, they must prefer cars over alternatives.

In reality a big part of why people use cars is because there isn't a practical alternative, because we either haven’t built it, or we tore it down in the 70s/80s. There was a period where the UK government honestly thought that public transport was going to cease existing, and be replaced by private cars. The decades since have clearly demonstrated why that isn’t true, as usage of public transport has grown year-on-year despite chronic underfunding, and the slow dismantling of services.