Except it isn't, its designed to get people between city centers much faster, making living in cities much more attractive. Often the highest density areas are around train stations.
Consuming less is simply not a solution that anybody would ever agree to. Anything that you cut out would just be replaced with other consumption. Maybe consumtion can be slightly more local, but the idea that most consumption can be replaced with something that is local a pipedream. And even if you did that, to produce all that stuff locally the inputs for that production would still need to be transported.
The only way to reduce consumption is people getting poorer or people increasing their savings. And that's just future consumption.
Building more and more infrastructure is actually sustainable. And arguably we are not even building more and more as things like rail infrastructure is less now then it was in many places.
> It's been shown time and time again that more infrastructure only leads to more usage of said infrastructure.
And that is actually good if the infrastructure usage does not have massive negative externalizes, like ... trains. It actually reduces externalizes because it takes away from car and air traffic.
> The number of lorries on the road will not decrease, we'll just start carting around even more stuff than before.
Switzerland is prove that you can reduce the amount of lorries. But even if you don't, it will at least reduce the growth. And it makes it so you don't have to invest in highway expansion.
You might be against that anyway, but most people would demand it if existing highways are always full of lorries.
> But to stop the road usage we need to tax it more heavily, especially for heavier vehicles, and not just lorries. So far I haven't seen any evidence of replacing roads with rail, it's just more, more, more.
If you tax heavy transport without providing an alternative you simply drive up cost of living and make peoples live worse.
But you are right, taxing lorries and putting that into a fund that helps rail expansion is exactly what Switzerland did.
No this is just a typical media nonsense that is spread by idiots who don't know anything.
> If they'd put in another standard rail line instead
That would be crazy. In order to be a viable line to go from Midlands to London and reduce capacity, it would have to be at the very, very minimum as fast as that line goes today. So you are going to build a high-speed line of some sort anyway.
And that means maybe you can be a bit more adaptive to the terrain, but that also leads to more distance and thus more kilometers of line that has to be build.
A huge amount of the cost is simply buying the land, building the tunnels and bridges, putting up the electricity wires and so on. All that you would have to do anyway.
So basically at the very minimum you would need to build a 200km/h line, and nobody serious would even consider that. A 250km/h is the only reasonable 'lets safe money choice'. Going to a 300-350km/h line is going to be more expensive, but likely only by a few %, maybe 10%. But you would lose a huge amount of the benefit, as tons of study show time is a massive important to use.
So if you actually take into account future income from the line, building it to a lower standard would have been insanely stupid.
> taken up much less space
This is just straight up factually wrong. If you want to save money by changing alignment, you need more space, not less.
> would have been much cheaper
As I pointed out, much is simply wrong here.
> would have caused less disruption
Building would have more disruption and overall there would be more disruption in general.
> would have had a clearer business case
The business case, would be much much worse.
The people making that argument somehow think that you could build some rural 160km/h rail line and still get 90% of the benefit. Yet somehow no country who analysis this beliefs this and pretty much every single rail expert in the world doesn't agree with it either.
So the question you have to ask yourself do you want to believe the designer of HS2, most experts in rail technology or a bunch of anti-infrastructure activists?
Do you think the people who designed HS2 have not considered these aspects?
You analysis is very narrow and only considered the benefits to a certain set of people.
HS2 actually follows reasonably closely to the old GCML. And for the same reason, its the best route to build a fast rail-line along.
I think your proposal complete ignores the additional cost of such a route change. And the cost alone, aside from anything else would make it unreasonable.
Many things go into selecting a route and in most cases where I think they made the wrong choice its usually because of cost concerns, like not building the needed tunnels into cities.
The reason HS2 route cost so much money is because so much is tunneled. Why is so much tunnelled? Because rich people live there and won't accept a blot on the landscape, partially because they don't see a personal benefit.
If you can remove the tunnels it doesn't really matter that the route is slightly longer or has slowly less optimal geometry.
That not totally true. Yes, HS2 spend additional billions on tunneling. But even without that you don't magically solve all the issues and in some places where they do tunneling its actually not completely stupid. Tunneling accounts for a few billions, not many 10s of billions.
And you don't get magically rid of all issues with people complaining, because guess what, other people live on that other imaginary route that lives in your head, and they would demand tunnels too.
And its really the politicians fault, a few people who don't like the look of the train should not have the power to stop it, specially not in a place as centralized as England.
The reason you can't run as many other trains on WCML and other lines is because high-speed non-stop trains take so much capacity. Once you remove them, you can run many more local/regional trains with more stops and higher frequency.
The whole way HS2 is designed is to maximally reduce the amount of fast trains going north south on the existing network. Leading to a massive capacity upgrade on the existing lines. You can still run some express lines but likely much more lines that stop at more station, making it fast for you to go to next HS2 stop and from there to the further distance destination.
HS2 connection to Leeds was designed to help the ECML, the whole HS2 system was designed by experts to help with WCML and ECML.
Of course now that the former car brained fucking moron of a prime minister in his last attempt to safe himself canceled most of HS2 all those benefits are gone. And labor is to cowardly and ignorant to bring it back.
What nonsense. As if there was a desperate need for land in rural Britain. Southern England is densely populated compared to countries, but its still incredibly rural.
In most places it barley effects people at all and when it does 99% of the time its a minimal visual impact.
> therefore unable to use the line, by the way.
This is a complete misunderstanding on the system effects of these lines. The point is that all other train lines can be used much more efficiently because the high-speed trains don't have to use those lines anymore. Making it much easier to run more rural trains.
And it will also reduce car use on these routes, meaning the much, much worse highways will be used less.
So in actual fact, the new lines are massively positive in terms of overall impact for rural areas.
And I say this living in a country with some of the most dense rail networks in the world.
> We also have very little wildlife left and we don't really want to live in concrete jungles.
Another bunch of nonsense. Rail lines are very small and highly efficient. If you didn't build rail lines, you would almost certainty have to extend highways and those are infinity worse for wildlife.
Railways and specially high-speed rail have the best impact vs effect calculation of almost anything you can build.
You will never get better by simply saying lets stop it, cancel the project and 'rethink'. Your not going to find a route that is much better. Your not going to magically find much supplier for your trains and equipment.
Also the short section that they are working on is by far the most expensive per kilometer compared to the northern parts. So the cost was always going to be pre-loaded in the early part.
Its also the case that this 3x number is not correct when you adjust for inflation. Covid and other stuff has increased because of inflation specially in that sector.
Another issue in the UK rail industry is simply that building and investing is so incredibly inconsistent that there isn't the pipeline for training people. And the constant political battle about HS2 also makes companies hesitant to do the needed investments.
But bottom line is this, unless you simply continue to work on HS2 and other infrastructure projects (like desperately needed electrification) you simply will never get better at infrastructure. And there are many things to learn and to get better at, on every level from parliament down to individual construction worker.
Unfortunately so far the 'reflection' that the UK has done on the issue with HS2 have been extremely disappointing and they have learned very little. But still even so, just by doing it the people and organization have gotten better and are moving increasingly faster.
Not doing the next parts of HS2 is hilariously stupid as the larger benefits only happen once the whole thing is complete. The UK has spend likely 50-60% of the total cost and only gets about 20% of the benefits.
Cigarretes are an interesting example. Its way more about general society attitude, without doing a full baning. And that's likely what we need for other stuff.
We litearlly can't ban everything that is bad in the large. That would simply be to many things.
More like banning was applied to advertising and indoor smoking in lots of places.
>without doing a full baning.
This is why it worked, as good as it did.
That was enough regulation of the prominent, growing hazard & risk, for the vast majority to experience how much better it was than before, and usage snowballed downward as much as it could.
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