I disagree. I don’t see how eighty-six thousand million pounds spent to shave 30 mins off the journey from Sheffield to London is good value. Yes, our train system is archaic, so let’s spend eighty-six thousand million pounds doing it up. We might even end up with a system that provides transport to somewhere that we want to go instead of the arse-end of town.
It’s like our transport system is an old Austin Marina, but we want to upgrade it straight to a two seater Ferrari, which is fast, but not really practical. We need a Ford Mondeo type system first, something reliable, efficient and gets you where you want to go. Let’s spend the eighty-six thousand million pounds trying to achieve that.
I'm not making any comment on the value of this HS2 project, just making the point that we have to start somewhere. That will include some that are better, some that are worse, but finding reasons to block every proposal for modernisation isn't going to get us anywhere.
For example, take the M25 that Woosh has just mentioned, a failure before its build was even started. That was because it's origins were to solve London's traffic problems at a time when the rest of the country didn't have a severe traffic problem,
So to solve the London specific problem, Inner London and Outer London motorway boxes were proposed, planned and builds started. Indeed 30 and more years ago I used to commute to work driving on parts of the Inner London motorway and here in Croydon we have a substantial section of the Outer Motorway box that I often drive on.
But then the NIMBY crowd kicked off with a campaign called Homes before Roads and eventually the politicians panicked and cancelled the motorway boxes, leaving sections scattered about ending nowhere, like our on-road painted cyclepaths. But the homes weren't built anyway, so we got neither roads nor homes, a typical British NIMBY victory.
But of course London's ever increasing traffic problem didn't go away, so a just outside London motorway box was proposed so that traffic could circle London closely to transfer from one part to another. However that simply proved impossible, partly due to the scale of the infrastructure on the fringes and partly due to the new NIMBY mob, this time of some elites.
So the "just outside London" motorway called the M25 ended up too far away to do what it was intended to do. For example, I'm in a sticking out bit of London's southern fringe, but I'm still nearly ten miles away from the M25. So to use the M25 to jump from one part of London to another means some 20 to 40 miles of additional driving just to get to and from the motorway, without counting the length travelling around it, which makes it an impractical way to move around London.
The M25 has ended up a 125 miles long bypass, doing nothing to relieve London's traffic problems while making other's traffic problems worse by encouraging vastly more car use by those living anywhere else.
This is what we always do, cancel every start to modernise through nimbyism and end up either with nothing or something completely unsuitable.
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