HS2, is it right for the UK?

Road_Hog

No, it's a waste of money and it could be better spent elsewhere.

Generali wrote: »

This thread shows exactly why all the roads and rails are full in Britain and you're about to run out of electricity.

As soon as anyone proposes building anything at all you all whinge your heads off.

It's the same with Heathrow: it's a shambles because nobody is prepared to just get on and sort out airports in SE England.

HS2 is an EU directive, it is not something that someone has looked at and decided it is a requirement. It follows HS1 which was the channel tunnel rail link and there is an HS3 in the pipeline.

It is part of the TEN-T (Trans European Network for Transport). Having an unelected body (EU) decide that £50 billion of taxpayers' money on a vanity project is not a good use of money in my mind.

What is more,it is part of the grand EU plan to takeover our road, raid, air and maritime network. Furthermore it will let them introduce their road toll pricing. It's all documented and all on the internet for anyone that wants to look.

Personally I don't find the idea, as a taxpayer, of funding some vanity project that most of the public will never use and even if I did use it, I would then have to pay to use something that I effectively should part own (along with other taxpayers) and yet someone else will be making a profit from us.

I also bulk at the medacity of our politicians, of not telling us the real reason that we are going to build HS2. In the same way that they won't mention that the Royal Mail was privatised, because of an EU directive.

kabayiri

No, it's a waste of money and it could be better spent elsewhere.

Road_Hog wrote: »

...
I also bulk at the medacity of our politicians, of not telling us the real reason that we are going to build HS2. In the same way that they won't mention that the Royal Mail was privatised, because of an EU directive.

Don't forget the EU directive affecting the closure of our Large Coal fired combustion plants by 2015.

andykn

Yes, the benefits to the UK are far too great to ignore.

TruckerT wrote: »

Like the energy suppliers, the reason why the railways can get away with their unreasonable price rises is because their 'customers' have no alternative.

But their numbers are increasing significantly, the very opposite of "outdated"

The railways occupy stupidly large areas of land within London, and I would guess that there is a similar picture in other UK cities. Ride the line from Willesden to Clapham and you will see what I mean. There is plenty of space for car parking, and onward travel would be not a lot different from what we have already (tubes and buses).

Yet how do you drive there? The A40 corridor is already full and where will they go once parked, it's a long walk to Central London from there.

andykn

Yes, the benefits to the UK are far too great to ignore.

Sinhanada wrote: »

It costs me almost £300 to travel to London and back on the same day for a reasonable London start (Say 9-10AM arrival). I can drive down, park and drive back, albeit a longer journey but for under £100.

Not from North Yorkshire in your own car you can't. Unless it's very cheap.

And if you're doing a day's work and driving for that length of time you're much more likely to have an accident on the road.

I can fly for less than the cost of a train ticket.

What would be the benefit to me? Oh wait, there isn't one

You might live longer.

Loughton_Monkey

No, it's a waste of money and it could be better spent elsewhere.

To me, the acid test of HS2 lies in the answer to two questions.

1. Is a cost of £121 million per mile reasonable?
2. Would it eventually be delivered on or within that cost?

To me, the answer to both questions is a resounding "No".

Airports [like Heathrow] can shift phenomenal numbers of passengers safely in highly technical machines taking off every minute. If we cannot find far better ways of strengthening a bit of track and co-ordinating 5 times more train traffic, with longer/more carriages, more powerful engines etc. for less than half the cost of HS2 we ought to be shot.

grizzly1911

TruckerT wrote: »

I would envisage a 'matrix' buried under the carriageway which would be in total control of motorway traffic. As a driver comes down the slip road, he or she would speak a destination into the system, and the computer would take over until the appropriate motorway exit was reached. There would be no need for speed limits, and queuing would be much reduced. Tail-gating would cease to become a problem. Wide Loads? - no problem, the computer will allocate the required road space, and other traffic will pass by (at much closer tolerances than are currently feasible). Rush Hours? - no problem, the computer will allocate road space according to demand, and there will be no need for a central reservation . Break Downs? - no problem, the computer will re-organise itself. Public Transport? - it will be given priority at all times, and will be able to travel at seriously high speeds. Crashes? - a thing of the past...

Having ramped up capacity by the use of this technology just imagine what would happen when the blue screen of death impacted the central infrastructure or a strategic server failed.

This is inevitably more likely to happen in winter at night in either heavy rain or snowfall.

Or even worse the system gets hacked by someone who gets their kicks playing GTA.

cells

No, it's a waste of money and it could be better spent elsewhere.

Here is an alternative idea

Government scraps HS2 idea and decides instead to set up a national coach fleet

Buys 1000 brand new coaches at a cost of £0.3B and replaces them for free every 5 years at a cost of £0.3B. This is far below the interest on £50B whixh ar 5% would be some £2.5B pa rather than 0.3B every 5 years

Hands it over to operators who charge just £5 a ticket each way London to Birmingham and do the trip in under 2 hours with the new motorway speed limit of 80mph.

The much lower price tag persuades a lot of would be train users to switch to coach alleviating capacity concerns.

Whats more this system can be made better and faster than trains.
It shoild operate more like buses where you can just hand over your £5 to the driver and not need to spend time booking a ticket

Unlike train you dont need one huge inefficient hub station like Euston. You can have this coach fleet far nore dispersed with say starting points in 10 different boroughs.

So instead of currently for example

Going from Enfield via bus to your local tube station and from the tube station to Euston and from Euston to Birmingham new street via 5 stops you just get the coach directly from Enfield to Birmingham new Street with no stops or perhaps just 1 stop.

What was a 4 hour bus tube HS2 train trip becomes a 2-3 hour Enfield to Birmingham coach trip and the ticket qould only cost you £5 vs perhaps £150 plus

You free up rail capacity
You free up tube capacity
You free up bus capacity


How much capacity could it add?
1000 x 70 seater coaches x 5 trips a day or 350.000 people can be moved a day. Far far in excess of daily commuters between Birmingham and London so this fleet can serve many more locations and points.

Even with 1 million passengers a wk this fleet would have over 50m yearly capacity.


If 200 of these coaches were utilised between London and Birmingham you would have one leaving Birmingham to London while its twin departs London to Birmingham more frequently than 1 coach per 2 minutes

cells

No, it's a waste of money and it could be better spent elsewhere.

The more I think of it the more I loke the coach idea
It could be a totally free service and still beat HS2 costs by a huge margin

1000 coaches replaced every 3 years
2000 drivers 500 other staff
~£200m annual cost for staff and coach replacement

150 million miles done annually @ 12mpg and £1.40 diesel
£80 million in diesel pa

Lets add another £20 million for maintenance of coaches which should be low as they are replaced every 3 years.

Total cost ~£300 million a year

Annual cost on the interest of a £50B HS2 would be £2.5B for all time

And the tickets would not be free

And remember due to the nature of dispersed coaches your total trip time would be similar.


So totally free coach system plus a £1, 600 cheque to each household or HS2 and £200 tickets

cells

No, it's a waste of money and it could be better spent elsewhere.

grizzly1911 wrote: »

Having ramped up capacity by the use of this technology just imagine what would happen when the blue screen of death impacted the central infrastructure or a strategic server failed.

This is inevitably more likely to happen in winter at night in either heavy rain or snowfall.

Or even worse the system gets hacked by someone who gets their kicks playing GTA.

Thisbis a criticism made of comouter driven vehicles too....wat if the software or computer hardware fail?

The solution is simple you have multiple independent comouter control systems.

So instead of ine comouyer system controlling the vehicle (or network) you have three. That way all three systems need to fail simultaneously

An example most people can underatand. Im sure everyone has had their computer crash on th multiple times and it takes a mibute or two to reboot. But how many times gave two of your cinouters crashed at the aame time?

A tri comouter system which has an error/failure once every week and takes a minute to reboot would have all three crash only once every 2 million years. If you want it even safer add a 4th independant comouter and you only have a fsikure once ever 20 billion years (the universe isn't even that old)

Road_Hog

No, it's a waste of money and it could be better spent elsewhere.

cells wrote: »

Here is an alternative idea

Government scraps HS2 idea

Sorry, but which part of the bit of, this isn't down to our government, it is an EU directive (as are about 80% of our laws, rules and regulations), do you not understand?

Like I've said, this is part of the EU's grand plan of TEN-T. Here, have a look at the nice map.

http://tentea.ec.europa.eu/images/maps/progress_report_may2010ongoing_projects_20100527_big.jpg