And of course, just to top off the fucking insanity here, the UK has a system of governance where a simple HoC majority can say "yeah, we're building it, lolsoz we'll pay for your house and sorry about the bats" and all the red tape would literally disappear. This isn't America where people can bang on about the constitution or some shit. The Tories didn't want to piss off the voters, but Labour are simply lacking the cojones here.

I think this article recycles a lot of the arguments that have happened over this and as usual doesn't make the correct case for why it's being done.

[NB to get passenger services off other lines because they dramatically reduce freight capacity]

As for the costs...well, some people in the UK don't want power lines, don't want wind turbines, don't want nuclear power plants, don't want anything in fact except the freedom to continue living their comfortable ruralish lives while the rest of us starve and die out and preferably just go away. They do, however, want Waitrose and possibly Sainsburys to keep on functioning and possibly their electric lights.

If there's a price to be paid - they're not going to pay any of it. So everything is a battle, and it's not an autocracy so a government that wants to be elected again has to think twice before taking on enemies.

Mismanagement aside, HS2 required 8000+ different permits along its route [1], as well as years of opposition and legal battles from environmental groups and NIMBYs.

This is a significant portion of the cost, huge amounts of 'green tunnels' and cuttings are being created where they are not needed.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/07/cost-of-shed...

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?

The original plan was to have 18 trains running every hour in each direction between London and Birmingham [0]. This is tube frequency, and very difficult to do. Therefore the specs and designs were quite expensive. But however sophisticated (or not) the trains where, a _lot_ of money is needed to buy out property holders and construction.

However, this is a complete paradigm shift in the way of travel. This would have made Birmingham a suburb of London, as you can just go to the train station and hop on the next train as you do if you were to travel from anywhere within London.

The newspapers kept reporting the "faster" travel times which only shaves off "a few minutes" for a huge amount of money. But that was not the point. The point was capacity through frequency.

Over the years, this has been watered down. Now still a huge amount of money is spent on property buyouts and nature preservation / protection (the same higher frequency trains would have needed as well), on a marginally better service.

It seems to me (maybe thats wrong) that a lot of the fancy tech that is needed for increasing frequency could be had at relatively low extra cost, because there is this high base budget that needs to be spent whatever the performance of this new rail-line. So now HS2 is the worst of both worlds: expensive works delivering only a small improvement.

[0]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a82b56740f0b...